Theatre of the Body: Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early Modern London: 10 [1° ed.] 2503520588, 9782503520582

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KATERN 1

T HE T HEATRE OF THE B ODY

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LATE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN STUDIES Editorial Board under the auspices of The Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Ian Moulton, Chair Arizona State University Frederick Kiefer University of Arizona Stephanie Trigg University of Melbourne Charles Zika University of Melbourne

Advisory Board Jaynie Anderson University of Melbourne John Cashmere La Trobe University Megan Cassidy-Welch University of Melbourne Albrecht Classen University of Arizona Robert W. Gaston La Trobe University John Griffiths University of Melbourne Anthony Gully Arizona State University Bill Kent Monash University Anne Scott Northern Arizona University Juliann Vitullo Arizona State University Emil Volek Arizona State University Retha Warnicke Arizona State University

Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of the book.

VOLUME 10

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T HE T HEATRE OF THE B ODY Staging Death and Embodying Life in Early-Modern London

by

Kate Cregan

H

F

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Cregan, Kate. The theatre of the body : staging death and embodying life in early modern London. -- (Late medieval and early modern studies ; 10) 1. Body, Human--Social aspects--England--London--History-16th century. 2. Body, Human--Social aspects--England-London--History--17th century. 3. Body, Human, in literature. 4. Human dissection--England--London--History-16th century. 5. Human dissection--England--London--History-17th century. I. Title II. Series 306.4'09421'09031-dc22 ISBN-13: 9782503520582

© 2009, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2009/0095/56 ISBN: 978-2-503-52058-2

Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

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for my parents Joseph Patrick Cregan, 28 December 1921–27 November 2005 Gloria Dawn Cregan, 13 January 1926–1 October 2006

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C ONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ix

Notes

xi

List of Illustrations

xiii

Introduction

1

Part I Chapter 1: Law, Theatre, and Medicine in the Early Seventeenth Century

31

Chapter 2: Embodiment in Anatomical Manuals

59

Chapter 3: Bodies Acted ‘to teach man wherein hee is imperfect’

101

Part II Chapter 4: Anatomical Practices during the Civil War

135

Chapter 5: Life and Death Narratives from the Sessions House

163

Part III Chapter 6: Law, Theatre, and Medicine in the Late Seventeenth Century

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Chapter 7: Theatrical and Anatomical Palimpsests

227

Chapter 8: Riding the Three-Legged Mare

269

Appendix

303

Bibliography

321

Index

339

About the Author

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A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

M

y thanks go first to Simon Forde of Brepols for his support in what became a protracted process, along with the editorial board of this Brepols series — Fred Kiefer, Ian Moulton, Stephanie Trigg, and Charles Zika — for contracting the book. Thanks must also go to Heather M. Padgen for her patience during the copyediting, and to Guy Carney for his help and advice throughout the production process. My sincere thanks also go to Helen Hickey for her expert research assistance in 2005 and for so enthusiastically entering into the work; and, to the anonymous reader, whose comments and suggestions substantially improved the final manuscript. When I began my research at the Worshipful Company of Barbers and Guildhall Library in the summer of 1996 I had little idea that I would end by tracing the individuality and the details of the crimes of those who were dissected by the Barber-Surgeons across the seventeenth century. Without the assistance of Mr Ian Murray, the archivist at the Worshipful Company of Barbers, who in 1995 found a reference to the burial of anatomies in the parish church of St Olaves Silver Street in J. G. White, The Churches and Chapels of Old London (n.p., 1901) I would have had no starting point. This book is the ultimate result of Ian’s expertise and generosity as an archivist. And I thank him for being a mentor and a cheerful companion in the basement archives of the Worshipful Company of Barbers in the summer of 1996. Both Masters of the Company in office during my visits were also very supportive. I would also like to thank the staff in Guildhall Library for their expertise and help at that time, and Rachel Cross at the Wellcome Institute for her excellent assistance in providing many of the final images. Full thanks go to the Publications Committee of the University of Melbourne for awarding me a grant that enabled me to complete the book. This book is also the long-delayed outcome of my doctoral thesis, though it is a very different and I hope much better and more considered work than the

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Acknowledgements

original. However, full credit should be given to the early influence, assiduousness, and intellectual rigour of each of my supervisors and the expertise of the examiners. The late Harold Love rightly challenged me throughout its earliest stages, for which I thank him; Terry Threadgold and Denise Cuthbert saw me through the slings and arrows to completion with unstinting support. During its progress Jonathan Sawday generously arranged a visiting fellowship through the University of Southampton in June and July 1996, which enabled me to complete the majority of the archival research that informs this book. Wal Kirsop provided me with information (and photocopies) on Hauteroche for which I sincerely thank him. Much practical support was forthcoming from friends both during my candidature and in the succeeding years as the focus of the work shifted and the content mutated: Jonathan Carter, Patricia McGarrity, Lydia Byth, Dey Alexander, Anne Olsen, John Waugh, Martin Mulligan, Christopher Scanlon, Leanne Reinke, Andy Scerri, and Alan Roberts all deserve heartfelt thanks for their generosity over the years. At different stages they either proofread or commented on the content, or just gave the kind of support that makes such journeys worthwhile. My sincere thanks also go to Professor John Frow and Dr John Gillies, who were fair and firm examiners of the original. I also thank the School of Culture and Communications for providing an institutional home at the University of Melbourne as I honed and completed the final manuscript. Though the ARC Discovery Fellowship (2003–05) I received was in a quite different field I also thank the ARC for supporting that work which inevitably, if perhaps subtly, informs what is here. The research and writing completed then formed a lens, focused on more contemporary debates around mortality and social ethics, through which this is in part viewed. I also thank the ARC Network for Early European Research (NEER) for supporting the work by arranging a subscription to EEBO while I was at an institution that had no access: it was utterly invaluable. I thank Joel Trigg for being a tower of strength at a critical point and a dear friend for many years. I also thank my son Camille and daughter-in-law Rebecca for their support, for joining in the journey that ended in this book, and for joyously producing my grand-daughter Mabel as the manuscript was finalized. Paul James’s theories of abstraction inform this book in a way that has made it far better than the original work and for that, his personal support, his advice, his painstaking reading of the final manuscript, and his friendship I thank him. But most of all I thank Stephanie Trigg for her kindness, warmth, and generosity over many years, and for supporting the publication of this book—particularly during testing times. She has been truly wonderful. Finally, I thank my parents for a lifetime of love, support, and quiet pride.

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N OTES

Parts of this book have appeared in print previously in different forms. I thank the publishers for their kind permission to reprint portions of that material here and the anonymous reviewers of each for their comments. ‘Edward Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist and “The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons”’, Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture: 1600–1700, 13 (2008), 19–35 ‘Early Modern Anatomy and the Queen’s Body Natural: The Sovereign Subject’, Body & Society, 13 (2007), 47–66 The Sociology of the Body: Mapping the Abstraction of Embodiment (London: Sage, 2006) ‘Blood and Circuses’, in Images of the Corpse: From the Renaissance to Cyberspace, ed. by Elizabeth Klaver (W isconsin: University of W isconsin Press/Popular, 2004), pp. 39–62 ‘She was Convicted and Condemned’, Social Semiotics, 11 (2001), 125–37

I have cited and quoted from Sidney Young’s Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (London: Blades, East and Blades, 1894), Beck, and Dobson and MilnesWalker in preference to my own transcriptions from the Barbers’ primary sources where possible. All other citations from primary sources are my own transcriptions unless otherwise referenced.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1, p. 10. The visceral lecture delivered by John Banister Aged 48, 1581, Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections, MS Hunter 364. c. 1581. Reproduced with the permission of the Glasgow University Library. Figure 2, p. 48. Inigo Jones, The Designs of the Chirurgians Theatre (Exterior plans), Oxford, Worcester College Library. 1636. Reproduced with the permission of Worcester College Library. Figure 3, p. 48. Inigo Jones, The Designs of the Chirurgians Theatre (Interior plans), Oxford, Worcester College Library. 1636. Reproduced with the permission of Worcester College Library. Figure 4, p. 49. Isaac Ware, Interior cross-section of Inigo Jones’s Anatomy Theatre, Oxford, Bodleian Library, from Designs of Inigo Jones and others, publ. by Isaac Ware (London, c. 1757), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Figure 5, p. 55. Title-page, Sydney, Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP), from Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: Thomas and Richard Cotes, 1630), in folio. Engraving. Detail: anatomy lesson. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 6, p. 70. Engraving of nude male and female figures with snake and skull, London, Wellcome Institute, from Thomas Geminus, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio […] (London: J. Herfordie, 1545), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 7, p. 73. William Marshall, Title-page, London, Wellcome Institute, from Alexander Read, The Manuall of the Anatomy or dissection of the body of Man

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(London: F. Constable, 1638), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 8, p. 84. Gravid female figure, London, Wellcome Institute, from Juan Valverde de Hamusco, Historia De La Composición Del Cuerpo Humano (Rome: Antonio de Salamanca, 1556), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 9, p. 86. Gravid female figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from Andreas Laurentius, De Anatomice […] (Paris, 1595), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 10, p. 87. Title-page, London, Wellcome Institute, from Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 11, p. 90. Male figure with flayed skin, London, Wellcome Institute, from Juan Valverde de Hamusco, Historia De La Composición Del Cuerpo Humano (Rome: Antonio de Salamanca, 1556), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 12, p. 91. Male figure holding flayed skin, London, Wellcome Institute, from Alexander Read, Somatographia anthropine, or a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard; 1616), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 13, p. 94. Anatomical illustration of a pregnant woman, London, Wellcome Institute, from Alexander Read, Somatographia anthropine, or a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1634), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 14, p. 96. Title-page, London, Wellcome Institute, from Alexander Read, Somatographia anthropine, or a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1616), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 15, p. 110. Visio prima, Sydney, RACP Library, from Johannes Remmelin, Catoptrum Microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannis Görlini, 1639), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 16, p. 113. Visio prima, Sydney, RACP Library, from Johannes Remmelin, Catoptrum Microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannis Görlini, 1639), in folio. Detail: gravid female torso. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Figure 17, p. 121. Visio secunda, Sydney, RACP Library, from Johannes Remmelin, Catoptrum Microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannis Görlini, 1639), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 18, p. 124. Visio tertia, Sydney, RACP Library, from Johannes Remmelin, Catoptrum Microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannis Görlini, 1639), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 19, p. 146. Robert Greenbury, Sir Charles Scarborough (MD) and Mr Edward Arris at Dissection, Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall. 1651. Reproduced with the permission of the Worshipful Company of Barbers, London. Figure 20, p. 206. Muscles of the back, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula V, Lib IV. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 21, p. 207. Anatomical illustration showing the back of the human body, London, Wellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XVII. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 22, p. 208. Muscles of the back, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula XIV, Lib IV. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 23, p. 209. Anatomical illustration showing the back of the human body, London, Wellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XIIII. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 24, p. 212. Muscles of the upper body, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula XV, Lib IV. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 25, p. 213. Anatomical illustration showing muscles of the upper body, London, Wellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XVIII. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 26, p. 214. Anatomical ‘Ganymede’, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula XV, Lib VIII. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Illustrations

Figure 27, p. 215. Anatomical illustration showing male genitalia, London, Wellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XIII. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 28, p. 233. Visio prima, London, Wellcome Institute, from Johann Remmelin, An exact survey of the microcosmus or little world […] (London: Joseph Moxon, 1670), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 29, p. 234. Visio prima, London, Wellcome Institute, from Johann Remmelin, An exact survey of the microcosmus or little world […] (London: Joseph Moxon, 1670), in folio. Engraving. Detail: gravid female torso. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 30, p. 235. Visio prima, London, Wellcome Institute, from Clopton Havers, A survey of the microcosme; or, The anatomy of the bodies of man and woman (London: Joseph Moxon, 1695), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 31, p. 236. Visio secunda, London, Wellcome Institute, from Clopton Havers, A survey of the microcosme; or, The anatomy of the bodies of man and woman (London: D. Midwinter and T. Leigh, 1702), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 32, p. 237. Visio tertia, London, Wellcome Institute, from Clopton Havers, A survey of the microcosme; or, The anatomy of the bodies of man and woman (London: D. Midwinter and T. Leigh, 1702), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute. Figure 33, p. 242. Hanged figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from William Cowper, Anatomy of humane bodies […] (London: Sam. Smith & Benj. Walford, 1698), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 34, p. 243. Male figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from William Cowper, Anatomy of humane bodies […] (London: Sam. Smith & Benj. Walford, 1698), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library. Figure 35, p. 244. Gravid female figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from William Cowper, Anatomy of humane bodies […] (London: Sam. Smith & Benj. Walford, 1698), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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INTRODUCTION

E

mbodiment — the physical and mental experience of human existence — is the condition of possibility for our relating to other people and to the world.1 Fully able or seriously disabled, it is through our physicality that we function as social beings, whether in face-to-face communications, through handwritten letters, printed missives, or by keying disembodied electronic symbols into a computer to ‘stay in touch’ with someone half a world away. Embodied social relations exist both as the context (the prior circumstances) and as an outcome (a consequence) of given social formations, given systems through which we create and gain social meaning. In an earlier volume, The Sociology of the Body, I argued for the complexity of embodiment over space, time, and cultures. Here I want to take one detailed example of the movement in a social formation through the shifting understanding of embodiment at a particular time, in a particular place, and within a particular culture: seventeenth-century London. This book is written in the context of a wider theory of the abstraction of social and political life and a much broader series of understandings of embodiment that are observable in social formations that range from the tribal, traditional, and modern to the postmodern.2 Here the process of abstraction refers to the ‘drawing away’ or ‘lifting out’ of social relations from being integrated through

1

Kate Cregan, The Sociology of the Body: Mapping the Abstraction of Embodiment (London: Sage, 2006). 2

Paul James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In (London: Sage, 2006), chap. 8. The analytical approach of this book is deeply indebted to the work of Paul James, a social theorist whose refinements upon the theory of constitutive abstraction (see Geoff Sharp, ‘Constitutive Abstraction and Social Practice’, Arena Journal, 70 (1985), 48–82) come out of the collaborative work of the group of writers and theorists associated with Arena (Melbourne).

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Introduction

the immediate embodied presence of others. It is a material as well as ideational process; it changes the nature of both being and knowing (ontology and epistemology). Examples of abstraction include objectification, rationalization and commodification. They are discussed across various fields of social theory as changing the way in which people relate to each other. For example, when exchanging a commodity for money, the bodies of the protagonists may remain relevant to the exchange at one level, but commodity exchange draws persons out into a much more abstracted relationship than does passing on a gift where the reciprocal particularity of the persons in the exchange is enhanced even as they part company. Or to put it more simply, a gift such as the kula (shells) that are key items of ritual exchange in the Trobriand Islands — described by the anthropologists Malinowski and Mauss — entails an on-going social relationship that the sale of betelnuts for national currency does not.3 Medically abstracting the body is not a new phenomenon, and in a crucial sense it was a logical correlate of developing what we now call ‘medical knowledge’. It is possible to generalize that this involved three intersecting processes: first, recording and later systematizing embodied patterns, symptoms and responses (codifying the body); secondly, developing a generalizing science of cutting into, dismembering, and later mechanically peering into actual bodies (anatomizing the body); and thirdly, developing a method of rendering images of body parts and body systems in a way that made social, technical, and aesthetic sense of them (imaging the body). Temporally, this book is situated on the cusp of early modernity when those processes of codifying, anatomizing, and imaging are taking shape across legal, anatomical, and theatrical practice in interconnected and mutually supporting ways. These processes of abstraction were uneven in at least two important ways. Firstly, new practices and subjectivities were layered over older forms, including traditional cosmologies of the body. Secondly, as I will argue, the new appropriations and sensibilities were differentiated across gender lines — here, in an unprecedented way, gender becomes a problematized category. The processes of abstraction were also contradictory processes, or to be more precise, they gave rise to contradictory outcomes. For example, the more that the body was drawn into abstracted fields of endeavour, the more the unmediated blood-and-guts physicality of individual bodies was asserted. That is not of course

3

The terms gifted and gifting are used specifically to connote this sense of relational exchange throughout. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Norton, 1990), Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge, 1922).

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to suggest that the body was for the first time revealed in its unmediated reality. Practices of codification, anatomizing, and imaging were now objectively mediating the medical experience of the body — just as older cosmologies continued to frame general understandings and practices. However, increasingly, practitioners experienced embodiment as a direct quandary that could not be explained by older verities. Here the distinction between social form and social content is important: ‘As the dominant social form became more abstract, we became more and more obsessed by making the content more palpable, more embodied, more “real”.’4 In this sense, processes of abstraction led to attempts to reclaim the particularities of embodiment. It is what James has called the ‘recalling of the concrete’.5 The ways in which different societies constitute social practice affects how social meaning is shaped, presented, or represented. Both within and across societies those meanings can change. Much of Foucault’s work is aimed at identifying shifts in dominant epistemological fields within particular social formations.6 However, Foucault’s epistemic shifts, ironically, have an absolutist edge to them. That is, despite the methodological avowals, he makes modern discursive practices all-powerful, not allowing for the survival of elements of the traditional within modernity. The epistemic shifts and epochal divisions he describes are too sharply demarcated. Nor does he take himself far from his own ‘backyard’ even if others have applied his approach far further afield. It is also worth taking to heart Philippe Buc’s caution about the application of social theory to historical discussions, and his exhortation that a ‘scholar should not confuse the intensity of his or her interest in an object (here “ritual”) and the degree of centrality of this object for a past society.’7 Using the evidence of the construction of embodiment across seventeenth-century London, The Theatre of the Body argues that shifts in the ontology of embodiment occur much more slowly and unevenly over extended periods of time in a way that does not obliterate what came before. Elements of

4

James, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism, p. 89.

5

Paul James, Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (London: Sage, 1996), chap. 2. 6

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1994); The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Random House, 1975); and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991), being the most relevant to this book’s subject. 7

Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 261; see also pp. 4– 9 on Darnton, and p. 248 on Bourdieu.

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the traditional survive into the period marked by the uneven dominance of the modern — here for simplicity’s sake still called modernity. Indeed the very processes of modernity involve pulling apart the traditional and re-forming it as a new tradition. Counter-intuitively, the more modern Western social formations have become, the more they have relied on a rewriting and reconstituting of traditions and the traditional in a process of self-legitimation. Classicism is remade and retraditionalized in neoclassicism. Medievalism is reconstituted in the Gothic. Prior forms are made ‘newly old’ and consciously constructed traditionalism takes on a life of its own. This is the heart, blood, and soul of nationalism under conditions of modernity.8 This reconstitution argument is not the same as a one-dimensional ‘invention of tradition’ argument, and it pays due attention to apprehending practices ‘through an approach that is site specific and contextual [… and a method that is] local as well’.9 However, this is getting ahead of ourselves, for the concern here is how practices and subjectivities of modernity began to take hold within and across three fields of expertise — medical, legal, and dramatic. From this slow, uneven process we can discern the gradual rewriting of the human body through the co-option and mutation of traditional ontologies. Let us take one moment of flux in a traditional social formation at the intersection of the three thematic concerns of this book to tease out the point. It occurs at the very beginning of the period under consideration.10 In examining the events around the death of Elizabeth I and the concordances to be found between her interment and the fates of the least of her subjects we will have the first step in beginning to plot the changing nature of the abstraction of the human body across the seventeenth century. At the time she died Britain was undergoing a slow and uneven shift in social formation from the dominance of traditionalism to the dominance of the modern. Scholars of the period between 1500 and 1800 rarely agree on the division between ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’. A central contention here is that there is no such easy division, for vestiges of earlier social formations will always survive even past the modern into the postmodern and 8

See Stephanie Trigg and Paul James, ‘Rituals of Nationhood: Medievalism, Nationalism and Republicanism’, in Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, ed. by Stephanie Trigg Making the Middle Ages, 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp. 255–75, on Australian nationalism in this context. 9

Buc, Dangers of Ritual, p. 251.

10

The following discussion is a more developed version of my ‘Early Modern Anatomy and the Queen’s Body Natural: The Sovereign Subject’, Body & Society, 13 (2007), 47–66, which incorporates responses to the extremely helpful and pertinent readers’ comments. Due to my error in production the wrong version went to print in B&S.

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beyond. However, there is a shift in dominance. That is our aim — to understand aspects of that shift in dominance as it is played out on and through the human body in the law courts, playhouses, and anatomy theatres of seventeenth-century London. In the discussion of the interment of Elizabeth I we will take one example of the processes of anatomy to set the groundwork for the book as a whole, taking it as one point from which the dominance of a traditional social formation begins to wane. However, our focus throughout the book will not be on the overtly political nor be confined to the bodies of sovereigns: far from it. The central subjects of this book are the least of the sovereigns’ subjects.

The Death of Elizabeth I Anatomy fragments the objects of its fascination to draw it together again in a newly unified whole. Boundaries are redefined, the division of systems renegotiated, pulled apart, layered over, and knit together afresh. In this it resembles cartography. In the reign of Elizabeth I, these technologies met momentarily in and through the body-natural of the sovereign. Written over as an icon of the newly mapped England in life, the Virgin Queen was covertly ‘opened’ by anatomists in death. What was expressed clandestinely in the treatment of the sovereign was rendered explicitly on the body of the executed felon; inscribed by anatomical dissection, subsumed and subjected within the England that Elizabeth I embodied. The intention of our discussion is to address the ontology of the technology at work in the imagery of power employed in anatomy and the connections that can be drawn out through examining painted imagery and one painting in particular which refers directly to mapping. This brief animadversion to maps is only in support of the main argument that imagery and artistic representations of the human body are integral to its abstraction. And as we shall see throughout this book, the adaptation of images across time has much to say about the movement from the dominance of traditionalism to the modern. Advances in anatomy express a set of shifting and emerging relationships between the body of the sovereign, her body-natural, and her territories. This occurs through a process of intensifying abstraction, whereby the Queen’s body-natural is fragmented and reconstituted in portraiture and, ultimately, her funereal effigy. What is described here is the overlapping of different ways of being, or, to be more precise, different forms of the representation of being. It is not the end of one epoch of representation and the beginning of another, but rather the intermeshing of different ontologies. Strategies of representation, such as writing

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on maps, bleed into the fragmentation and representation of bodies — royal and common — in ways that can be said to mark out those persons as ‘universals’ rather than as individuals.11 We shall see in later chapters, however, that this is increasingly in tension with the known individuality of the commoners’ bodies used in anatomy. Alive, Elizabeth I embodied the country and the people as a whole, and one of her powers was the condemning of the lives of convicted felons and the disposal of their bodies. In death, the treatment of the sovereign’s body-natural has very strong connections with that meted out to the recipients of her laws — although their ultimate fates are vastly different. The abstracted form of the sovereign’s body-natural is resubstantiated, absorbing and encompassing that abstraction into a new dominant understanding of corporeality. No longer the living sovereign, she reverts to being an embodied particular, a woman whose wishes in life can be ignored. Her body-natural is unimportant in the transfer of power to the next monarch: it is the effigy that counts. The felon’s body is dissected down to taking the skeleton to pieces. It is carried under a pall in a reusable coffin to be buried in a common pit, at the charge of one shilling.12 She is carried, attended by thousands of mourners, to Westminster where she is (eventually) interred at the cost of thousands of pounds. There are similar ceremonies that must be observed: proper coverings, proper disbursements, proper rites. The grandeur of her monumentalization obscures not only the fact of her decaying mortal remains and how they were prepared; it also conceals the connections between this sovereign and her subjects in mortality that persists beyond the metaphorics of the polity.13 This is also to suggest that the dissection of the Queen during the politically liminal period between death and interment raises serious questions about the supposed concomitant inviolability of the boundaries and borders of the state she worked so hard to embody. This is confirmed when one looks to the connections that are made between mapping and the Queen’s body in the ‘Ditchley’ portrait and the representations of anatomical dissection.

11

I would like to thank the second anonymous reviewer of the original article for this point about the categorical nature of the human subjects on whom words appear. I also thank Christopher Scanlon, David Garrioch, and Paul James for their insightful comments and suggestions. 12

Aldermanbury, London, Guildhall Library, MSS 1257/1–3, Churchwarden’s Accounts, Parish of St Olave’s, Silver Street, 1630–1756. 13

I also thank the first anonymous reviewer of the original article for drawing out this point around concealment.

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On 24 March 1603, after nearly half a century on the throne, the mortal form of Elizabeth I ambiguously returned to being solely a body-natural. Her remains were attended as assiduously as she had been in life.14 A detailed waxwork and wooden effigy was constructed — crowned, orbed, and sceptred, clothed in ornate robes and jewels15 — as a material symbol of the body politic she had embodied for forty-seven years. The effigy was placed above her coffined body during the lying in state and remained above it in the funeral hearse until a month after her interment.16 With the sovereign’s death the funereal effigy was infused with the body politic17 and the Virgin Queen’s wax and wooden likeness performed this office at least until both it and her mortal remains were carried to Westminster Abbey on 28 April 1603. The effigy was an abstraction of what had been in life at once abstracted and re-solidified back into the physical body of the Queen.18 Once she was dead her physical body was released from that association. Her immortal soul ascended to heaven, and with his coronation the body politic was reincarnated in the physical body of the new king. What of the lingering presence of Elizabeth’s body-natural? At the death of the Queen, the absent King James’s right to the Crown(s) and his accession were proclaimed. However, as Jennifer Woodward has argued convincingly, while ‘in law’ the state continued to function and James I of England was legally the king upon the death of Elizabeth, until the funeral of the one and the coronation of the other had taken place the popularly understood ‘metaphysical’ connection between the body politic and a sovereign body-natural remained in a liminal state:19

14

Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), p. 116. 15

‘For Queen Elizabeth I’s effigy, a crimson satin robe was sewn, lined with white fustian, with sabatons and a coif of cloth of gold, while £6 13s. 4d. was spent on “the crown, sceptre and ball, being all gilt with fine gold burnished, the crown set with stones”’: Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 223. 16

J. Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 129.

17

‘[A] persona ficta — the effigy — impersonating a persona ficta — the Dignitas’: Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 421; see also pp. 420–37. 18 See Cregan, The Sociology of the Body, for a fuller discussion of the abstraction of embodiment across social formations. 19

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Introduction James’s staging of Elizabeth’s funeral ceremony, complete with effigy ritual, is an acknowledgement […] that legal accession and ritual proclamation were not enough. He seems to have recognized that a ceremonial interregnum remained as far as display or the royal person was concerned.20

Further, as Marie Axton has argued, this was played out in the poetry and pageantry surrounding James’s long-delayed entry into London: ‘Thomas Middleton’s triumphal arch, the descent of Astraea, showed a separation and reunion of bodies politic and natural […]. Queen Elizabeth’s heavenly body, Astraea, goddess of laws and justice, ascended to heaven and returned like the Holy Ghost to be locked in the breast of the new King.’21 Between the death of her body-natural and its interment, in the popular imagination at least, the immortal body politic was linked to both and yet imbued in neither the deceased sovereign’s nor the living successor’s body-natural. It is events that took place within this interregnum period which we shall explore. In death, ‘Your fat king and your lean beggar is but | variable service — two dishes, but to one table.’22 The ‘obsequies’ performed subsequent to the deaths of both the Queen and a select group of her subjects — executed felons — are intimately connected. It is both the metaphorical and abstracted ‘table’ upon which they became ‘dishes’ disconcertingly allied. Each was subject to post-mortem opening by barber-surgeons though with quite different motivations and consequences. At the same time, each was the subject of the anatomical learning (the epistemological bounding) of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons which was dominated by visual representations of the body as defined by anatomical atlases. The impact of post-Vesalian anatomical illustrations on ways of ‘seeing’ the body was as profound as ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, or electron-microscopy today. The outer world, the realm of newfound and newly bounded lands, was contemporaneously undergoing a similarly radical shift in vision, conception, and representation. It is necessary first to discuss the practicalities of what it means when the first of these two knowledge systems is applied to the body of the Queen and to the 20

J. Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 96.

21

Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), p. 131. This transfer was ultimately finalized in the anointing and coronation of the new monarch on 25 July 1603, but because 1603 was a ‘plague year’, James I’s ceremonial or triumphal entry into London did not take place until the following year, on 15 March 1603/04. 22

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works, ed. by S. Wells and G. Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), IV .3.23–24, which was first performed c. 1599–1601.

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bodies of her subjects, and the power relations that are inherent in such acts. In each of these epistemologies there is a new integration of the body and the land through a radical disintegration of the objects of their fascination. Cartography looks out upon the world (the macrocosm) and reinterprets it in two planes from a God’s-eye view. Anatomy looks in upon ‘Man’ (the microcosm of God’s perfect creation) and similarly renders it in two planes. The ‘Ditchley’ portrait (c. 1592) of Elizabeth I illuminates claims to divinely ordained power using cartography as a reference point, both in her representation as an embodied extension of England — physically connected to her subjects and the land by her elegantly shod feet — and as a wider symbol of the imperial aspirations that came into being under her reign. We will see in The visceral lecture delivered by John Banister Aged 48, 1581 (c. 1581; Fig. 1) a corresponding set of claims being asserted over the central subject — felonious and anatomical — upon whom John Banister rests a proprietorial hand. Each reached a larger audience than one would initially assume. The main elements of the former painting became the ‘pattern’ for mass-produced images of Elizabeth23 and the latter was bound in a personal anatomical atlas, designed to be carried to lectures and displayed before audiences of barber-surgical apprentices and their masters.24 A comparative analysis of these two seemingly disparate paintings reveals direct associations between the technologies of anatomy on the body-natural both sovereign and common.

Elizabeth I and the Barber-Surgeons of London In life, Elizabeth embodied the law. Her word, however, was law only in life. She must have been aware of the practical preparations that accompanied a lavish funeral and no doubt foresaw the grandeur of her own. Yet she made it clear that she did not want her body opened post-mortem.25 Once dead, that command was ignored:

23

Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), pp. 14–20, p. 140. 24

University of Glasgow Library, Hunterian Collection, MS Hunter 364, ‘Master John Banister’s Anatomical Tables’. 25

The post-mortem opening and preservative preparation of the body was not unusual amongst the nobility and it was expected for royalty, the lavish nature of their funerals requiring an inevitable delay prior to interment.

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Fig. 1: The visceral lecture delivered by John Banister Aged 48, 1581, Glasgow University Library, Department of Special Collections, MS Hunter 364. c. 1581. Reproduced with the permission of the Glasgow University Library. Hereupon, instantly she died. Then the council went forth, and reported she meant the king of Scots: whereupon they went to London to proclaim him, leaving her body with charge not to be opened, such being her desire: but Cecil having given a secret warrant to the surgeons, they opened her which the rest of the council afterwards passed over, though they meant it not so. Now her body, being seared up, was brought to Whitehall, where being watched every night by six several ladies, myself, that night there watching as one of them, being all about the body, which was fast nailed up in a board coffin with leaves of lead, covered with velvet, her body and head brake with such a crack, that [it] splitted the wood, lead, and sear-cloth: whereupon, the next day, she was fain to be new trimmed up: whereupon they gave their verdicts, that, if she had not been opened, the breach of her body would have been much worse: but not man durst speak it publicly, for displeasing secretary Cecil.26

26

Lady Southwell, one of Elizabeth I’s maids of honour, recorded by Father Parsons in ‘The Relation of the Lady Southwell of late Q. death, primo Aprilis, 1607’, Stonyhurst MS Ang. A iii 77, as transcribed in M. A. Tierney, Dodd’s Church History of England from the Commencement

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Given the delay in interring her remains, removing the solid organs and viscera and packing the abdominal cavity with herbs to afford as much preservation of the body as possible27 seems a reasonable precautionary move. Far more significantly, whether or not her protestations were a political move to uphold the rhetoric of chastity so identified with her to the tomb in full knowledge that the practicalities of a state funeral would negate her wishes, these actions are a stark reminder of the transience of any power vested in a ‘weaker vessel’. Hers was a body inextricably identified with a physical inviolability. As her recalcitrant council seemingly knew, she clearly meant to control and maintain that inviolability to the last. This unwarranted breaching of her body was performed by a fledgling group of ‘scientists’ whose work enjoyed the royal imprimatur. In Clapham’s report her embalmers are referred to only as ‘mean persons’.28 Southwell’s relation clearly identifies them as the same people to whom Elizabeth I, like her father, gifted executed felons as anatomical subjects: the ‘surgeons’, or more properly, members of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London. Her death is not directly mentioned in their Court Minutes covering this period, but it is intriguing that during the weeks in which she was known to be dying the clerk chose to stop noting the date as ‘anno domini, E R, I[mprimus]’ and resorted to ‘anno domini, I’. Further, while reference is made to taking part in the Lord Mayor’s ‘intertaynment of his ma[jes]tie’ on 20 April, it is not until the minutes recorded for 3 May that the King is proclaimed ‘Jacobi dei gratia’ in their records,29 after her funeral. Within her court Elizabeth, like her predecessors and successors, had a Royal or Sergeant-Surgeon and further supporting surgeons in attendance. Between 1591 and 1603 the position of Sergeant-Surgeon was alternately held in turn by William Gooderus, several times master of the Company of Barber-Surgeons, and George Baker, who as author of a famous herbal would certainly have been in a position to recommend the appropriate preservative materials such as they were.30 of the Sixteenth Century to the Revolution in 1688, 5 vols (London: Charles Dolman, 1839–43), III, 73. 27

Gittings, pp. 104–05.

28

John Clapham, Elizabeth of England, Certain Observations Concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. by Evelyn Plummer and Conyers Read (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1951), p. 110 n. 3. 29

Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MSS 5257/1–7, Court Minutes, 1551– 1721 (5257/4, 1598–1607). 30

Jessie Dobson and R . Milnes Walker, Barbers and Barber-Surgeons of London (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 137.

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It seems reasonable to assume that it was these men and their lieutenants who performed the ‘opening’ of the body.31 What would they have done to her remains? Her chest and abdominal cavity would have been emptied and filled with preservative and perfumery herbs and spices. These would have been set aside and the body closed. In a time when the monarch’s touch was believed to cure scrofula, who would dare to simply discard the vital organs of a sovereign? The body was then wrapped in sear-cloth (swaddled), sealed in a leaden shroud, which was then placed in a wooden coffin and draped with an embroidered black velvet pall. I have come across no mention of a distribution of the heart and major organs — a known practice — so one can only speculate that they were either placed with her in the coffin or buried in a separate casket somewhere close by in Westminster Abbey, as were Anne of Denmark’s in 1619.32 Yet even if they treated her body with due care, the indignity and insult offered to the Virgin Queen in the mere fact that her aged body-natural was exposed to the sight and touch of an exclusively male audience is immense. And it makes one wonder if Ben Jonson’s salacious gossip that ‘she had a membrana on her, which made her uncapable of man’ came from one of her embalmers.33 These same men who opened the Queen’s body at her death had her warrant — a gift originally accorded the Barber-Surgeons of London by her father at their incorporation as a united company in 1540 and formally affirmed by her in 1560 — to take four convicted felons per annum from the gallows at Tyburn for their ‘public’ anatomies. They appear to have exercised this right on one Thomas Smith a bare three weeks before her demise.34 The treatment her

31

It is also worth noting that shortly afterwards the Barber-Surgeons sued for and ensured the supremacy of their right (to attempt) to monopolize the practice of embalming against the claims of other guildsmen. This claim was granted in the Charter of James I, 30 January 1605; see Sidney Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (London: Blades, East and Blades, 1890), pp. 111–14. 32

J. Woodward, The Theatre of Death, pp. 172–73.

33

Ben Jonson, ‘Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden’, in The Complete Poems, ed. by George Parfitt (London: Penguin, 1975), pp. 459–80 (p. 470). 34

Aldermanbury, London, Guildhall Library, MSS 6534 and 6534A, Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, Parish of St Olave’s, Silver Street, 1561–1770, ‘1602/03, Thomas Smith, anatomised, March 5’. It seems highly probable that he is the Lenten public anatomy and therefore a felon and that the reference in Court Minutes, dated 1 March 1602/03, for payment of four pounds to the stewards of the anatomy ‘towards their charges’ almost certainly relates to his dissection.

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executed subjects received was considerably different from her post-mortem embalming, though the pedagogical practices at the Barber-Surgeons’ public anatomical lectures inevitably would have shaped their understanding and treatment of her remains. How then were they treated? Anatomical dissection was not conceived of as an extension of retributive justice in England until the eighteenth century, nor was that conception put into law until the ‘Murder Act’ (1752).35 Indeed at this period the Barber-Surgeons seem to have taken some trouble to treat their anatomical subjects with a fair degree of respect in terms of their retrieval from the gallows and their eventual disposal, and went about this business unmolested.36 A public anatomy was not public in the sense that nonmembers of the company were free to attend. Far from it. Occasional visitors were welcomed. Pepys was one notable guest late in the century as we shall see in Chapter 5. However, the public anatomies were primarily for the education of the masters and apprentices of the company. In the original gift, Henry VIII granted the sayd maysters or governours of the mistery and comminalties of barbours and surgeons of London and their successours yerely for ever after their sad discrecions at their free liberte and pleasure shal and maie have and take without cotradition four persons condempned adjudged and put to deathe for feloni by the due order of the kynges law of thys realme for anatomies without any further sute or labour to be made to the kynges highnes his heyres or successours for the same. And to make incision of the same deade bodies or otherwyse to order the same after their said discresions at their pleasure for their futher and better knowlage instruction in sight learnyng and experience in the sayd science or facultie or surgery.37

35

This is the act of 25 Geo II, c. 37, which stipulated that a ‘convicted murderer be executed within two days, and that his body be “dissected and anatomized” by surgeons’ ( John M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 78). 36

Peter Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons’, in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-century England, ed. by Douglas Hay and others (London: Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 65–118, has famously shown that the Barber-Surgeons’ rights were vigorously contested towards the end of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, but this was not the case up until at least the end of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, as I shall demonstrate below. 37

‘The Union of the Fellowship of Surgeons with the Barbers Company, 1540’, reproduced in full in R . Theodore Beck, The Cutting Edge: Early History of the Surgeons of London (London: Humphries, 1974), p. 188, and Appendix C in Young, pp. 586–90. Where an original document has already been transcribed by Young or Dobson and Milnes-Walker, I have chosen to use their versions rather than my own. Any other records referenced to the originals are from my own transcriptions.

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It sounds almost like the granting of a commercial right. And yet the bodies were not property and never have been in law. The bodies themselves were worth nothing in financial terms, valuable as they were to their recipients. In fact if anything they incurred expenses through the attendant costs during the anatomies with fees to the reader, stewards, and masters of the anatomy, the beadle, porter, and executioner. The proper disposal of them afterwards required paying all the church officials for their troubles and for a place in the common burial plot.38 They also had to be careful not to encroach on others’ rights. For example, the deceased’s clothing (for the majority of people their most valuable assets)39 was the rightful property of the hangman. The bloody particulars of the fate of these felons are as follows. The beadle and porter of the company retrieved them from the gallows at Tyburn as soon as they had been successfully executed. They were carried back to the hall under a pall kept for the purpose, for ceremony’s and modesty’s sake. Once at the hall they were placed on a table, still beneath the pall and at one stage behind a screening curtain, to wait in readiness for the lectures. At this period all public anatomies were held in the main hall, with the table centrally located, surrounded by scaffold seating that was set up specifically for the occasion by a carpenter. When the reader, masters, apprentices, and stewards had assembled, the body would be uncovered. Six anatomical lectures were given over three days, with a morning and afternoon lecture on each day. Each day was spent on a separate system and the body was processed in a strict order — visceral, muscular, and osteological — that took into account the natural processes the body was undergoing. This was in an age when neither embalming nor cool storage were effective. Bodies were dissected down to the bone. Sometimes the skeletons were cleaned and retained for display purposes, 40 but generally the remains were collected, placed in a coffin kept for the purpose, and taken to the nearby churchyard of St Olaves Silver Street for

38

Regular payments for these items appear throughout the Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MS D/2/1, The Wardens Great Accompt Book 1603–1659, and MS D/2/2, Audit Book 1659–1674. 39

See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), passim, on the commodity status and ‘currency’ of clothes at this period. 40

See Kate Cregan, ‘Blood and Circuses’, in Images of the Corpse: From the Renaissance to Cyberspace, ed. by Elizabeth Klaver (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press/Popular, 2004), pp. 39–62, and Chapter 3 of the present volume for a detailed account of the fate of two such felons.

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burial.41 The body of the sovereign and the body of the executed criminal were both treated with the kind of respect that was expected at funerals, though of course the felon was denied some of the dignities. The surgeons provided a reusable pall, much as churches had palls for hire for the burial of the poor, so the burial of the felon was in some sense treated like a charity funeral. We can see from the Banister portrait that black hangings were laid on, as they were standard in other funerals despite the cost of acquiring the fabric, although these too were in all likelihood reused. The funereal hearse has its parallel in the dissection table and the skeleton’s costly wainscot casing. There are corresponding appropriate attendants. Even the rods of office used in the offering ceremony during a noble funeral to confer power from the dead noble to the living heir42 have their parallel in the white rods of office (pointers) used by the surgeon in the transference of knowledge, thanks to the bounty of the sovereign, to his apprentices and peers. If it were not for the gift of the sovereign the rods of office would confer nothing. Those felons who were claimed by the Barber-Surgeons for public anatomies were lectured over by Readers who referred, as did their audience, to anatomical manuals dominated by illustrations transposed from the works of Andreas Vesalius, discussed below in Chapter 2. Vesalius’s anatomy books had had a revolutionary impact on the visualization of the human body across Europe. His work was in turn influential upon and influenced by new turns in cartographic visualizations. I have referred in some detail to these processes to draw lines of connection to what I will argue below is a radical shift that is taking place in the manner of ‘naming’ of the body. As I have already noted, alive Elizabeth I embodied the country and the people as a whole and she possessed the power to condemn the lives and direct the disposal of the bodies of convicted felons. The post-mortem treatment of the sovereign’s body-natural has very strong connections with that meted out to the recipients of her laws despite the difference in their ultimate fates and the careful stratification of the rites and rituals accorded each. The abstracted form of the sovereign’s body-natural is resubstantiated, absorbing and encompassing that abstraction into a new dominant understanding of corporeality. Between the sovereign and her felonious subjects stand the Barber-Surgeons wielding their instruments over both of them, quite probably wearing images of 41

See Chapter 4 and the appendix, below, for a compilation of the identifiable anatomized felons in this parish records, totalling 307 burials over the 105 years’ records extant for the period 1600–1736. 42

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the Queen in pendants around their necks, much like those that Banister and one of the surgeons are wearing in the portrait. Even if the pendants around Banister and his fellow-anatomists’ necks do not bear her image, by the time she was embalmed the Sergeant-Surgeon would in all likelihood have been wearing one.43 They stand, hands on the motto-decked body, redefining it and expressing their authority over it, much as the power of Elizabeth’s image standing above Saxton’s England redefines the land, the people, and herself.

Anatomy and Maps During the reign of Elizabeth I the mapping of the country and the mapping of the human body underwent a significant conceptual shift, and the abstract representations which had once been used to illustrate each was reconstituted into new conceptions and visions of separated territories, boundaries, and provinces. The outcome is rendered visible in the ‘Ditchley’ portrait (c. 1592) and John Banister’s anatomy portrait (c. 1581). Like anatomy, cartography was experiencing a period of intensified ‘sophistication’. Roy Strong’s comments on the depiction of Elizabeth I in the ‘Ditchley’ portrait as the relation of the body politic to cartographic representations gives the grounding for making the comparisons between it and the Banister portrait that are the subject of the succeeding two sections. Writing of the 1579 ‘Sieve’ portrait, which he identifies as the initial image in which imperial claims are made through cartographic associations that were carried through and intensified in the ‘Armada’ and the ‘Ditchley’ portraits, Strong argues, Legally the Queen’s body and the body politic of her realm were inseparable. Thus the cartographic image of the kingdom on the globe and the physical presence of the sovereign were two aspects of the same thing: England. This identification of the map of England with representations of the Queen was to become a recurring theme in royal iconography.[…] To all intents and purposes looking at an image of Elizabeth was looking at England.44

Before discussing these portraits in detail it is worth briefly noting the general connections between anatomical and cartographic illustration. Anatomy and cartography share many facets of their production in common. From the midsixteenth century onwards, this includes new ways of abstracting and revisioning

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43

Strong, pp. 109–11.

44

Strong, pp. 98–99.

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the world through maps that mirrors new ways of abstracting and re-conceiving the human body through anatomical illustration. In late-sixteenth-century England cartography was (like anatomy) a trade learned by apprenticeship, and the production of printed maps was (like anatomical manuals) the subsequent work of artists, engravers, and printers. A physician ‘Reader’ declaimed over bodies from master texts to barber-surgical apprentices who referred to cut-down manuals as their master barber-surgeons performed the actual dissection before them. Surveyors and cartographers gained licences from the Crown or were hired by landowners to map lands with their expert instruments, often after collecting any existing maps, using royal warrants to ensure the assistance of locals who could name what was before them: and, who knew the best vantage points from which to conduct a survey. For example, Saxton and Norden surveyed and compiled manuscript maps for the Queen and state using local inhabitants to assist in the process: thereafter, Speed compiled and re-engraved them for a mass market.45 In both cases, the production of texts was in the hands of the experts (physician or surveyor) but each was ultimately dependent on intermediary sub-experts, including artists/engravers and printers, for the survival of that expert knowledge past the manuscript stage into an ‘anatomy’ or an ‘atlas’.46 On the Continent map-engraving was the authorized ground of guild-aligned artists and/or specialist instrument makers. One person may have done the surveying, another collected available extant maps, and another still re-engraved them for a printer to publish. So, the expert defined the ground and directed a subordinate what to record, after which plates were made or were re-engraved from existing materials.47 In London at least, the coincidence between the production of cartographic and anatomical texts goes a step further. In 1555 Thomas Geminus reissued one of the earliest cartographic illustrations of the British Isles, Lily’s 1546 map.48 ‘[O]ne of the earliest engravers and instrument-makers in London’, in 1556 he produced A Boke named Tectonicon, a manual on military and civil surveying in which he declared himself ‘ready exactly to make all 45

Paul D. A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (London: Public Record Office and the British Library, 1993), pp. 60–65. 46

While it is common for anatomical manuals to use this name now, Brown notes the first use of the word atlas for a collection of maps is 1595, directly alluding to the mythological Atlas who carried the world on his shoulders; see Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps (New York: Dover, 1977), pp. 165–66. 47 48

Brown, pp. 160–64.

Sarah Tyacke and John Huddy, Christopher Saxton and Tudor Map-making (London: British Library, 1980), pp. 7–8.

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intrumentes apperteyninge to this booke’. 49 As we shall see in Chapter 2, contemporaneously he also produced the first English ‘adaptation’ of Vesalius’s anatomical manuals, dedicated successively to three sovereigns, the last being Elizabeth I. The obvious connection between these two technologies is that they are reliant on relatively recent shifts in art for their power. Anatomical illustration helps make possible the analytic and literal dis-integration of natural bodies, both of the sovereign and his or her subjects. Post-Vesalian anatomy recharts organs and systems. It supersedes scholastic traditions, through a redefinition of the boundaries within as displayed in a detailed series of illustrations. The body — to use that term as a shorthand for bodies framed by relations of practice and subjectivity — is abstracted in a new way, and body parts are objectified and particularized to be drawn back together, overwritten into a newly unified whole.50 Those illustrations are displayed and referred to in the process of apprentices being taught what to see. Cartography, similarly, recharts the boundaries of tracts of land, overwriting earlier understandings of customary usage and/or fields held in common. I am not appealing here to a metaphorics of mapping; there are quite concrete connections at work. Nor am I suggesting that either of these technologies was immediately or ever wholly successful — other knowledge systems competed, older knowledge systems survived, and the dominance of these systems was contested — but eventually they each became the authorized, dominant means of defining the boundaries of the body and the world.51

49

Tyacke and Huddy, p. 22

50

See Cregan, Sociology of the Body, passim.

51

On cartography and anatomy as new modes of exploration see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Gender and Anatomy from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 64–65; Frank Lestrignant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. by David Fausett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 77–78; Samuel Y. Edgerton, ‘From Mental Matrix to Mappamundi to Christian Empire: The Heritage of Ptolemaic Cartography in the Renaissance’, in Art and Cartography: Six Historical Essays, ed. by David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 43; Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 22–32; Katharine Park, ‘The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the Tribade, 1570–1620’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 171–93; Howard Marchitello, Narrative and Meaning in Early Modern England: Browne’s Skull and Other Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), although he does not specifically deal with anatomy.

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Yates52 and Strong have made a strong association between the Queen and cartography in life, as sovereign. We shall extend it to her body-natural in death. In each of the technologies there is a new integration of the body and the land through a radical disintegration of the objects of their fascination. Cartography and anatomy both rely upon an interplay between artistic conventions and territorialization. In 1581 John Banister read an anatomical lecture for the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons at their hall. Two years earlier John Saxton had published his atlas, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I. She appears in its frontispiece, holding an orb in one hand and her sceptre in the other. Roy Strong has argued that between the publication of Saxton’s atlas and the painting of the ‘Ditchley’ portrait, in which Elizabeth reigns over a map of England, representations of Elizabeth shift from identifying her with maps and mapping to integrating her into the map and to her figure embodying the country as a whole. A comparison with the Banister portrait opens out an even more complex reading.53

John Banister’s Anatomy and the ‘Ditchley’ Portrait In the anatomy portrait commemorating the visceral lecture given by John Banister (aged forty-eight) in 1581,54 we are presented with a visual representation of the anatomical practices of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons as set down in their minutes and court records. While it is not absolutely certain whether this is meant to record a private or public anatomy lecture, given the detailed adherence to the rules for a public anatomy that the picture displays and the fact that Banister was appointed as Reader for the public anatomies in that year,55 it is highly likely that this does indeed show a public anatomical dissection in the first day of its three-day proceedings. Banister reads from Realdo Colombo’s

52

Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). 53

Strong, p. 99, p. 136.

54

The lectures were given over three days, beginning on the day of execution, with a morning and afternoon lecture on each day, and staged in the order of putrefaction: visceral, muscular, and skeletal. See Young, Dobson and Milnes-Walker, and below for a detailed description of proceedings around public anatomies at the hall. 55

Dobson and Milnes-Walker, Barbers, p. 139. Banister was in fact a physician, as were all Readers at the public anatomies, and as his bonnet and gown attest. He clearly had a particular interest in anatomy, unlike many of his peers, as one can see from the lavishly illustrated MS with oil paintings on brown paper of which this portrait is but one of eight.

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De re anatomica,56 pointing to the corresponding portion of the viscera in the body. Although he is depicted reading from a Latin text — the same language as the manuscript volume this portrait was originally bound in — this was in fact expressly discouraged by the company, where lectures were directed to be held in English. By their own admission they knew that their apprentices were for the most part ‘un-Latined’.57 Banister may, however, be giving an impromptu translation over the body. In several aspects the Banister portrait makes direct or indirect claims of association with the Queen. We have already seen that like her father before her, who in 1540 granted a deed of incorporation to the United Company of Barbers and Surgeons that is commemorated in a spectacular painting by Holbein still in the possession of the Worshipful Company of Barbers, Elizabeth granted the Barber-Surgeons licence to perform their work. She reaffirmed their right to four executed felons from the gallows at Tyburn for their better education and learning of the art of surgery through the performance of ‘public’ anatomical lessons. In 1569 Elizabeth added to the King’s approval, by granting them the arms that appear on the right, above the heads of the assembled observers. The other coat of arms belongs to Banister. Arms also frequently appear like this on maps to show the provenance and authority of the titled landowner of an area who was also, frequently, the commissioner of the map. Further, by the very act they are performing they are staging their relationship to the sovereign. If this is a public anatomy, the body upon which they work is a gift from the sovereign. In the name of the Queen, under the force of her law, the person whom they are dissecting has been freshly executed. The vivid colours of the body — lusciously rendered, as are the armaments that hang over the proceedings and in such stark contrast to the black, white, and sallow skintones that dominate the majority of the painting — bear witness that a few hours earlier, this person was alive. This vividness of the contrast is partly a factor of the dominance of dark colours in (non-courtly) clothing of the period, particularly 56 D’Arcy Power, ‘The Education of a Surgeon under Thomas Vicary — The Second Vicary Historical Lecture, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on 11 November 1920’ (repr. in Sir D’Arcy Power, Selected Writings, 1877–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), pp. 77–78). 57

On 27 August 1557 the Barber-Surgeons decided that apprentices could be bound notwithstanding ‘they be not lerned in the Latin Tonge’ (Young, p. 312); see also Power, Selected Writings, p. 74. Nearly sixty years later, Helkiah Crooke noted in the dedication to Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p. 9, that anatomies at the Barber-Surgeons’ were held in their ‘Mothertoonge’, that is, in English.

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amongst these men whose occupation circumscribed their dress. Gowns, caps, and white linen over-sleeves were mandated attire. The black of their garb and its predominance in the hangings and draperies are also indicative of their respectful treatment of the corpse: black is only fitting to their purpose, as it was at a funeral. The body is laid out on the table not unlike an effigy laid out on a funeral hearse, which sat like a stage within the church at state funerals. Indeed the kind of contrast between the brilliance evident in the figure or effigy at such funerals that stood out dramatically against the black of the attendants that Clare Gittings argues for has a correspondence here. The financial considerations attached to the proceedings and the value to the attendants of the perquisites they received at such funerals also has its parallel.58 More speculatively, both Banister and one of the masters of anatomy (as opposed to the master of the company, William Bovey, the bearded patrician in fur-collared gown on the far right) wear a pendant on what appears to be black silk ribbon. Banister’s is a jewelled ornament surrounded by gold tracery that seems to have a human figure in the centre of it. The other man who wields a scalpel and who bears a strong resemblance to an engraving of George Baker, the herbalistsurgeon who attended Elizabeth in her decline, wears a pearl-encrusted, blue enamel pendant that matches the buttons that fasten his doublet.59 Pendants like this, proclaiming the wearer’s allegiance to the sovereign in the wake of recent and successful campaigns against the Spanish fleet, were prolific from the mid-1580s.60 And yet this painting is recording an event of 1581. Whether this is a factor of the portrait actually being painted at a later date is unclear — and I would argue unlikely given that it does appear to be painted, however naively, by someone who had witnessed a dissection firsthand — but if they are wearing images of the Queen they are proclaiming even more adamantly their connection and allegiance to the sovereign whose bounty has enabled their ‘further learning’.61

58

Gittings, Death, Burial, pp. 224–25.

59

Dr John Young’s Catalogue of the Hunterian Library, cited in Power, Selected Writings, pp. 18–35, and available online at [accessed 8 May 2008]. 60 61

Strong, pp. 120–23.

Power makes the rather extraordinary and as far as I can see totally unsubstantiated claim that the Banister portrait was by Nicholas Hilliard (or his workshop), the painter of most of the miniatures of the Queen and the originator of the patterns for the proliferation of them, including pendants, during this period; see Power, ‘Notes on Early Portraits of John Banister, of William Harvey and the Barber-Surgeons’ Visceral Lecture in 1581’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of

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The most interesting point for our purposes here, however, is what Banister has his beringed hand resting upon. It lies upon the corpse’s exposed viscera, over which have been inscribed the words intestina (intestines), hepat[icus] (liver) and some indecipherable word/s that appear to mark the stomach. While this is a familiar form of diagrammatic marking to modern eyes, it is far from conventional in either portrait painting or anatomical illustration at the time. Words, dates, and mottoes frequently appear in the background of English paintings of this period, either free-floating, in borders, inscribed in monuments, on cartouches, or lettered upon banderols, sometimes even as embroidery upon clothing. They are occasionally found on figures representative of a group or a type (universals). They do not usually appear on individuals (particulars). Similarly, these conventions also hold true of anatomical illustrations. There are odd instances when words may appear on limbs or organs depicted in isolation, and letters were certainly inscribed on whole-body representations — related back to a key and/or a table of explanation — but words do not appear on complete forms in anatomical illustrations until the late seventeenth century, as we shall see in Chapter 6. One place where words do appear directly attached to the illustration of the abstracted matter they describe is on printed maps, and this is itself a relatively recent innovation in the late sixteenth century, particularly in Britain.62 It is an adaptation of the conventions of both portraiture and anatomical illustration, turning the body of the felon into a mapped territory. The master and the two men to the left of Banister all have their right hands on their breasts and their left hands on the table in a gesture of sincerity that simultaneously acts to link them with the corpse, and invokes the anatomical maxim nosce te ipsum: ‘know thyself’. It is also an act of laying claim. The circle formed by the hands of the central players point in towards the torso of the body, except the master’s, who appears to be gesturing towards the head of the deceased. The reader, the masters of anatomy, and the stewards of anatomy all reach towards the inscribed corpse, either touching it or about to touch it. In declaiming over the mysteries of the body on the table Banister ‘brings it into being’, stakes out his territory, names and defines it, with the express warrant of the sovereign. Just as Elizabeth I lays her hand on the globe in the ‘Armada’ portrait and positions her feet on England in the ‘Ditchley’ portrait. Medicine, 6 (1913), 18–36 (p. 31). The naivety of this painting in comparison with Hilliard’s work is self-evident. 62

See David Woodward, ‘The Manuscript, Engraved, and Typographic Traditions of Map Lettering’, in Art and Cartography (see n. 46, above), pp. 174–212, for a detailed account of the evolution of lettering on printed maps.

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The representation of Elizabeth I as she appears in the ‘Ditchley’ portrait is one of the most striking and most widely dispersed images of her in the latter part of her reign. Its explicit theme is forgiveness, the Queen having eventually recovered from her pique that her former champion, Henry Lee, had retired to his estate at Ditchley in 1590 with Anne Vavasour and a life of bucolic bliss without Elizabeth’s consent. That forgiveness is an expression of her power as sovereign and is the ever-present alternate of her power to condemn. As Roy Strong has shown, the ‘pattern’ of her face, the dress she wears, and the basic elements of the composition of the painting are repeated in numerous engravings that circulated throughout many sections of society. What is generally not repeated in those more common images is the full import of the original, which lies in what backs, surrounds, and lies beneath her. She stands above the world, her feet resting upon Oxfordshire and beside Buckinghamshire, very much as Saxton had relatively recently portrayed them in his atlas. Gloves in one hand, a fan in the other, an armillary sphere pendant by her left ear, her luminous presence in the heavens banishes a glowering thunderstorm and ushers in a gentle reign from heaven. There is little that can be added to what has already been so eloquently said about the iconography of this portrait.63 It is a potent image of the Elizabethan body politic, as seen through a lens of imperial ambition that simultaneously proclaims generosity and power. And there is only a subordinate sense of a bodynatural here. The little we see of the physical body of the Queen is secondary to the import of the background and her vestments: the dress could as easily stand without its corporeal inhabitant; in fact there is good reason to believe that it does.64 The angle of her toes in relation to the rest of her torso certainly does not seem conducive to standing upright. Strong is right, however, that as a whole the rhetorical import of the painting is to lay claim to and embody the country as a whole. But is that a uniformly unifying image? As Strong has shown, in terms of the history of her painted or engraved image, only ambiguously so. Images of Elizabeth I were routinely put together from separate authorized ‘patterns’ of her face and hands added to the detailed depiction of her fabulous gowns. Taking her image apart, particularizing and objectifying its details, or dissecting and reconstructing it was entirely conventional.65 The

63

Strong, pp. 134–41.

64

Jones and Stallybrass, p. 34–37 have shown that clothes were conventionally employed in the painting of portraits in their owner’s absence. 65

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conditions of the construction of her painted image mirror not only the unification but also the dis-integration integral to both anatomy and cartography. Maps made possible the long process of the closure of the commons, the willynilly parcelling and gifting of lands to nobility, the dissection of Ireland, and the dispossession of its people.66 The creation of a newly abstracted understanding of the whole of the human body relied on the physical dissolution and disintegration of persons. Anatomy rediscovered the human body, separated it into visceral, muscular, arterial, and skeletal structural formations by tearing bodies apart and then putting ‘the body’ back together at a more abstract level of representation. Contiguously, the visual and conceptual integration of the land came out of a deliberate practice of social disintegration. This portrait of Elizabeth symbolizes her unification of England even as it is dissected, and in a grisly irony that imagery turned back on her when she died. Her body-natural was dissected, not into oblivion, but it was eviscerated and embalmed by the same people who carried out anatomies on the felons she gave them to work on. These felons’ bodies often came from those sections of society dispossessed by those very closures, or their immediate descendants, the new city-dwellers who flocked into the towns. Elizabeth I standing on the map of England is a direct parallel of Banister’s victim, in a world turned upside down. With the death of the body-natural this image of the living embodiment of power reveals a deeper meaning that was always implicit. Sovereignty and the illusion of unity come into being through disunity. In turn the Banister anatomy is like the map on which she stands. The ‘Ditchley’ portrait utterly subsumes the people into the landscape, objectifies them both, flattens them out, and makes their lives invisible. They now live as subjects of the realm. We are still a long way from the formation of a nation as an abstract community of individualized strangers. The connections between the body-natural and the body politic in earlymodern England, particularly as pertains to the exercise of political power and the origins of the idea of nationhood, is ground that has been well-trodden for over forty years.67 Speculation about Elizabeth I’s sexual availability, or lack of it, was intense throughout her reign and in contemporaneous as well as contemporary debates the tensions between the sovereign’s body-natural and the body politic she

66

Peter Barber, ‘England II: Monarchs, Ministers and Maps, 1550–1625’, in Monarchs, Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe, ed. by David Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 57–98. 67

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embodied became more important and more disputed precisely because she was a daughter of Eve.68 Yet, in all this the body-natural is only discussed or deemed significant for its youth, beauty, marriageability, or potential corruptibility prior to her accession; for the prospect it presented throughout her long reign of enabling the forging of international alliances through those same traits; and, for being a disturbing physical grounding for the powers she incarnated and exercised as sovereign in a deeply patriarchal world. We have shown that there is far more at stake when the early-modern sovereign’s body-natural, and in particular the body of Elizabeth I, ceased to incorporate the body politic. In the authorized technology of anatomy there is a new integration of the body through a radical disintegration of the object of its fascination. Anatomy relies upon an interplay between artistic conventions and territorialization. In the imaginings of imperial portraiture, in the very act of claiming power, the ultimate fate of her body-natural is foreshadowed. In the act of embalming, the abstracted form of the sovereign’s body-natural is resubstantiated within a new dominant understanding of corporeality. In death, the sovereign’s body-natural is vulnerable, violable, and subject to the power and authority of ontological systems which in life that same sovereign sanctioned and empowered. The dissection of the Queen during the liminal period between death and interment and its connection to both mapping and anatomy undoes the supposed concomitant inviolability of the boundaries and borders of the state she worked so hard to embody.

The Theatre of the Body The foregoing example is one moment in the shift in abstraction for which I am arguing. The portrait, funereal, and dissection practices discussed thus far belong more to a traditional social formation than to the inchoate modern social formation which is beginning to emerge in both the representations used by and the practices of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons. We shall see that while some anatomical techniques remain the same others change, or change in quality as wider changes are taking place across the century. By the time Charles II was depicted in his funereal effigy rakishly standing as if in life,69 the last monarch to

68

See Yates; Axton; Phillippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989); and Linda Woodbridge, ‘Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33 (1991), 327–54. 69

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This remarkable effigy is on display at Westminster Abbey.

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be so commemorated for a funeral procession, the dominant quality of abstraction has changed. In the plays, legal records, and anatomical practices across the century there is a tension between older forms and the increasing individualization and abstraction of the body. As the abstraction of social relations intensifies, so does the possibility for individualization. This is not an immediately obvious point, but it is important. In a sense, what I have been calling the ‘drawing away’ from the immediacy of embodied presence or the ‘lifting out’ of social relations allows for persons to experience themselves as differentiated. In turn, individualization is associated with a greater objectification and subjectification of persons — a process aided by and imbricated within the shifts in anatomization, and/or the increasing popularity of anatomy to define the human body. What is being suggested here is that the processes and practices of anatomy increasingly support the construction of persons as individuals and vice versa. The public and private perception of anatomizing dead persons moves from being unremarkable to violently contentious. The public relation to the gallows and those who end their lives there shifts from the condemnation of archetypal criminals to the individualization of both the criminal and the crime. The stage undergoes radical changes both in the kinds of theatres used and the conditions of playing, not least of which involves the introduction of actresses after 1660. Taking the example of Elizabeth I’s body-natural as our starting point we will now move on to follow the gradual mutation of practices and events as already described, adding to them the dramatic representation of embodiment in the playhouses of London and the recording of legal narratives to trace the shifting nature of abstraction of the human body across the seventeenth century. To reiterate, we begin with a sovereign’s body-natural. It is crucial to stress that this book is not concerned with the metaphoric body politic. Rather, it is firmly focused on the material body-natural. We began with an outlining of the argument that the abstraction of embodiment is part of a wider complex of abstraction that operates at multiple levels within and across social formations. Bodily subjectivity is experienced differently across history, across social formations, and across cultures. As the dominance of a social formation shifts over time, so the quality and understanding of embodiment shifts in turn, though this never happens evenly or uniformly. Through the close reading of the shifting representation of the human body in three authorized sites of knowledge production in seventeenth-century London — the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre, the public playhouses, and Newgate and the Old Bailey — we can follow the progress of those shifts. We can also see evidence of how the body has been viewed within a given culture and how those views correspond with a movement from the dominance of the traditional to the

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modern. We are looking at the emergence of an ontology of which our dominant medicalized embodiment is a palimpsest. Across the book, this is done in three stages in three corresponding parts that address early-, mid- and late-seventeenth-century representations. The first chapters of each part (Chapters 1, 4, and 6) are intended to provide an overview of practices. The subsequent chapters give more explicit examples of the workings of anatomy at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, the playhouses, and the law courts in order to draw out the details that provide evidence of the shift in the abstraction of embodiment across the century.

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L AW , T HEATRE, AND M EDICINE IN THE E ARLY S EVENTEENTH C ENTURY

I

n the post-mortem examination of Elizabeth I and the felons subject to her sovereign laws we begin to see a clear nexus of legal and medical practices at the turn of seventeenth century. This ‘concatenation of events’ took place in a very particular context that has wider implications and ramifications for the generality of each of these practices. Each of these ontological grounds, in Bourdieu’s terms, constitutes a field of practice,1 to which we shall add a third, the public playhouses. In these fields various agents have varying degrees of expertise — that is differing capacities to comprehend and make best use of the knowledge system in question. A playgoer who did not understand the structural meaning of a soliloquy would have found much of Hamlet a mystery. Conversely, an Elizabethan or Jacobean audience’s greater reliance on the spoken word and knowledge of current events would have made parts of it readily accessible that are obscure to a theatregoer today. As we have seen in relation to the anatomy theatre, the bodies of the least of Elizabeth’s subjects were prey to being opened and examined by the same people who attended to the Queen’s body-natural, in life and death. Those sovereign subjects, convicted felons, had passed through the Old Bailey Sessions House (subsequent to Newgate Prison) before their public dissection at Barber-Surgeons’ Hall. While references to the practice of dissection are limited in plays of the period the more general fact of criminality and bloody fates is standard fare for both the Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. It is to a more detailed contextualization of these spaces we now turn, and to which we shall 1

Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), and Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

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return at the beginning of each of the three parts of this book. These chapters will be used, to background the more explicit examples of their fellow-chapters. We shall begin by compassing the material conditions and the practical workings of the courts and gallows, the playhouses and the anatomy theatres of the period prior to the Civil War. Formal trial documents from the early part of the seventeenth century are scant. As Frances E. Dolan has shown, crimes and trials were more eloquently recorded in print narratives such as Henry Goodcole’s Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry than in the surviving Sessions Papers, the Gaol Deliveries, or the Depositions of Sessions Papers of the time.2 Dolan has also shown that capital crimes, then as now, were gendered insofar as the types of crimes and the differing consequences for the men and women who were convicted of them. However, our concern is less with tracing specific tales from this period than in examining what remains of those stories for how that sits in relation to a wider complex of abstraction. Our focus is on the meaning of change and changes in meaning, how and why understanding and ontologies have mutated over time. Specifically, the aim is to show a movement from the dominance of one ontological formation to another through shifts in the ways such stories are recorded and told, and how that relates to the implicit representations of embodiment. Here we take as our starting point the first decades of the seventeenth century, not as an originary moment but as one point in the progression through a slow and uneven shift in techniques and practices that reveal changes in the ways in which the human body has been abstracted. There are clear concordances between what I shall describe and what social historians like Dolan have said about sociopolitical discourses and tensions around embodied subjectivity between 1550 and 1700, and some equally clear differences. The spaces in which trials at the Old Bailey were judged and the anatomies performed at the Barber-Surgeons’ were both ‘theatres’ with performances in the sense that each took place in recognizably ritualized ceremonies that were performed in relatively public arena and relied on roles and patterns of behaviour which their audiences could ‘read’. In a manner similar to that by which our Hamlet playhouse audience understood the action taking place on that stage, the people in attendance at each of these venues had varying degrees of expertise in comprehending what went on before them. Each of these ‘theatres’ relied on a shared understanding of the elements of a public act, although the semiotics 2

Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

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appropriate to each also varied. As we have already noted, the early-seventeenthcentury trial records are extremely patchy for the City of London — the precinct from which the Barber-Surgeons specifically had the right to claim felons for dissection. By contrast there are ample play-texts to draw upon for the period and a wealth of scholarship around the conditions of theatrical production. Further, Jacobean drama is particularly well known for its preoccupation with bloody retribution, legal or otherwise. However, this is no simple equation of the real human suffering upon which the courts and the anatomy theatre relied with the productions at the Globe Theatre and its ilk, no matter how bloody or vengeful a play may have been. Francis Barker has rightly argued that ‘the difference between the aestheticisation of politics and the politicisation of aesthetics remains crucial’.3 Though connections are being drawn between the performance of anatomies in the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre, the trials at the Old Bailey, and the performance of plays in early-modern playhouses, serious reservations remain about arguments for a ‘theatricalisation of power’ under which ‘the scaffold of punishment becomes, or risks becoming, indeed aestheticised by identification with the scaffold of playing’. 4 Barker wrote specifically of Elizabethan and Jacobean London, but his point holds throughout this book. The execution and anatomization of the men and women legally murdered by the state, often for paltry crimes, is neither just a gripping spectacle nor merely another theatrical enactment of the power of the sovereign. Nor are the circumstances described here as pertaining to the abstraction of embodiment in the anatomy theatre and the playhouses simply matters of spectacle and performance. There have been changes in the construction and perception of meaning, in the abstraction of embodiment, in each of these spheres and this had and has concrete political outcomes. The mortal remains over which the Barber-Surgeons lectured with such ceremony had only hours before been living social beings. They had been arrested, imprisoned, and tried in a court of law. They had been convicted of a capital offence, sentenced to be hanged, and about two weeks after sentencing, executed. At the turn of the seventeenth century, capital crimes were numerous and, over the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, even more capital crimes were added to the statute books.5 In this context, it is not hard to comprehend 3

Francis Barker, The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 201. 4 5

Barker, The Culture of Violence, p. 200.

In 1603 there were 50 capital offences; when Blackstone was writing in the 1760s there were 160; and by 1820, around the time that reforms began to be made to the criminal laws,

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how so many people found themselves on the road heading west out of London to Tyburn gallows. Let us turn to examining in more detail the conditions governing such sad and awesome journeys, starting with the legal system.

Capital Crimes, their Constitution and Consequences To begin with one could be charged with a capital crime on the evidence of witnesses, as the result of a private prosecution, or, if one were implicated in a suspicious death, at the recommendation of the coroner.6 The accused was then arrested, by a sheriff, under-sheriff, or a bailiff, and imprisoned to await trial.7 Imprisonment was by and large a holding stage before trial and prior to punishment of whatever degree being exacted. The grounds for a capital conviction were numerous: high treason, petty treason, piracy, murder, arson, burglary, house-breaking and putting in fear, highway robbery, horse-stealing, stealing from a person above the value of a shilling, rape and abduction with intent to marry. In the cases of persons who could not read, all felonies, including manslaughter, every kind of theft above the value of a shilling and all robberies were capital crimes.8

Being accused of these crimes was not in itself a death sentence, of course. There was always the chance that one would be acquitted, have the charge commuted to a lesser crime with a less grievous penalty, or be pardoned. If not, while heinous crimes were sometimes punished close to where they were committed and state crimes often at the Tower of London, the most likely place for a felonious commoner to end his or her days was on the triangular gallows — the ‘Triple Tree’ — at Tyburn.9 there were over 200. However, the numbers of executions decreased in inverse proportion with increased transportation as an alternative in the eighteenth century. See Jonathan Briggs, Christopher Harrison, Angus McInnes, and David Vincent, Crime and Punishment in England (London: University College London Press, 1996), p. 73, and John Laurence, A History of Capital Punishment (London: Sampson Low, 1932; repr. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1971), pp. 13–14. 6

Briggs, p. 26.

7

Briggs, p. 50.

8

Sir Leon Radzinowicz, A History of Criminal Law in England and Its Administration from 1750, I: The Movement for Reform (London: Stevens, 1948), p. 140. 9

The gallows at Tyburn consisted of three cross-beams supported by three legs and was capable of accommodating the hanging of eight bodies across each beam: twenty-four in all. It was

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The most heinous crime, high treason, encompassed not only offences against the sovereign’s person, but also included false coining, which was considered to be a deceit practised against the sovereign.10 Petty treason was the murder of a ‘superior’ by an ‘inferior’, for instance the killing of a master by a servant, or a husband by a wife. Petty treason could not be commuted to a charge lower than murder; therefore conviction meant mandatory capital punishment. When a woman was found guilty of high or petty treason this meant burning at the stake. By way of comparison, although a man convicted of high treason was likely to be drawn and quartered, a husband who killed his wife would have been charged with murder, which it was possible to commute to manslaughter, which was in turn an offence subject to further pleas for clemency and far less likely to result in a sentence of capital punishment.11 Some of these capital crimes impacted upon women specifically. By 1623 the charge of murder included infanticide. This charge was predicated on a woman being supposed to have concealed the birth of her infant, that is, the birth was unwitnessed by a midwife or some other help-meet.12 Women who miscarried in the second or third trimester or gave birth to stillborn infants were often accused and sometimes convicted of this crime, as we shall see in Chapter 5. The burden of proof in a case of rape also rested heavily upon the woman.13 The victim had to prove she was unwilling in the act.14 In an age when many believed that orgasm was necessary to achieve conception, lack of conception was supporting evidence of nonconsensual intercourse. However, conception implied orgasm; hence if a woman was found to be pregnant after the fact, or even if it was believed that she had had ‘pleasure’ by the act, then the evidence weighed in the rapist’s favour. Even minors bore this burden of proof.15

known by various names, Tyburn Tree, Triple Tree, Tyburn Cross, and the Three-Legged Mare being the most famous. 10

Radzinowicz, pp. 652–53. In a time when minting was not an exactly standardized practice, it was possible for people to clip the edges off a legally minted coin and melt down the clippings, either to be made into a forged coin or to be sold for its value as a precious metal. 11

Radzinowicz, pp. 628–29.

12

Radzinowicz, p. 629.

13

Laura Gowing, ‘Language, Power and the Law: Women’s Slander Litigation in Early Modern London’, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, ed. by Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: University College London Press, 1994), pp. 26–47 (p. 37) 14 15

Radzinowicz, pp. 631–32.

There are several Sessions Papers later in the century which deal with cases of the rape of a young girl and the attempts of her friends and relatives to secure a conviction. See A True

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Many capital offences could be commuted to lesser charges and frequently were. Murder could be reduced to manslaughter, or the value of goods from a theft could be compassionately revalued at below a shilling.16 If one was charged and found guilty of a lesser offence, theoretically one could then plead ‘benefit of clergy’, although there was a drawback to this option to which Radzinowicz’s allusion to literacy quoted above refers. One had to be able to read the ‘neck verse’, the first verse of Psalm 51 from the Vulgate Bible: ‘Miserere mei, Deus: “Have mercy on me, O God.”’ This required literacy in an era when such rates were increasing but were still very low. Even if Watt is right and it should have been possible to learn this verse by heart, one would have to have had a prior knowledge of the customs of the court and to assume that every illiterate person who might appear in the dock was familiar with judicial procedure is not only arrogant it assumes a criminal ‘class’.17 If one succeeded in the plea, however, the consequences were light in comparison with the fatal alternative. The thumb of the felon was branded with an M for the charge of murder and a T for any other felony, and in practice one was then freed.18 The branding was an expedient to enable detection of a repeat offender so that the full force of the court could be dealt for a second offence: one was only allowed to enter this plea once. It appears that judges were generally lenient with respect to this plea and it has been estimated that up to 20 per cent of such pleas succeeded.19 However, women did not have any recourse to this plea until 1623, and it was not fully available to them until 1693,20 at a time when a woman still had a far

Account of the Proceedings at the General Sessions of the Peace, holden for London and Middlesex, Upon the 15 and 16 of January Instant (London: [n. pub.], 1674) and A Full and True relation of two very remarkable tryals at the quarter-sessions of the peace for the city and liberty of Westminster held in the great hall, on Monday the third of October, and ending the eleventh of the same (London: W. H. & T. F., 1680). 16

Beattie, p. 183 n. 92. See also, Briggs, p. 75.

17

Francis Watt, The Law’s Lumber Room (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1896): ‘surely it were easy to get these words by heart and to repeat them at the proper time? This must have been done in many cases, and yet sometimes criminals were so densely ignorant and stupid, or it might be merely bewildered, that they failed; then the wretch paid the penalty of his life’ (pp. 4–5). 18

J. S. Cockburn, A History of the English Assizes: 1558–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 128. Ben Jonson, as is well known, successfully made this plea when he was found guilty of the murder of Gabriel Spencer.

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19

Cockburn, English Assizes, pp. 128–29.

20

Cockburn, English Assizes, p. 129.

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poorer chance of being literate than a man. As Radzinowicz notes, if one couldn’t read, pleading benefit of clergy was not an available means of avoiding the consequences of conviction for a capital offence. The plea of ‘benefit of belly’ was, on the other hand, exclusive to women. In order to claim this respite from execution on the basis of pregnancy one had to undergo an examination by a panel of matrons (midwives) to prove or disprove the claim that one was quick with child. The logic seems to have been that it was improper to execute the unborn child for the crimes of its mother. It was an effective gambit if proved, for it seems that most convicted women who were allowed this benefit were not subsequently executed after they had delivered.21 If, however, the plea was rejected, one was sent to the gallows. There were two more possible ways of avoiding execution, acquittal, or pardon. If one reads the proceedings of the Sessions at the Old Bailey, which were printed towards the end of the seventeenth century, one can see that although an appalling number of people were executed, sometimes for ridiculously minor offences against property, a great number of the accused were acquitted; others had the charges laid against them commuted and suffered corporal punishment instead; many successfully plead benefit of ‘clergy’ or ‘belly’ against their conviction; and, many were pardoned by the King’s mercy after being found guilty. However, for those who were unsuccessful in any of these gambits, the judgement of the court was swift and irrevocable.

The Old Bailey Throughout the seventeenth century the Sessions House of the Old Bailey, which abutted Newgate, Bridewell, and the Fleet prisons,22 was the central criminal court for both the London and Middlesex. The majority of those accused of a capital crime within the jurisdiction of the City of London and the increasingly suburban County of Middlesex were likely to find themselves imprisoned at Newgate and subsequently tried at the Old Bailey.23 There were other courts that dealt with specific jurisdictions of crime, for instance, the ecclesiastical courts

21

Briggs, p. 75.

22

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 75.

23

Noble prisoners, and those accused of high treason, were more likely to languish in the Tower of London until they were brought to trial, although not invariably so. See A. L. Rowse, The Tower of London in the History of the Nation (London: Sphere, 1974).

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adjudicated largely on sexual misdemeanours and other matters of morals.24 These courts could even impose a capital sentence in particular instances, but by and large the sentence of death was the prerogative of the sovereign’s law. The Sessions House, which was in commission from the time of Elizabeth I and through two-thirds of the period spanned by this book, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and a new Sessions House was built to replace it in 1673.25 From illustrations and descriptions we know that in structure the rebuilt court bore a superficial resemblance to the dramatic theatres of the Restoration period. It had raked and ranked seating for the judge and the juries, a holding pen in which to wait for the charges against one to be heard, and a direct confrontation between the central player (the accused) and his or her audience (the judge and jury). Those sitting in judgement were under a roofed area fronted by what looked remarkably like a proscenium arch,26 and they were further partitioned from the accused by the ‘bail dock’. This dock was a ‘low wall with short spikes affixed to the top, [which] marked the boundary between the yard’27 where the prisoners stood, and the area where those sitting in judgement were installed. The accused stood at the dock while conducting his or her defence.28 The holding yard in which the defendants waited for their turn at the dock was an open pen, unprotected from the elements. We shall return to this description in Part III. Little is known of the construction of the earlier Elizabethan Sessions House, but apparently it was rarely used and ‘the justices preferred to sit in the open air, in a garden near by, and take cover when it rained under a makeshift shelter’.29 The preference for open-air proceedings in both the early and the rebuilt court was apparently motivated by a desire to avoid any possibility of coming into contact with the deadly ‘gaol-fever’, epidemic typhus. This disease was popularly associated with the fetid odours of the gaols and was believed to attach to the 24

‘Ecclesiastical courts had three basic jurisdictions: (1) record, which dealt with the granting of marriage licences and the proving of wills; (2) instance, which dealt with disputes between parties and (3) office, which dealt with disciplinary matters. This third category produced most of the “criminal” cases.[…] The role of the church courts was primarily not to punish but to reform people, to reconcile them to God and their neighbours’ (Briggs, pp. 33–34). 25 See Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 76, for an engraving of this Sessions House. See also Donald Rumbelow, The Triple Tree: Newgate, Tyburn and the Old Bailey (London: Harrap, 1987).

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26

Linebaugh notes it is a ‘Doric portico’ (The London Hanged, p. 76).

27

Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 75.

28

Linebaugh, The London Hanged, pp. 75–76.

29

Rumbelow, pp. 67–68.

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stench of the prisoners. These fears were well founded, not because the prisoners were pungent but because of the unhygienic conditions which led to their malodour: ‘The body louse that carries typhus, thrived upon hosts who enjoyed neither bedclothes, running water nor toilet facilities’.30 We do know from reports of the trial in 1616 of Lady Frances Howard and Sir Robert Kerr over the death of Sir Thomas Overbury that scaffold seating was erected within Westminster Hall for those who attended.31 The earlier open-air assizes may have been organized in a similar manner to those held in the rebuilt Sessions House, but with scaffold seating and benches to accommodate the judge and the juries. There were in fact two juries at each Sessions at the Old Bailey for the judge to direct, one to represent the people of the City of London and one to represent the people of Middlesex.32 Unlike the Assizes — the circuit courts held at regular six-month intervals in the major centres around the country — the London Sessions were held roughly every six weeks throughout the seventeenth century.33 This meant that the accused went to trial quickly, generally spending little time in gaol, although individuals could be held over from one Sessions to another. Further, because there were no lawyers to argue points of law, and two juries to deliberate, the trials at the Sessions House were dealt with expeditiously.34 The Sessions were generally held over two or more days, and more than thirty cases could be tried in that short period.35 If one was not acquitted, pardoned, corporally punished, or from late in the seventeenth century transported, the conviction of a capital crime was swiftly followed by capital punishment. Because they were conducted more or less in the open air and in front of a sizeable gallery of fellow prisoners, court officers, and spectators, the proceedings which took place within the Sessions House at the Old Bailey were, like the 30

Peter Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate and His Account ’, in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. by James Cockburn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 253. 31

John Chamberlain, The Chamberlain Letters, ed. by Elizabeth McClure Thomson (New York: Capricorn, 1966), letter, 18 May 1616, p. 119. This seems to have been a relatively common way of seating large crowds. 32

John H. Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial before the Lawyers’, University of Chicago Law Review, 45 (1978), 263–316 (p. 274). 33

Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial’, p. 280 n. 53.

34

Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial’, p. 277–79.

35

Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial’, pp. 274–75. Langbein gives the random example of the cases heard at the Sessions House in December 1678 where thirty-two trials were deliberated upon, eleven by the London jury and the remaining twenty-one by the Middlesex jury. This is far from unusual.

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regular Assize Courts held across England, ‘more disorderly, more ramshackle, and less seemly than those obtaining in a modern court of law’. In 1634/35, Mary Spencer, ‘at her trial for witchcraft, complained that “the wind was so loud, and the throng so great, that she could not hear the evidence against her”’.36 Peter Linebaugh writes that the ‘scene as a whole has been compared to a “giant Punch and Judy show”’, but ‘it might just as well be compared to the amphitheatre of Greek tragedy.’37 Although Linebaugh writes about the conditions in the Sessions House as they obtained from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the evocation of noise, action, contestation, and pitiable scenes of condemnation which he describes sounds very similar to the description of Mary Spencer’s trial. Indeed, the description of the proceedings of the courts as a puppet show is an apt observation, for the accused was acting in an arena where he or she appeared to have some control, when in fact s/he had very limited agency. Until the 1730s the accused at the dock had no legal counsel, that is, lawyers did not act as defence counsel. The defendant had to act on his or her own behalf, calling any witnesses from the bail dock.38 What legal assistance or direction the defendant received came from the judge, who also had the right to direct the jury as he saw fit, either to convict or acquit. Judges were not always impartial in this respect, with variable effect.39 And as Charles Carlton has asserted, ‘In a very real sense confessions were pieces of public theater, which to be effective required the cooperation of all involved — the people as the audience, the traitor in the leading role, and the state as the director’.40 So, like an actor playing a part, confessing to a crime whether in the dock or at the gallows — the stories through which one presents, represents, or patterns one’s behaviour, in an attempt to pacify an external authority — entailed a process of abstracting a pattern that accorded with contemporary protocol. We shall see in more detail in later chapters, it is a limited sense in which 36 J. A. Sharpe, ‘Women, Witchcraft and the Legal Process’, in Women, Crime and the Courts (see n. 13, above), pp. 106–24 (p. 113). 37

Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 75. Linebaugh also quotes a contemporary (1732) description of the open yard area , pp. 86–87, which bears a striking resemblance to descriptions of the antics of the groundlings such as those Ben Jonson complains of in the Induction to Bartholomew Fair (1614). 38

Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial’, pp. 282–83, 311.

39

Langbein, ‘The Criminal Trial’, pp. 284, 289–90. It appears sometimes this worked in the defendant’s favour, with judges overruling a jury’s desire to convict, but at other times it did not, with some judges unduly influencing a jury to convict. 40

Charles Carlton, ‘The Rhetoric of Death: Scaffold Confessions in Early Modern England’, Southern Speech Communication Journal, 49 (1983), 69.

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criminals became players in their public appearances, were lifted out of everyday life, and were able to present an abstracted projection of their deeds to the audience in attendance at their trials and executions.

The Playhouses The foregoing has given a basic sense of the physical structure as well as the basic logic of the courts. We shall now look to the material structures and the basic conditions of the spaces where that process was far more consciously carried out, in the public playhouses. In recent years the discovery of the foundations of earlymodern playhouses during excavations on the south bank of the Thames, the subsequent revisions to the theories on the construction of those playhouses, and the completion of the Globe Project has had some influence on scholarly debate on the practical realities of the theatres of early-seventeenth-century London. This has given rise to more detailed estimations of capacity audiences and physical conditions of attending performances, but even with these discoveries the structural history of the public playhouses and private theatres is sufficiently familiar that it requires less explanation than the workings of the law courts and the anatomy theatre. There are issues that become important, however, when one comes to compare the dramatic theatres with other structures, such as the Sessions House and the anatomy theatre used by the Barber-Surgeons in London. The physical structure of the wealth of new playhouses that were being constructed at the beginning of the seventeenth century varied depending on whether they were purpose built or adaptations within existing structures. Class-inclusive or admixed converted courtyards in inns and baiting houses, new ‘round’ public playhouses, and socially segregated private theatres dotted the landscape of London.41 One can make broad social distinctions between those who frequented each of these ‘circuses’, but attendance at one type of venue did not absolutely preclude attendance at others provided one had the price of admission.42 Just as in London today one person might be equally at ease at Wembley, a cinema, or 41

See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 14. Gurr has marked the theatres constructed between 1567 and 1629 on a reproduction of an early-modern map of London, making clear how dispersed, and how numerous, they were. 42

See Gurr, Chapter 3, for a discussion of the paucity of surviving evidence of playgoers and a comprehensive attempt to extrapolate what social and economic divisions may have operated between the private and public theatres.

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Covent Garden and another would choose to patronize only one or two of these venues, an individual theatre patron in the early seventeenth century might frequent all or only one of the correspondingly socioeconomically marked Red Bull, Globe, and Blackfriars. Importantly, there are several main features about the rationale behind the design of the playhouses that were common whether they were outdoor or indoor, public or private. Theatres were first and foremost venues at which the overweening imperative was to enable mass viewing of the action in performance, most of which took place on the stage, but they also functioned to allow the observation of the social ‘performances’ in the galleries and the pit. Auditory considerations work in tandem with this for an actor needs to be seen and heard: as does a judge or a physician reader. The construction of the theatres was centred, therefore, upon enabling the largest number of people to see the action in progress, with varying degrees of ease and comfort, dependent upon the size of a patron’s purse or choice of theatre. Similar considerations are implicit in the construction of courts and anatomy theatres. The Globe Project, while speculative in some of its construction and cloying to some in its sentimentality and tourist appeal, gives a concrete example of one idea of the physical experience of attending an early-modern theatre in London. If the reconstructed Globe even approaches the physical reality of the original Globe it suggests that with a capacity audience an afternoon at the playhouse would have been as crushed, noisome, and noisy as extant records suggest. It would also have offered a surprisingly good view of the stage; a more than adequate auditory experience; and, particularly when one considers the predominance of blacking in clothing of the period it would also have been blisteringly hot for the groundlings and those in the boxes on the eastern side on even a moderately sunny afternoon. Of the many playhouses that were built, destroyed, rebuilt, and demolished in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century the Globe, Swan, Fortune, and Blackfriars are four theatres or playhouses for which detailed records are either extant, or for which reasonable estimates of their dimensions still exist.43 Being pedantic about the physical dimensions may seem odd, but there is method in my madness. It lays the ground for making comparative estimates of the capacity audience at the Barber-Surgeons’ purpose-built anatomy theatre in Chapter 4. We

43

See The Revels History of Drama in English, III: 1576–1613, ed. by J. Leeds Barroll, Alexander Leggett, Richard Hosley, and Alvin Kernan (London: Methuen, 1975), pp. 119–235, and Gurr.

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will leave aside any description of the truly private coterie theatres and confine the discussion to what is known of these four structures as our object is defining what is most common and most public. Our larger concern is the possible effects of the representations produced and presented for a massed audience, in preference to those which an elite may have tacitly sanctioned.44 The Globe and the Swan were round (polygonal) open-air public theatres. The Globe measured approximately 100 feet in diameter externally and 70 feet internally,45 and was approximately 33 feet tall at the eaves.46 The Swan had an estimated external diameter of 96 feet, an internal diameter of 71 feet, was approximately 33 feet 6 inches tall at the eaves, and 42 feet 6 inches tall at the pitch of the roof.47 The Swan would have had an audience capacity of close to 3000 people,48 and given the similarity in their dimensions, the Globe must have held a similar number. It is generally agreed that these public playhouses were open to the broadest cross-section of society. In a population of around 160,000 at the turn of the seventeenth century, approximations have been made from Henslowe’s records calculating that around 15,000 people attended the theatre in a week, suggesting that up to 13 per cent of that population attended the theatre.49 That would not necessarily be a static population — it is unlikely that exactly the same 15,000 patrons were attending regularly, for people move and tastes shift. There were boxes or lord’s rooms only affordable to the wealthier of the city merchants and the nobility at a price of sixpence; there were the galleries for those of middling income at a cost of tuppence or more; and there was the open pit for the price of one penny. 50 If an average workman received around 84 pence per week in salary while not cheap at a cost of one-third of the cheapest meal available, entry to the playhouses was also not prohibitively expensive — as long as you were in work.51 The fact that the pit was cheap does not mean, however, that those who could afford to pay higher prices chose to do so. 44

I would see these performances as being analogous to the ‘coterie’ anatomies at the Physi-

cians. 45

Gurr, p. 19.

46

Barroll, p. 176–78.

47

Barroll, p. 176.

48

Barroll, p. 143, and Gurr, pp. 21–22. Gurr cites contemporary evidence for these figures, De Witt for the Swan’s capacity and the Spanish Ambassador for the Globe’s.

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49

Barroll, p. 48.

50

Barroll, p. 123; Gurr, p. 26.

51

Barroll, p. 49.

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In contrast, the private theatres were by their admission prices relatively exclusive, with the cheapest seat in the farthest gallery at the Blackfriars costing sixpence, a seat on a bench in the pit one shilling and sixpence, and a box virtually on the stage fetching half a crown (2s./6d.). With artificial lighting making mass viewing a more difficult proposition, it makes sense that the pricing system in relation to one’s distance from the stage should be reversed from that found in the public theatres. The construction of the Blackfriars was also constrained by the shape of the existing building in which it was constructed, that is it was rectangular. The inner dimensions of this theatre were approximately 66 feet by 46 feet, and it had an estimated capacity of only 600 to 700 people, which must also have been a factor in the higher prices asked for admission.52 In both the public and the private theatres described, people were stratified in their physical relation to the stage by their ability to pay, which was also a fair indication of their social rank, although, as I have said with regard to the open playhouses, relatively rich people may have chosen to ‘slum it’ in the cheaper seats. In both theatres, the audiences’ gaze was directed towards the action on the stage, or that close to it in the boxes and lord’s rooms. In both a certain measure of attentive behaviour was hoped for if numerous playwrights’ prefaces give any indication. But by the same evidence it was also frequently lacking with the members of the audience taking an active part in voicing their approval or disapproval of what was put before them. People went to the public and private theatres to see and be seen. The Barber-Surgeons went to their theatre to see and to learn a fundamental aspect of their trade. In the ceremonial way in which these anatomies were performed, the participants, especially the cadaver, were there to be seen. Anatomies also functioned as self-legitimating spectacles by which the company asserted and reinforced its position as the ontological ‘owners’ of the anatomical object.

Material Conditions of the Anatomy Theatre We have already seen that there are obvious parallels in the structural dynamics of the law court and a playhouse. Both have a common influence in the necessary architectural principles to draw attention to a central spectacle from an audience. We have also seen that the concordances between the playhouses and the anatomy theatre are more striking for the more explicit concentration on the body on

52

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‘centre stage’. This extends not only to the construction of the dramatic theatres in London up to their closure prior to the Civil War and Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre, built for the Barber-Surgeons of London, but also to the similarities between their respective audiences. There are other significant links which I believe exist between the playhouses of early-seventeenth-century London and that city’s most active site of anatomical pedagogy. There were two known anatomy theatres in London at the turn of the seventeenth century, one at the College of Physicians and the other at the Hall of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons. There are, according to William Brockbank, no records of the type of construction which the Physicians ordered to be built in March 1583/84,53 but it seems unlikely that it was the kind of permanent, purpose-built anatomical theatre that was erected in Padua in 1594 and which became the model for Europe and the later anatomy theatre designed by Inigo Jones for the Barber-Surgeons. Considering the relative paucity of the membership of the college,54 and their lack of diligence in attending lectures at the turn of the seventeenth century even in this new edifice, it was probably a room that could accommodate a dissecting table and perhaps some scaffolding from which the fellows of the college could observe. Permanent, purpose-built anatomy theatres were not erected across Europe until the crush of numbers of those attending warranted the expense. In Holland before the construction of the Leiden (1597) and Amsterdam (1639) anatomy theatres, wooden scaffolding was sometimes set up to form an amphitheatre within church buildings.55 In Italy in 1493 Alexander Benedetti advised building well-ventilated temporary theatres for anatomies, with ranked seating (both literally and hierarchically), arranged in such a way that

53 Brockbank, ‘Old Anatomical Theatres and What Took Place Therein’, Medical History, 12 (1968), 371–84: ‘There was an anatomical theatre in the second college building. No details have come down to us, except that it was redecorated in 1641’ (p. 380). Sir George Clark, A History of the Royal College of Physicians, vols I– III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964): ‘In March 1583/4 [the college] decided, apparently enlarging its plans to build a suitably capacious theatre, with a cathedra, for dissections’ (I, 150). 54

Margaret Pelling and Charles Webster, ‘Medical Practitioners’, in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 165–235 (p. 188), estimate that at any one time between 1580 and 1600 there were 30 fellows and 20 candidates or licentiates in the College of Physicians, and 100 freemen or licentiates in the Company of Barber-Surgeons. N.B. these figures do not include barber-surgical apprentices. 55

William S. Heckscher, Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr Nicolaas Tulp: An Iconological Study (New York: New York University Press, 1958), pp. 30–31.

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the anatomist had room to move.56 The famous Vesalian frontispiece seems to show just such a structure within what Sawday has described as a basilica.57 Park, Schultz, and Ferrari58 each note that as medical anatomies became more entrenched as part of the university syllabus in Italy, demand for seating at public anatomies grew: Jacopo Berengario da Carpi claimed to have demonstrated the placenta of a hanged woman to ‘almost five hundred students at the university of Bologna, together with many citizens.’ These larger audiences could no longer be accommodated in private houses but required more spacious quarters: temporary structures of seats and risers set up in the interiors of churches, for example, and later in the sixteenth century, permanent anatomy theatres.59

Realdo Colombo’s De re anatomica (Venice, 1559) ‘names dozens of prelates and princes who crowded demonstrations’.60 Representations of these theatres as found in frontispieces and broadsides show them to be crowded sites of explication and disputation. One of the most striking impressions one gains from an initial observation of the plans of Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre for the Company of Barber-Surgeons, and from the written descriptions of the temporary scaffold theatres which preceded it, is the similarity between the rationale behind their design and the playhouses being discussed here. The inspiration for their architecture came from a common source — both were designed under the influence of classical and neoclassical architectural principles (Fig. 2). They had areas equivalent to the orchestra or auditorium, the proscaenium, and the arena in their theatra (Fig. 3).61 Raked seating around the margins of each building surrounded a raised central area upon which a formalized scene was enacted on the bodies of subjects scrutinized and specularized by an audience prepared to be confronted by gore, whether animal or human, particularly in the Jacobean period (Fig. 4). Further, like other 56 Brockbank, p. 372; Giovanna Ferrari, ‘Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), 61. 57

Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, pp. 69–70.

58

Katharine Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body: Autopsy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy’, Renaissance Quarterly, 47 (1994), 1–33 (pp. 14–15); Bernard Schultz, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985); Ferrari, pp. 61–66. 59

Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, p. 15.

60

Alpheus Hyatt-Mayor, Artists and Anatomists (New York: Artist’s Limited Edition, 1984), p. 68. Michelangelo was to have illustrated this book but died before he could do so. 61

The use of such terms in De Witt’s sketch of the Swan suggests that these connections were recognized by at least a section of the audience.

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centres of ontological power they facilitated the definition of the identity of those at the margins. Ironically, albeit necessarily, unlike the majority of the contemporary dramas, the anatomy theatres’ passion plays adhered strictly to the Aristotelian principles of unity of time, place, and action in their tragedies. We will return to the workings of Jones’s theatre in more detail in Part II, for while it was opened in 1638 with Charles I in attendance it did not become the main anatomy theatre almost until the Civil War. Temporary scaffold anatomy theatres like the early theatre at the Barber-Surgeons’ were the norm throughout Europe until the end of the sixteenth century. Regular public anatomies, performed on the bodies of felons, were initially held in the Common Hall of the company, with scaffolding being erected for the accommodation of the crowd of spectators which was afterwards dismantled and stored.62 The court records of the company give an early case of the specifications for such a structure: 1st February, 1568. Also yt ys ordayned and agreed by this Courte That there shalbe buyldyngs don and made aboute the hall for Seates for the Companye that cometh unto every publyque anathomy, ffor by cawse that every p rsone comyng to se the same maye have good prspect over the same and that one sholde not cover the syght thereof one frome another as here to fore the Company have much cõplayned on the same.[…] And also ther shalbe pyllers and Rods of Iron made to beare and drawe Courteynes upon & aboute the frame where w th in the Anathomy doth lye and is wrought upon, for bycawse that no prsone or p rsones shall beholde the desections or incysyngs of the body, but that all maye be made cleane and covered w th fayer clothes untyll the Docter shall com and take his place to reade and declare upon the partes desected.63

The theatrical implications of this structure, and the participants and properties appertaining to it, are clear, as are the concordances with descriptions of the Elizabethan Sessions House. The scaffolding and seats were arranged to allow the optimum view for the audience, at their request, for many had complained about the inability to observe clearly heretofore. They were at once invited to gaze into the body, and regulated into taking up that position. Once seated their line of sight was drawn, but not restricted, to what was placed in the centre of their field of vision. 62

Young, p. 315. There is a further account for the payment of carpenters for erecting scaffolding in 1603: ‘Itm paid to the Carpinter for settinge up the Scaffolds of the Anothomy & for mendinge of the same — xxxvijs iiijd’ (Young, p. 388). This seems to imply that they were erected and dismantled as needed. 63 Young, p. 315. There is also a request that it be made from reused timbers from the scaffolding erected for the company’s attendance at coronations and the pageants of visiting peers. The sense of ceremony implicit in these orders is discussed below.

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Fig. 2: Inigo Jones, The Designs of the Chirurgians Theatre (Exterior plans), Oxford, W orcester College Library. 1636. Reproduced with the permission of Worcester College Library.

Fig. 3: Inigo Jones, The Designs of the Chirurgians Theatre (Interior plans), Oxford, W orcester College Library. 1636. Reproduced with the permission of W orcester College Library.

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Fig. 4: Isaac W are, Interior cross-section of Inigo Jones’s Anatomy Theatre, Oxford, Bodleian Library, from Designs of Inigo Jones and others, publ. by Isaac W are (London, c. 1757), in fol. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

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Even the beams that were ordered for this function had been recycled from the stands which were originally ‘the olde standyng wch did srve for the company of the clothing at coronacions or any noble pere his comyng throughe the cytie oute of any fforeyns Cõntrey or lande’.64 Logically, these timbers could have been used to view at least three coronations — in 1547 (Edward VI), 1553 (Mary Tudor), and 1558 (Elizabeth I) — and as many or more royal funerals. It is an ironic fate for timbers which had served to enable the repeated viewing of the spectacle of the coronation of successive sovereigns and their respective funerary processions, that they be used to support a quarterly bloody spectacle authorized by the sovereign. The assembled company filed into these scaffold seats to witness the exercising of this right and like the audience of the seventeenth-century public theatres, their proximity to the ‘stage’ was determined by professional and/or monetary standing. In either theatre a high financial and/or social standing ensured the best view. In Holland and Italy people paid to attend anatomies, the seats closest to the anatomist being reserved for those of highest status who were also those able to pay for the costlier tickets.65 The cost of the anatomies at the hall in London was borne by the company from their general funds, but one’s position within the company still regulated one’s position within the stands. In a situation analogous to the people in the galleries at the Blackfriars, or the pit of the Globe gazing on the shoes or up the legs of the actors, apprentices and plebeian visitors were not afforded the optimum view. They were relegated to the stands furthest from the corpse and, like the spectators throwing apple cores onto the stage from the pit of the Globe they could be unruly and call out during the proceedings. The more powerful members of the company, like those who took boxes or lord’s rooms or sat on the stage in the private theatres, sat closest to the corpse and those who acted upon it. This is paradoxical considering that the lectures were being given, at least in part, for the instruction of the apprentices. Those in greater need of edification were denied it in favour of those who could pay to reinforce the knowledge they presumably already possessed — and reinforce their dominance within the company. There was also a small cast of actors who played out their allotted parts included in this document. The physician reader, like Prospero, directed the action of the performance by appealing to the power of the words and pictures in his books. The protagonist’s attendants, the barber-surgical stewards, provided the ‘business’. Like Ariel ensuring the safe confinement of Ferdinand and Miranda in the discovery space until the moment appropriate for

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64

Young, p. 315.

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See Heckscher, pp. 42–43, for Holland; and Ferrari, pp. 82–84, for Italy.

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their disclosure the stewards took care to prepare the body and keep it behind a curtain, or later a pall, until the reader was ready to enter and read upon it. The working of this theatre not only borrowed its layout from the dramatic theatre, but it also used analogous spectacular devices to impress its audience. In this theatre, however, Ferdinand’s death was not a ruse. The corpse of the executed criminal was eviscerated, flayed, and the flesh systematically dissected from the bones. This process, like the most successful early-seventeenth-century plays, took place over a three-day run. These provisions for the anatomy only obtained for the quarterly public occasions. Private anatomies were also held at the hall66 but only on application to the masters, and by subscription, that is by covering the cost of acquiring the body from the hangman or relatives and ensuring its proper disposal.67 There was no restriction on the number of private anatomies that could be held once the company granted permission nor on those who attended them; these performances were contingent only on the ability to procure a corpse either from the gallows or as a post-mortem. They also seem to have been restricted to ‘apartments’ other than the public anatomy theatre.68 The elaborate form required of the public anatomies would not have been as pressing, however, and the numbers in the audience would have been restricted by the smaller space. By contrast the public anatomies appear to fit with the frontispiece illustrations of Vesalius and other anatomical texts, reflecting the recommendations for and expectations of animated proceedings, with raked seating, and hierarchically ordered participants. As Ferrari rightly points out, the use of ancient theatrical designs may have been based on practical considerations, much as the design of dramatic theatres was, but this does not refute the very real connections between the conceits of the anatomical theatres and the dramatic theatres. If anything it strengthens the connections.69

66

Young, pp. 119–20, 180, 331. There are, however, repeated records of members being fined for performing private anatomies out of the hall. See Young, pp. 274, 319. 67

On 11 January 1648 the court allowed four ‘Chirurgeons of the Cloathing of this Company’ to acquire and dissect a malefactor, as long as it was at their own cost, and properly conducted; see Young, p. 372. There are other similar instances. 68

Young, p. 334, 20 October 1631: the cause of the annoyance to the kitchen cited below in Chapter 4 was specifically attributed to the lack of a proper room for private anatomies. At this time it was ordered that ‘a faire and convenient roome built over the greate staire case next the back yard to be employed onely for dissection of private Anathomyes to the value of xlli’. 69

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Anatomical Performance The processes of the anatomy theatre were as coded as either of our two prior examples from the law courts and the playhouses, and constituted a parallel field in which different agents had varying levels of expertise. As we saw briefly in the introduction, the participants in the anatomy theatre of the Barber-Surgeons wore costumes that were hierarchically differentiated to emphasize the demarcation between the body acted upon, the barber-surgical performers, and the masters and apprentices. A set procedure was followed in the lectures, given in an order predetermined by the natural process of decay of the body. The supposedly passive authority of the body was therefore not entirely passive. The Barber-Surgeons’ authority did not enable them to resist the corruption of the flesh; the body regulated the proceedings insofar as in the early-seventeenth-century putrefaction could not successfully be arrested without causing severe damage to the tissues.70 For that very reason the public anatomies held on the Continent in the early scaffolding theatres, and later in the purpose built theatres, were usually held in the winter months.71 This prevented the body from becoming too noisome over the three days proceedings of the visceral, muscular, and osteological lectures.72 Public anatomies at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall followed the same pattern of three days of lectures, but they were held up to four times a year.73 They would seem to have fallen quarterly, not strictly in the winter months, which may have been in order to fit in with the availability of bodies from the Sessions House. However, there were occasions when private anatomies took place at other times of the year, and there were times when individuals anatomized bodies elsewhere than at the hall.74 70

However, see Loedwijk de Bils, The Coppy of a certain Large Act (Obligatory) […] Touching the Skill of a better way of Anatomy of Mans Body, trans. by John Pell (London: [n. pub.], 1659) for a revolutionary claim to a way of preserving cadavers. 71

See Ferrari, pp. 64–66; Heckscher, chap. 5. Paradoxically, this is the time when the public playhouses in London, like the Globe, closed. 72 Young, pp. 342–43, gives accounts for a public anatomy which took place between Michaelmas (29 September) and Christmas, 1646, that is in autumn. There is also at least one instance of a body being anatomized in early summer, 22 June 1698 (p. 345). And when they anatomized Canonbury Besse that would have taken place in spring, on or very shortly after 17 April 1635, the date of her execution. If she was the subject of the public anatomy that year she would have been anatomized in the hall, but she may have been anatomized privately in one of the smaller apartments, or even in Arris’s own quarters. 73 74

Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 39; Young, p. 362.

John Deane had an anatomy at his house and was fined ten pounds on 21 May 1573; Thomas Gillam was fined five pounds in 1614 for the same offence; see Young, p. 317 and

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The public anatomies at the hall were ceremonial occasions, with regulations setting out the proper accoutrements for the members of the company, and for the linen to be afforded the reader, the surgeon, and his stewards. As the construction of the anatomical theatre ensured the regulation of the bodies that entered it, so too did the carefully regulated anatomical performances which took place in it. Costume, properties, and setting were manipulated to effect and enhance the pedagogical intent. All the participants were coded by their physical disposition and their apparel. The minute which codifies these conditions bears quoting at length: 5th March 1555 […] That they whiche be appointed for the Anathomye for the yere next following and must sarve the Docter and be about the bodye he shall se and provyde that there be every yere, a matte about the harthe in the hall that the M r Docter made not take colde upon his feate, nor other gentelmen that do come and marke the Anathomye to learne knowledge And further that there be ij fyne white rodds appointed for the Docter to touche the body where it shall please him and a waxe candell to loke into the bodye and that there be alwayes for the Docter two aprons to be from the sholder downewarde and two peyr of Sleaves for his hole arme w t tapes for chaunge for the sayed doctor and not to occupye one Aporne and one payer of Sleves every daye w ch ys unseamly. And the M rs of the Anathomye y t be about the bodye to have lyke aprons and sleves every daye bothe white and cleane. Yf yt the M r of the Anathomye y t be about the Docter doo not see theise things ordered and that their knyves probes and other instrumets be fayer and cleane accordinglye w th Aprons and sleves, if they doo lacke any of the said things afore rehersed he shall forfayte for a fyne to the hall xls.75

Although this dictum comes from very early in the company’s anatomical history, there is good reason to believe that it was observed for many decades to come. The 1581 portrait of John Banister’s anatomy discussed in the introduction to the present volume shows that this form of dress was still in use thirty years after it was codified. The title pages of Crooke’s Microcosmographia (London, 1630) (Fig. 5) and of Alexander Read’s The manuall of the anatomy or dissection of the body of man which usually are shewed in the publike anatomical exercises (London, 1638), discussed in detail in Chapter 2 (see Fig. 7), also depict ceremonially dressed groups of men in attendance at anatomies in books specifically intended to be used by the company. From the terms of this minute, the partitioning of anatomical actor from appreciative audience is clear. The actors — the reader, master, and stewards — are not only centrally located within the theatre, but their position is also marked p. 331. See also the appendix, below, for a comprehensive list of the dates of the burial of anatomies. 75

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out by the ‘matte’ upon which they stand. The final character, the corpse, is laid in front of them on a table for the ‘business’ of the performance to be enacted upon it. The white rods at once give the reader the power to point out and describe the parts of the body under discussion, but they also allow him to maintain a distance between himself and the criminal body. Further, the costumes ordered for the actors in this bloody production ensure not only their cleanliness, but also distinguish them as agents with agreed positions and roles within the action. The players are thus in the theatre by virtue of their roles, rather than simply in the capacity of this or that person. In 1635, for example, it was thought necessary to restate the need for proper dress at the anatomies, and a ‘return’ to a dignified course of proceedings: Alsoe this Court takeing notice that in theis latter yeares there hath bene a generall remissnes in the greater p rt of the Surgians of this Companie in their not appearance and personall attendance in their Seates on the Scaffoldings at the Six lecture tymes at the publique Anatomye, and the disorderlynes of those Surgians y t doe appeare for wanting their outward ornament commixing themselves confusedly amongst the Comon people then p rnte whereby the hono r and worthynes of this Companie on the Surgians p rte hath bene much eclipsed.[…] It is now decreed that for ever hereafter at the tymes of publiqe Lecture readings on the Sceletons and Anatomies in this Comon Hall […] every Surgian either of the Assistants or of the Liverye shall appear in his gowne in the foenone and the afternoone of one daye at the least of the 3 dayes lectures at every publiqe discection […] and every one of those Surgians during the tyme of such lecture shall sit decently in such place in the Scaffoldings as is appropriated to every of them in their degrees and Rancks as aunciently hath bene accustomed [upon pain of fines and that the same be done by the commonality and the foreign brothers under the same threat].76

From Pepys comment of his visit to the hall in 1662/63, dealt with at length in Chapter 5, we also know that there was at that time a tradition of processing into the anatomy theatres: ‘we were led into the Theatre; and by and by comes the reader, Dr Tearne, with the Master and Company, in a very handsome manner.’77 Vesalius also waited until his audience was seated before arriving.78 Both these theatres, separated by over a hundred years and half a continent, seem to have employed leads who knew how to make the most of an entrance (and there is also an obvious liturgical precedent).

76

Young, p. 335.

77

Quoted in Young, p. 373.

78

K. B. Roberts and J. D. W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 130. They quote a contemporary observer, Baldesar Heseler, on this point.

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Fig. 5: Title-page, Sydney, Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP), from Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: Thomas and Richard Cotes, 1630), in folio. Engraving. Detail: anatomy lesson. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

This exhortation on the part of the company for a return to an earlier, more dignified form of proceedings, speaks of a desire to reinforce the demarcation between the audience and the performer already explicit in the costuming of this production. It also emphasizes the disciplinary nature of this pedagogical site. And it betrays the lack of dignity that seems to have characterized many of these performances. As was true of the crowds at the gallows, and in the dramatic theatres, audiences could be an unruly and unpredictable mob. We have already looked briefly at the order of proceedings in our reading of the Banister portrait. From the two court records quoted above we can give a more detailed account and something of the atmosphere of the public anatomies at the hall can be reconstructed. The reader, master, stewards, and the members of the company processed into the Common Hall, and later the theatre, which was already peopled by the cadaver and the audience of apprentices and nonmembers. The Barber-Surgeons were supposed to take their places in the scaffolding, starting with the seats closest to the body, receding back into the tiers according to their position within the company. The order of 1635 shows that it was not always the case that the more prestigious Barber-Surgeons commingled

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with the ‘Comon people’79 who were in sufficient numbers for the more highly ranked to become lost amongst them. A similar confusion of distinction could also be found in the dramatic theatres. Although the ‘lower’ orders in the playhouses could not afford an entry to much more than the pit, this did not stop people of higher status from commingling with them. Nor, in what we know of attendances at public hangings, was there any reluctance for people of all stations in life to intermix before the spectacle. This minute seems to express the same kind of anxiety about a motley and socially mixed crowd that Puritan critics voiced in their harangues against in the playhouses. The reader then began one of the six anatomical lectures which took place over three days, one each morning and one each afternoon, over the freshly prepared corpse, that is, a newly executed felon from Tyburn who had two weeks before stood in the dock at the Sessions House. The physician reader had his white rods with which to indicate parts of the body. The surgeon stewards had already prepared the body and performed any subsequent incisions or excisions. The form of procedure in this pedagogical exercise, and the demarcation of position within the anatomical performance, shaped the proceedings in a way designed to transmit the information to an audience, within the regulated frame of a preordained methodology. The audience knew to expect a visceral, a muscular, and an osteological display, each split into two lectures in a recognized programme. Much as the pedagogical imperative desired and called for a theatre populated by docile bodies, the fact that seemly behaviour in the theatre had to be appealed for speaks of resistance, of a lack of compliance. Each player in this bloody circus was supposed to wear a particular costume which distinguished them in their allotted role in this performance. Those who dealt with the body had linen aprons and sleeves which could be changed to avoid begriming their clothes with fluids and tissues. The barber-surgeons in the audience were supposed to wear caps, hats, and/or gowns which signified their position within the company. In the late sixteenth century, even the cadaver had a curtain, behind which it waited until the appropriate ‘discovery’ could be made on the entrance of the reader. By the time of the construction of the new theatre, it had an embroidered pall with which it was covered.80 This acted as both costume to the corpse and property to the other actors. In the galleries the ‘Comon people’ observed the spectacle enacted before them. Deviation from these prac79 This is probably a reference to members of the ‘Commonalty’ of the company rather than a common ‘rabble’, but they were of a distinctly lower status than the office bearers. 80

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tices attracted fines, which again at once suggests a failure to comply with, and an anxiety to ensure, strict adherence to this ritualistic regime. Regimens and monetary concerns extended beyond the regulation of behaviour in the theatres. The criminal body at the centre of the theatre was also the product of a series of controlled acts and financial transactions. There were regulations regarding the payment of beadles, who had to collect the bodies from Tyburn.81 Other payments included the cost of actually obtaining the body. In 1606 the burden of these costs led to the suspension of the anatomies for three years because of the poor state of the hall’s coffers.82 Anatomies were also suspended several times for reasons of plague, and in the year 1644 for fear that they would exacerbate civil unrest.83 They were generally well attended, however, and on the occasion of the opening of Inigo Jones’s new theatre in 1638, even ‘the Lords of his Maties most honoble privye Councell & others Spectato rs’ attended the three day’s lectures.84

Reflections Anatomical dissections were, and are, pedagogical displays. Despite my use of the metaphors of the theatre, I am not here suggesting that the pedagogical display can be understood in terms of acting and the proceedings of the anatomy theatre in terms of plays. Rather, I am emphasizing the performative purpose of the anatomies. Their purpose at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall was to teach barber-surgical apprentices, to remind those who had served their apprenticeship about the structure of the body, and to impress the lay observer with the wonder of God’s creation and a fear of his judgement, by displaying an opened corpse to the naked eye. Anatomical dissections were sites of ontologically rich bounding and performance in which both the body and the audience were subject to the abstracting power of the anatomy text as pronounced and enacted in this theatre of blood. The audience gazed upon the body, which was represented to them by and mediated through the word of classical textual authority, and declaimed by a 81

Young, pp. 299, 301, 382. From 1715 this was no easy matter, as there were many riots at Tyburn over the removal of bodies, and beadles often found themselves injured in the affray. It is often stated in articles and books, usually by citing Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riots against the Surgeons’, that riots accompanied the claiming of bodies from Tyburn as if this were always the case, but as I will show in later chapters, this was not so.

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82

Young, p. 327.

83

Young, p. 368.

84

Young, p. 367.

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lecturer; abstracted and reconstituted both through the text and in practice. When this classical scribal authority receded before the evidence of Vesalian anatomy, as Sawday argues, spectators were no longer limited to seeing what the written word told them to see, they were subjected to a new authoritative and increasingly dominant form of abstraction. Anatomical illustrations came to show the way to see. The body was framed, presented, and represented — abstracted in text, illustration, and the practice of anatomical dissection — in the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre. The audience who came to view the spectacle of the opened corpse was similarly lifted out and abstracted from their lived and learned experience of embodiment and taught to see themselves in a different way. The body was not only a reminder of the transience of the flesh; under the anatomical imperative it was also a mirror of the observer. As we shall see in the next chapter in a detailed discussion of anatomical illustrations in use at the company, the abstraction and reconstruction of the corpse reflected back upon the spectator in and through the texts they followed. The repeated anatomical imperative nosce te ipsum — ‘know thyself’ — became a literal as well as a metaphoric injunction. Further, as sites which drew spectators, as spaces in which rituals of bloody spectacle were held, the anatomy theatres were also locations where embodiment was re-created as much as it was in the playhouses. Anatomical performances were part of the matrix of ontological relations that slowly brought the modern body into being. The process of self-examination and self-presentation was similarly at work in the onus put on a felon to represent him or herself ‘before the bar’ and in the actor’s work in representing a character. Armed with a general understanding of the workings of each of our three spaces of ritually managed ontological formation we can now move on to specific examples of the processes of abstraction within each. Our first follows directly on the description just given of the practices of the Barber-Surgeons. In their claims to technical expertise in the construction of the human body they used books and illustrations to support their case and inform their apprentices. The text and images told master and apprentice alike what to see and what to understand about themselves and the bodies they treated. In learning how to see their patients through the example of dissected felons and Italian Renaissance imagery they also learned how to take their conceptions of themselves apart and knit them anew.

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n the illustrations of anatomical texts we can see traces of the complex way in which embodiment is constructed in a given sociocultural context. There were and are other aspects to the body that obtain — spiritual, social, political, and so on — and in illustrations of the anatomical body of this period we begin to see modern embodied subjectivities and practices emerging that has all these other aspects. Modern embodiment is often described as the birth of the scientific body and in one sense this is correct. It is only one narrow sense, however, in a much larger, diffuse, and uneven shift in meaning and practice. Taking the rise of science as definitive of the ‘Age’ frequently leads to narrow positivist explanations, anathema to our project here. Nevertheless, it is possible to discern patterns of meaning that are in the process of being redrawn from which a relatively familiar medicalized body starts to rise beyond the surface of the page. As I have argued elsewhere, as modern/post-modern embodiment becomes dominant across the world, related in large part to processes of global health initiatives, it continues a long process of writing over (but not obliterating) other conceptions of embodiment.1 Part of our aim here is to draw out patterns of meaning as they become structural. To do that we need first to describe what is in the process of changing through a discussion of the imagery that dominated the anatomy theatre of the company, using illustrations from texts dedicated to and/or known to be in the possession of the Barber-Surgeons between 1600 and 1640. Our discussion is built around two anatomical texts that were overtly intended to be used concurrently during the Barber-Surgeons’ quarterly public dissections of convicted felons. The first, Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man 1

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(London: William Jaggard, 1615), is a large text intended to be used by the reader in anatomy and is amply supplied with text drawn from various medical authorities (Galen, Laurentius, etc). The second, Alexander Read’s Somatographia anthropine; or, A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1616), later revised and reprinted as The Manuall of the Anatomy or dissection of the body of Man (London, 1638), is Crooke’s book ‘in little’. That is, Somatographia anthropine contained illustrations from ‘the book at large’, but unlike Crooke’s tome in which the images pepper lengthy textual discursions, Read’s epitome has an image on every verso with only the briefest of descriptions identifying what is in the illustrations on the recto. For our purposes, thus, the detail of the text in the larger book is far less important than the images that arrest the eye, because the majority of the participants — those watching and learning —were following texts dominated by the images. And to justify this limited choice of texts, rather than surveying all the extant anatomical texts of the period, it is necessary to explain what is known or can be reasonably supposed about the kinds of books the Barber-Surgeons used.

The Library at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall It is important to note from the outset the limitations that exist in discussing the illustrated anatomical texts used by the Barber-Surgeons at their dissections. It is clear from surviving records that there was a substantial collection in the library at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall throughout the seventeenth century but precisely what the collection was comprised of is, unfortunately, an enigma. In 1637 the library contents consisted of eighty books valuable enough to be chained and undoubtedly more of lesser value, as well as a sizeable collection of manuscripts.2 The library also held more than just anatomical texts, and by 1701 the collection was so diverse that propositions were made for it to be collated, catalogued, and for the beadle to be employed in attending it one day a week.3 One only has to consider the exponential growth in the number of vernacular anatomical titles alone that were printed in England over this period to realize

2

Young, p. 403, and R . Theodore Beck ‘The Lost Library of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London, and Dr. Richard Mead’ (unpublished lecture delivered to the G. H. A. (unidentified), Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, 1978; in the archives of the Worshipful Company of Barbers), pp. 6–7. 3

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that by the time the collection was sold in 1749, after the separation of the Barbers and the Surgeons, it must have been substantially larger.4 Unfortunately, it appears that plans to catalogue the collection were never effected, and to date no inventory of the library’s contents has been found to have survived. Had the excellent suggestion of marking each of the books with the company’s impress been carried out the contents of the collection may have been traceable, but this proposal was also neglected. On the separation of the company, the Surgeons were offered the collection at the price of twenty-five guineas, but they declined (they considered they had a right to it gratis as former co-owners) and it was later sold to a book dealer for a sum total of thirteen pounds.5 Those books that are named in the company’s records, such as gifts that were left to loyal apprentices in the wills of individual barber-surgeons or as other forms of bequest to the library, give some indication of the kinds of texts that were in the possession of individual members of the company.6 Continental anatomical texts were also available to the Barber-Surgeons, as is evident from the donation to the library of ‘Cafferius Placentius his booke of Anatomye’7 on 9 August 1642 by Dr Meverell, sometime reader in anatomy to the company and president of the College of Physicians between 1641 and 1644. 8 Other sources in the archives provide evidence of the company being in possession of books specifically targeted towards and dedicated to them, such as five hundred copies of the unillustrated translation of Horatius Morus’s Tables of Surgerie (1585).9 More importantly for our purposes here, we know that they were in possession of

4

See K. F. Russell, ‘A Bibliography of Anatomical Books Published in English Before 1800’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 23 (1949), 268–306. On his estimation 110 titles were published in 244 editions between 1500 and 1749 (p. 268). See also Russell, British Anatomy 1525– 1800: A Bibliography of Works Published in Britain, America and on the Continent (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1987). 5

The book-dealer, Mr John Whiston (c. 1700–80), did make an inventory in anticipation of the sale but that too is apparently lost; see Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 63. 6

See Young, pp. 514–73, for transcriptions of the Wills of eminent members of the company.

7

This would have been a work of Giulio Casserio (1561–1616) of Piacenza (Placentia) who, like Vesalius, was lecturer in anatomy at Padua. 8 9

Young, p. 405, Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 139.

It was ordered in the Court Minutes of 5 June 1604 that these books, the gift of ‘M r Deputie Caldwellr ’ and containing his dedication ‘TO THE COM PANIE O F SU RGEANS WITHIN the citie of London, much health with good successe in their practises and cures’, be distributed to the freemen of the company (Young, p. 326).

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a copy of Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia, which Crooke personally presented to the company.10 These snatches of information alone are insufficient to provide a balanced estimation of either the contents of the library or of the illustrated books which apprentices and their masters used and/or owned privately and it is not my intention to do so. It is possible, however, to attempt to reconstruct some notion of the most likely books used as illustrated anatomy texts by combining the limited evidence that is available from the archives of the Barber-Surgeons with the evidence of dedications in individual books that mention barber-surgeons as the intended readers. As we have just seen, it is possible to verify that two illustrated anatomy texts were in the possession of the Barber-Surgeons in the first half of the seventeenth century because they are specified in the archival records of the company. While Crooke’s and Casserio’s texts were large books and unlikely to have been used other than in the Barber-Surgeons’ Library, in the practice of an established master barber-surgeon, or as the text of preference of a reader at an anatomical dissection, each of these books is important for their repeated reuse.11 Shortly after the publication of the former a companion ‘in little’ was produced by Alexander Read specifically aimed at the barber-surgical apprentices.12 Our reasons are straightforward for settling upon Crooke and Read as exemplars of the representation of embodiment at the Barber-Surgeons’ in earlyseventeenth-century London. Crooke ‘donated’ a copy to the company, and he specifically dedicated it to them. As a cut-down version intended to be used by an observer at a dissection which was being pronounced upon by a reader referring to Crooke’s text, Read’s book seems highly likely to have been used by apprentices and masters during anatomical lectures and subsequently in their work. Despite their intended concordance the differences in intention between these twinned texts are also important, as are the concordances and differences we will trace across time between texts contemporaneous with these and the reworked versions of them that were in use later in the century and similarly dedicated to members of the company. The first preface to Crooke’s Microcosmographia is addressed to

10 It is noted for 27 May 1616 that Crooke made a gift of a copy, and that he received a gratuity of five pounds for dedicating it to the company (Young, p. 332.). 11

See Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 59 for the limited usage of large expensive texts. 12

That is, Somatographia anthropine (London: William Jaggard; 1616). Crooke’s full-format book went through six issues and two editions, as well as being abridged by Read, all of which went through several print runs; see Russell, British Anatomy, pp. xxiii and 161–63.

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James I and it is in Latin, but the ‘Preface to the Chyrurgeons’ which succeeds it reads as follows: Company of the Barber-Chyrurgeons, the Maister, Wardens, Assistants, and Comminalty of the same; H ELK IAH CRO OK E , Physitian and Professor in Anatomy and Chirurgery to His M AIESTIE , wisheth Happie and prosperous successe in your PROFESSION . MY Maisters and Worshipfull Friends. As from the first I intended this Labor unto your behoose; so now hauing by Gods assistance brought it to an end, I offer it unto you as a token of my Loue.13 TO THE WOR SHIPFVLL

Even though he was a fellow of the College of Physicians, Crooke rhetorically allies himself with the Barber-Surgeons against other physician readers ‘who thinke and do not sticke to affirme, even before your publique Assemblies, that you haue meanes enow already, & haply more then they would you had. Their reason can be no other, but because they would holde you alwayes obnoxious to themselues.’14 Crooke specifies his market and his reasons for producing this text: ‘among all the partes of our Art there is none that the Chyrurgeon hath more need of, or that is of more vse for himself then Anatomy’. Crooke also goes to great lengths to justify making this knowledge clear and accessible in the ‘Mothertoong’,15 his avowed ‘purpose being to better them who do not fowel vnderstand’ Latin.16 Like Geminus before him Crooke knew that most barbersurgical apprentices were, in common with Shakespeare, unlikely to have more than ‘small Latin and less Greek’. Crooke simultaneously flatters his potential customers, in producing this book for the betterment of the Barber-Surgeons, but like any dedication of the day it was also written in the hope that the audience addressed will endorse it, contribute to its production, and recommend that others purchase copies. Similarly, there are good reasons to privilege Alexander Read’s text. Firstly, each of these texts was popular and went through multiple issues over many decades, suggesting that there was a considerable demand for them. We saw in Chapter 1 that the Barber-Surgeons far outstripped the Physicians in numbers and in anatomical practice, and although there were other practitioners who were similarly well represented in the healing community (midwives, cunning-women, herbalists) they seem less likely to have been in the market to buy these particular

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Crooke, p. 7.

14

Crooke, p. 8.

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Crooke, p. 8.

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Crooke, p. 9.

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anatomy books, their practice being less dependent on the subject matter. Secondly, Read’s books were consciously aimed at the Barber-Surgeons’ Company where, by the time Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre was opened in 1638, he was reader at the regular public anatomical dissections. Crooke dedicated his text (to which Read refers directly) to the Barber-Surgeons and as we have seen the Physicians had scant interest in dissection at this time, so there is little doubt that he is referring to ‘the places appointed for dissection’ at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall.17 This, of course, does not make it a certainty that they were used by their intended audience but it does make it more than likely and at least suggests that they were written in the hope of barber-surgeons buying them. If you combine these factors, the numerous editions of these particular books, and the numbers of barber-surgical apprentices who were bound each year,18 the dedication starts to look like more than just a hopeful plea. Rather, it begins to sound like informed rhetoric consciously drawing in identifiable consumers with a tailor-made product.19 Further, like Crooke’s, these texts are in English, which vastly increases the probability of their being popular with the ‘unlatined’ barber-surgical apprentices in preference to similar publications in Latin.20

17

‘Whereas by contrarie, this small volume presenting all the partes of the body of man by continuation to the eie, impresseth the Figures firmely in the mind, and being portable may be carried without trouble, to the places appointed for dissection’: Read, Somatographia anthropine, A3 v . 18

Sir D’Arcy Power, ‘The Education of a Surgeon under Thomas Vicary — The Second Vicary Historical Lecture, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons of England on 11 November 1920’, repr. in Power, Selected Writings, estimates that the number of apprentices indentured at any one time in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century (by considering the seven years of indenture and the average of 150 apprentices bound each year) could have been as high as 1000. However, this could be conservatively quartered to take into account the numbers of apprentices who were known to be bound to other trades through the company or who were more barber than surgeon. 19

Read’s A treatise of all the muscules of the whole bodie […] (London: printed by R . Y. for F. Constable, 1637) includes the advertisement that ‘[t]he author is to read of this subject this next Shrove-tide publickely, in the theater erected this last yeere by the aforesaid [Barber-Surgeons’] Company, at their extraordinary great charges’ (Russell, British Anatomy, p. 162). 20

Geminus knew that barber-surgeons were more likely to use a vernacular text: ‘the same worke beeyng set foorth in the Englishe tounge might greatly availe to ye knowlage of the unlatined Surgeons, & by meanc of them, should bee muche more beneficiall, then in latin it is to an infinite nombre of people in thys your Maiesties Royalme of Englande’ (Thomas Geminus Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio […], trans. by Nicholas Udall (London: N. Hill, 1553; repr. London: Dawsons, 1959), A1 r).

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Finally, Read’s book is an epitome of Crooke’s Microcosmographia. There is a deliberate concurrence and concordance between the two books that reinforces the probability of Crooke’s text being used as an exemplar by any anatomical reader. I would infer from the popularity of these two publications, their specific dedications, and most particularly the repeated imperative attached to each illustration in Read to ‘[s]ee the History of this [illustration] in the Booke at large’ with a citation of the appropriate page in Crooke, that it would have been efficacious and positively intended that a reader would lecture from Crooke as we saw Banister lecturing from Realdo Colombo’s text (see Fig. 1) while the audience followed Read’s abridged and image-dominated version. These then were two books highly likely to have been directly implicated in the abstraction of the body on the table before the public anatomy’s massed audience.

The Importance of Images Before moving on to discuss these two companion volumes in more detail I want to be careful to frame the way I make the case for interpreting the images in these texts as I have. In the first place it is important to differentiate between the subject matter under discussion here and work such as Ian Maclean’s fastidious study of the semiotic content of medical texts in the Renaissance.21 The signs he focuses on are those used to diagnose, prognosticate upon, and define the body in ways that are central to the theories of university educated physicians. While the BarberSurgeons were not utterly isolated from those concerns, these matters were not consonant with their training or the purview of their trade.22 Maclean quickly passes over anatomical illustrations as ‘representational’, ‘produced to provide relative location of internal organs’, preferring instead to concentrate on the semiotics diagrams. We are concerned with the practices of tradesmen for whom anatomical representations formed the core of their learning. On the other hand there are critics who have advanced theories on the meaning of illustrations from anatomy texts have sometimes made rather sweeping generalizations about their relevance to a general understanding of corporeality. I refer, in particular, to Thomas Laqueur and his analysis of the illustrations from Charles Estienne and 21 22

Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance.

There are numerous records of disputes over medical territories in the minutes and the accounts of the Barber-Surgeons. See also Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003) for the College of Physicians prosecution of similar disputes.

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Étienne de la Rivière’s De dissectione partium corporis humani […] (1545).23 Just because an image is striking and rich in metaphor or iconography does not mean that the message being transmitted by it was a widely received or a commonly accepted one. Whilst the images in De dissectione are rich and remarkable, the book was expensive, and I would assert that any implied message in its illustrations reached far fewer people on the Continent than would have been the case for those published by Read or Crooke in England. A lavishly produced, illustrated anatomical text would not necessarily reach and influence a barber-surgeon, and our purpose is to trace a shift in dominance. On these grounds I have been conservative in my choice of texts, and selected those I thought were the most accessible and/or the most prolific publications. I have also done this to try to trace with some confidence a conception of embodiment that would have had currency beyond the barber-surgical ‘field of play’ by the dissemination of that conception into the wider community they treated, even if that was undoubtedly in tension with other forms of understanding from ‘below’. I am looking at the emergence of what became a dominant ontology over a very long period of time, and to which the current dominant ontology of medicalized embodiment traces its genesis. Many of the books which were designed to be used at English anatomies as dissection manuals originated in Italy, or were based in the practices of educational anatomy as revivified there.24 Those Englishmen who went on to become the eminent anatomists of their day had often studied at one or other of the Continental universities, or had at least visited the anatomy theatres of Padua, Bologna, or Leiden.25 The practices of and texts used by Continental surgeons, physicians, and anatomists were thereby highly influential on the practices of surgery and physic in seventeenth-century England.26 One of the effects of the 23

Laqueur uses Estienne’s work to ‘illustrate the fluid boundaries of sex and the more rigid distinctions of gender in […] the lascivious court of Francis I’ but then goes on to make broad generalizatons, as if the work of the court physician and the codes of the court are the way of understanding sex and gender current in sixteenth-century France (Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 130). 24 See Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot: Scolar, 1997), Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) and Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 25

Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 50–52. 26 For a brief account of the interrelationship of the practices of anatomy theatres in Italy, Holland, England, and France, see Jan C. C. van Rupp, ‘Michel Foucault, Body Politics and the Rise and Expansion of Modern Anatomy’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 5 (1992), 31–60.

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migration and multiplication of Continental woodcuts and plates was that some of the factors which influenced their production, such as religious and artistic aesthetics, were also absorbed into the dominant abstractions of the body in England. When the patrons of the anatomy theatres of England followed the texts which came from these European centres of learning, texts illustrated with Vesalian figures or their derivatives, they were taking part in a relatively recent revision of classical anatomical precepts and they were simultaneously receiving imagery based on classical explanations of embodiment as mediated by the aesthetic theories and iconography of the Italian Renaissance. So when approaching anatomical illustrations in use in seventeenth-century London it is not just the immediate cultural context of the practice of the Barber-Surgeons of London which ought to be taken into consideration, there is also a cross-cultural context which is implicit in the importation of another culture’s representations of the body. In 1540 when Henry VIII had approved the uniting of the Fellowship of Surgeons with the Barbers of London into the Worshipful Company of BarberSurgeons, he ‘was said to have suggested that the Vesalian plates should be made available to English surgeons’.27 This particular sovereign not only granted the bodies which formed one focus of the anatomy theatre of the Company of BarberSurgeons, he also directed his subjects to the appropriate texts with which to study them. In 1545 Thomas Geminus, foreigner and painter of the King, dedicated his anatomical manual, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio (London, 1545) to Henry VIII. This text contained engraved anatomical plates consciously adapted from the finely wrought blocks of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome (Basel, 1543) and De humani corporis libri septum (Basel, 1543), now commonly referred to as the Epitome and the Fabrica. Geminus’s Compendiosa certainly fulfilled the requirements of the King’s edict, and it is mentioned in the records of the Barber-Surgeons.28 In 1553 this book was translated into English by Nicholas Udall (playwright of Ralph Roister Doister), and was dedicated to the new monarch, Edward VI,29 in a revised form which incorporated some of the text

27

Roberts and Tomlinson, pp. 140–41.

28

Robert Balthrop, Serjeant-Surgeon to Elizabeth I, bequeathed a copy to his apprentice in 1591: ‘And I give and bequeath to my servaunt John Edwards […] these English bookes, Gemines Anathomy, Guido and Leonard ffuschsias both written in hand’ (Young, p. 531). See also Robert Herrlinger, History of Medical Illustration: From Antiquity to A .D . 1600, trans. by Graham FultonSmith ([London]: Pitman Medical and Scientific Publishing, 1970), p. 122. 29

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of Thomas Vicary’s A Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of Man’s Bodie (London, 1553).30 While this volume is a little early for our purposes, the message of its dedication sets the form for those locally produced texts that were to follow. When he rededicated it yet again in 1559, Geminus wrote to a young Elizabeth I in the dedication: Forasmuche as holy scripture bearing wyttenesse (most honorable Princesse) it pleased almightye God to create man to the similitude of his lyknes, not only in spirite resemblyng the deitye of the eternall father, but also in bodie bearying the shape of Christe oure God and sauiore whose humane nature is nowe inseparably unite wyth the fathers deitye […] me thinketh doubtles that this well consydered, we can no wayes come soonner to the knowledge of God, then first to learne to knowe our selues. [… verso] So that, who so in all partes learneth to knowe himself, may therby come to no smale knowledge of God and all his creatures. Woorthely therefore as a holy oracle was written ouer the doore at the temple of Apollo in Delphis. NO SCE TEIPSVM .31

This seems like a brave piece of advice to be offering the Virgin Queen, but it is also framed in an extremely pious manner. William Schupbach argues that the Delphic edict was given a particular anatomical application from the early sixteenth century until the late seventeenth century32 and that the rationale for anatomy was often given as its being a means of knowing God by knowing oneself through the structure and mysteries of the human body. This edict to ‘know thyself’ was an abstracting imperative in the sense that codified knowledge was being placed in an interceding relationship, mediating the relationship of persons to their Maker. As the audiences at the theatres were physically regulated by the structure of the theatre, and ceremonially positioned by the ritual of the performances in that theatre, they were also being exhorted to identify themselves with and construct their ideas of embodiment around the images (and, in effect, through the anatomist’s texts) placed before them. As we saw in the introduction, these representations of the body were then reinforced by the example of the corpse. They justified each other. And in Geminus’s book we can see some of the earliest effects of adapting Vesalius’s illustrations across cultural boundaries. 30

Roberts and Tomlinson, p. 141. Vicary was, variously, a lecturer, examiner and master of the Company of Barber-Surgeons. Vicary was master in 1530, 1541, 1546, 1548, and 1557 (Young, pp. 5–6). He was also surgeon-general at St Bartholemew’s Hospital (Young, p. 88). 31

Geminus, quoted in William Schupbach, The Paradox of Rembrandt’s ‘Anatomy of Dr Tulp’, Medical History Supplement, 2 (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1982), p. 69. 32

Schupbach, pp. 37–38, and Appendix 3, pp. 66–84. Schupbach lists the frequency with which this phrase was invoked in anatomical texts, drawings, paintings, and theatres.

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It has often been remarked that Vesalius’s original woodcuts of the surface anatomy of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are depicted as Adam and Eve after the Fall. Each of them bears an expression of some distress and the knowledge of their disgrace, and each shows through their gestures the torment of their minds. In her visage, Eve displays a pained consciousness of her nakedness as she modestly covers her ‘shame’. Adam holds in his hand a skull, signifying the inevitable mortality of the flesh which has descended upon them. This memento mori is also a reminder of the fact of anatomy, that this study of God’s handiwork relies on the corruptibility of the Fallen form. Adam does not cover himself — God did not directly curse his procreative powers — but his gravely downcast eyes and spread fingers express a sudden knowledge of the hopelessness of their plight. These lapsed characters are penitent, naked outcasts from Paradise. This is not the message which one reads from Geminus’s re-engraving of Vesalius’s surface anatomy pair (Fig. 6). In place of the skull in Adam’s hand Geminus has set an uneaten apple. This Adam has not yet fallen, but is on the brink of partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. A skull is still apparent but instead of being held by one of the figures it is placed between Adam and Eve, shifting the rhetorical emphasis. There is now a serpent passing through the eye sockets of the skull: it ‘grins’ expectantly at Eve. Importantly, Eve no longer gazes downwards with grave countenance ready for her punishment, the labour, toil, and pain of childbirth. Her head is appealingly tilted and she looks directly and purposefully at Adam who gazes solemnly but absently at the ground to his left. She is all temptation, the serpent laughing up at her as she smiles invitingly at Adam. Adam’s expression is solemn but it is also somewhat distracted, his splayed fingers now seeming to invite an interpretation of resignation. Eve has eaten, he has yet to, but we know he will. Reading her bodily gestures according to the codes of the time, Eve still displays a modest deportment.33 She covers her pubic area, and her knees are bent inward in a further gesture of modesty but, by endowing her with an inviting smile and shifting her line of sight, Geminus has given her an appealing sensuality. The adapted Adam still displays a potential for action, his knees apart, muscles flexed, about to step out nobly, but the addition of the apple emphasizes that his action will be towards an inevitable Fall from Grace. The general composition of the two pages also reflects the sort of conventional marriage portrait composition which Spicer describes, with the wife to the left of her spouse, with his potential 33

See A Cultural History of Gesture, ed. by Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenberg (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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Fig. 6: Engraving of nude male and female figures with snake and skull, London, W ellcome Institute, from Thomas Geminus, Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio […] (London: J. Herfordie, 1545), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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action and her submission being implicit.34 However, only Eve has fallen which emphasizes her guilt in the initiation of Adam’s corruption; that the mind of a woman is prone to perversion; and, that perversion can be rendered visible through the deportment of the body. The cumulative effect is to project a reading of the feminine body as more debased and corrupting than the masculine body. As we shall discuss at greater length in Chapter 3, the Cardinal in The White Devil says of whores, of Vittoria, and by extension of all women that they are ‘worse then dead bodies, which are beg’d at gallowes’.35 The weight of religious moralizing on Eve’s part in the Fall is actually intensified by Geminus’s engravings. He has rewritten the narrative of the illustrations, taking Vesalius’s Adam and Eve back to the moment of the Fall, emphasizing Eve’s culpability and the moral burden which she and her descendants have to carry. If Vesalius’s woodcuts show the potential Virgin Mother in Eve, Geminus’s shows us a potential (unrepentant) Magdalen. The minor details which need to be changed in order to effect this transformation magnifies the fine line between feminine probity and woman’s flesh as fallible, inconstant, and incontinent. Vesalius commissioned the originals of the illustrations that appear in Geminus’s text — which were, according to various accounts, by Titian or members of Titian’s workshop and/or Jan Stephan van Calcar — in a collaborative enterprise between artist and anatomist to produce an extraordinary set of woodcuts.36 Geminus was by no means the only person to copy these finely detailed, extremely influential, and notably artistic plates. Even where they were not copied exactly, they often formed the bases of other anatomist’s illustrations.37 Whilst Vesalius’s books were extremely popular, the woodcuts and engravings produced by his imitators spread his illustrations further, wider, and faster than his work alone could have done. The cheaper (and sometimes cruder) these derivatives became, 34

Joneath Spicer, ‘The Renaissance Elbow’, in A Cultural History of Gesture (see n. 44, above), pp. 84–128 (pp. 108–12). 35

John Webster, The White Devil (London: Thomas Archer, 1612), III.2.100.

36

Roberts and Tomlinson, pp. 137–38. See also J. B. Saunders and C. O’Malley, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1950), pp. 25– 29. Amazingly, the original blocks were used to create a reprint edition in the 1930s, but were destroyed in the WWII bombing of Dresden. 37

Roberts and Tomlinson, p. 224. They cite Juan Valverde de Hamusco, Caspar Bauhin, Volcher Coiter, and Felix Platter, but to this may be added Helkiah Crooke, Johannes Remmelin, and many others: see Herrlinger, pp. 121–38, for a more complete list; and Harvey Cushing, A Bio-Bibliography of Andreas Vesalius (London: Archon, 1962), for an extended treatment of the widespread use and reuse of Vesalius’s illustrations.

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the wider a cross-section of a society they were likely to reach.38 The illustrations which appear in Crooke and Read are either re-engravings of Vesalian woodcuts or, in a few cases, they are copied from the work of anatomists highly influenced by Vesalius’s work. As Henry VIII exhorted, the primary purpose of these images was to proliferate anatomical knowledge. It is the nature of the ontology being conveyed and the rhetorical content that is our object. The ways in which men and women are represented and differentiated in the anatomical drawings used at the anatomy lectures, the crimes for which each found themselves at the gallows and then on the anatomy table, and the spectacular performances that took place in the anatomical theatre, are all vectors in a matrix of knowledge systems which worked to abstract the lived relations of embodiment. Whether as a Vesalian geographical discovery or as a Harveian or Cartesian mechanistic invention, ‘the body’ comes into being and ‘the organs’ take on shape and meaning through the abstracting pronouncements of the anatomist and the supporting evidence of supplementary texts. As a body is dissected it both becomes an ‘anatomy’ and reveals Anatomy. The title page from Alexander Read’s Manuall of the Anatomy or dissection of the body of Man (Fig. 7) exemplifies the slippage between these two terms. It shows that the terms anatomy and dissection’ are largely interchangeable, but it also reveals the slippage between the act of dissection and the production of what Bourdieu might have termed ‘the field of anatomy’. The body is, then, both the site of a corpus of knowledge and also the place which is used to names and gives meaning to the corpus of knowledge itself. ‘The body’, or rather bodies, situated within relations of embodiment are the product of a set of attributions, properties and appearances, which are decided upon and shaped by those who are viewing and describing it. The ‘passive authority’ of the body, which as we saw in the previous two chapters is not entirely passive, is dependent on the construction of meaning within which it is itself abstracted into a generalizing frame of image, text, architecture, and practice. Anatomical illustrations form a part of that understanding of the ontological frame. 38

K. F. Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin the Anatomist (Melbourne: Russell, 1991), pp. 16, 29. Flap anatomies and fugitive sheets were literally used to the point of destruction and therefore very few survive, despite repeated issues. The Royal Australasian College of Physicians holds a copy of Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannes Görlini, 1639), an eight-page flap-anatomy which was last valued (in 1996) at AUD$45,000 because of its rarity and good condition. See Andrea Carlino, Paper Bodies: A Catalogue of Anatomical Fugitive Sheets, 1538–1687 (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1999) for a comprehensive collection of contemporary fugitive sheets.

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Art, Aesthetics, and Anatomy I have already intimated that religious and aesthetic iconography are important to our discussion and have gestured towards them in discussing Geminus’s adaptation of the Adam and Eve figures. I now want briefly to touch upon the cultural codes inherent in these illustrations that are pertinent to my interpretations. There is a convergence of many of the preoccupations of the Italian Renaissance inherent in the depiction of anatomy. Vesalius’s plates, perhaps partly because he employed an artist from Titian’s studio who would have been familiar with a system of aesthetics which itself advocated dissection, depict a turning point in both anatomical practice and the representation of the practice of anatomy. The frontispiece of the Epitome and the Fabrica shows the anatomist with his hands on (and in) the subject rather than merely directing the action, as we have also seen is the case in Banister’s portrait. Here we see evidenced one of the apparently ironical processes accompanying the matrix of abstraction: what James has called the ‘recalling’ or ‘reclaiming’ of the concrete.39 That is, as the framing of social relations becomes objectively more mediated by codifying, objectifying, and rationalizing practices, the palpable body is, from a more abstract level, subjectively re-called in its phenomenal detail. The Vesalian drawings reflect a sense of the empirical observation of anatomy as theatrically performed, rather than either a cosmologically given rendition or a figuring of what the Galenic texts said would be there.40 In the case of early pedagogic dissections, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ‘[t]heir goal was not to add to the existing body of knowledge concerning human anatomy and physiology but to help students and doctors understand and remember the texts in which that knowledge was enclosed’.41 Vesalius challenged and disputed accepted Galenic anatomical precepts, basing his arguments on direct observations from his dissections: but others had already started the process of revisioning the canon on the body.42 Bernard Schultz argues that Leon Battista Alberti’s artistic, aesthetic, and architectural theories supported the practice of the study of the human body in depth and that, consequently, dissection became an important means of artistic education.43 Influential 39

James, Nation Formation, pp. 88–89.

40

Schultz, pp. 23–25. In Chapter 4, pp. 67–109, Schultz gives a detailed description of the Galenic anatomical inaccuracies which Leonardo included in his drawings until, like Vesalius after him, his dissections taught him otherwise.

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41

Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, p. 14

42

Schultz, p. 25.

43

Schultz, chap. 4, passim.

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art theoreticians of the Quattrocento, including Ghiberti amongst others, proposed that in order to depict the human form in its correct proportions aspiring artists ought to gain knowledge about the structure of the body by the detailed study of anatomy.44 Artists far outstripped anatomists as critical observers of anatomy until Vesalius, perhaps because they were not as constrained by a history of scholastic medical education. Both Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were highly skilled and experienced dissectors of the human body.45 Although Leonardo’s anatomical drawings were not in circulation until the nineteenth century, the empirical accuracy and the observation apparent in his work are far beyond any of the medical anatomists of his day. If not for the encroachment of old age, Michelangelo, who had dissected since his youth and was a master of myological observation,46 would have illustrated anatomist Realdo Colombo’s posthumous De re anatomica (1559) — the very text which dominates the painting of John Banister’s anatomy lecture.47 As Shultz shows, Vitruvius and Alberti each proposed that in order to reflect an organic wholeness the proportions of buildings ought to reflect the true and perfect, God-given proportions of Man’s body. They both used analogies linking human anatomy and architecture, asserting that buildings can become ill, distempered, and misshapen like an ailing body.48 Schultz argues that Alberti in particular was insistent on the importance of an artist or an architect being well versed in anatomy.49 The body was the temple of the soul, ‘the life o’ the building’ and, like that ‘anointed temple’, buildings in turn should represent the harmonious creation of the godly healthy body.50 It is little wonder then that, prior to the career of Vesalius, in a period when visual artists were being exhorted to

44

Schultz, chap. 2, pp. 27–44, passim.

45

Schultz, passim.

46

Michelangelo was inclined to inflict male myology on the female body, as were others. Venetian artists were supposed to be more adept at rendering the female form (Hyatt-Mayor, p. 76). One could be flippant and suggest that was the result of that particular city’s notoriety for freely disposed women; live models would have posed no problem. 47

Schultz, pp. 102–03.

48

Schultz, pp. 73–77.

49

Schultz, pp. 27–35.

50

Shakespeare, Macbeth, II.3.66–68: ‘Most sacrilegious murder hath broke ope | The Lord’s anointed temple and stole thence | The life o’th’building!’ The body as temple, or building, is a pervasive literary image. How ironic and how circular that bodies were dissected in buildings built on principles informed by these theories.

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observe the body closely for the betterment of their craft, painting, and drawing should surpass anatomical illustration in detailed depictions of the human form. Italian artists included medicine within their studies, read classical unillustrated medical texts, and paid attention to what they saw. In Florence they bought the elements for their paints from apothecaries who not only traded in drugs, but also sold anatomical texts. Florentine physicians and painters even belonged to the same guild.51 Glenn Harcourt has asserted that ‘the history of anatomy is in fact embedded in the history of art’.52 I would go further. If aesthetic theories permeated the depiction of anatomical illustrations, a degree of anatomical knowledge was already a precondition for the production of drawings by the time the Vesalian woodcuts were engraved. Art was equally embedded in anatomy, and artistic or aesthetic conventions were carried forward into anatomical illustrations. Katharine Park has described the importance of religious iconography as reflected in Berengario da Carpi’s illustrated anatomical texts in the relationship between medieval post-mortem examinations of bodies to discover the cause of death and the concomitant search for evidence of saintly qualities.53 The existence of portentous growths on or in the corpse could lead to the fetishization of the body, or a given part thereof. Such formations were proof of God’s direct intervention on earth and hence the tendency for body parts to become religious relics. Park argues that in Berengario’s illustrations there is an intertwining of this idea of the saintly body as exemplary, and the criminal body as exemplar of the will of the state. The criminal paid public atonement for sin, as Christ had ‘for all our sins’, therefore there is a logic to illustrations drawn from the example of dissected criminal bodies being depicted in the style of religious martyrs: ‘Both the saint and the criminal were exemplary figures, models of all that was to be emulated or shunned.’54 In Renaissance Italy the state acted as God’s emissary in mortifying the criminal’s flesh. Parts of criminals’ bodies became sought after as religious relics, for their supposedly supernatural or curative powers.55 51

Schultz, p. 60.

52

Glenn Harcourt, ‘Andreas Vesalius and the Anatomy of Antique Sculpture’, Representations, 17 (1987), 28–61 (p. 33). 53

Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, pp. 1–14, passim.

54

Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, p. 23.

55

Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, p. 26. Even those good Protestants, the BarberSurgeons of London had cause to warn against members carrying away, tanning, and keeping parts of anatomized bodies. See Young, p. 320. As we shall see, however, they kept an Adam and Eve pair of mounted tanned skins in the theatre in the 1630s (Young, p. 488).

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The depiction of criminal bodies as saintly martyrs in anatomical illustrations does indeed pay service to the similarity of the reverence and mysticism accorded to their material remains, and this will be important elsewhere in our discussion, but it also provides evidence of the strength of artistic conventions for the depiction of the human form. By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries many Italian artists were already familiar with using the anatomical study of dead bodies to support representations of religious scenes. If one is already familiar with using flayed and dismembered bodies to construct an image of religious martyrdom, it would seem only logical that this would influence one to represent the same form in a similar manner for an anatomical illustration. The strength of the conventions for the way in which the human form is represented is overwhelming: they are vectors in the series of imbricated levels of meaning which construct corporeality. Paintings, statues, or frescos such as Michelangelo’s representation of St Bartholemew holding up his own skin in the Last Judgement are influenced by the experience of flaying and dissecting bodies in the pursuit of myological studies.56 In turn, anatomical illustrations are permeated by the kinds of cultural and the aesthetic beliefs current in their time. Art and anatomy are two threads of a larger fabric into which the body is woven, but from which it is discernible, like the pattern in a damask cloth. Further, art and anatomy were complicit in supporting and maintaining gender distinction and this can be seen in the hierarchy of value explicitly accorded to the masculinized and the feminized bodies. Art theorists proposed that a man’s body was the true likeness of God’s handiwork and therefore the higher, more perfect bodily form. As Cennino Cennini wrote circa 1400, ‘I will acquaint you with the proportions of man. I omit those of woman because not one of them is perfectly proportioned.’57 Religious dogma and medical theory supported this kind of hierarchical view. Indeed, it was still being propagated in anatomical illustrations in the mid-eighteenth century.58 In practice, however, in Italy in the

56

See Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment: Art and Criminal Prosecution During the Florentine Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 217–18; he asserts that this painting influenced the illustrator of Valverde’s Historia, which would seem to take us full circle from anatomy to art and back to anatomy. 57 58

Cennini, cited in Hyatt-Mayor, p. 46.

In explaining his rationale in choosing a representative human skeleton for his illustrations Bernhard Albinus wrote in his Tables of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body (London, 1749): ‘I made choice of one that might discover signs of both strength and agility: the whole of it elegant, and at the same time not too delicate; so as neither to shew a juvenile or feminine

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fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the female body was considered a very desirable commodity. While Italian women had more rights over property and their person than in other European countries at the time, they were, as in England, the sexual vessels by which the legitimate passage of property was secured, which made them commodities (chattels) in the marriage market. In death, the unavailability of female cadavers for dissection, because they were less likely to be hanged and more likely to be claimed for burial by their families, led even Vesalius to body snatching.59 The anatomical illustrations of the human body that circulated on the Continent and in England during this period reflect the tension between the supposed perfection of men and the carnal attractions of women in the way male and female bodies are depicted.

Art, Fashion, and Gesture There is another sense in which art has influenced the depiction of anatomy. Although she does not deal specifically with anatomical illustrations, Anne Hollander describes at length and in great detail the ways in which the female form, clothed and unclothed, has been represented in art from classical Greece to the late twentieth century. For the purpose of reading anatomical illustrations, her observations on the presentation of the unclothed female body are pertinent. Hollander argues that the female body, even when divested of its cover of clothing, implies the presence of clothes.60 Hollander argues that periods of changing fashion in Europe, starting from around 1300,61 are reflected in the roundness and slenderness, nor on the contrary an unpolished roughness and clumsiness; in short, all of the parts of it beautiful and pleasing to the eye. For as I wanted to shew an example of nature, I chused to take it from the best pattern of nature […] of the male sex, of middle stature, and very well proportioned; of the most perfect kind, without any blemish or deformity’: cited in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ‘Images of Objectivity’, Representations, 40 (1992), 81–128 (p. 90). See also Londa Schiebinger, ‘Skeletons in the Closet: The First Illustrations of the Female Skeleton in Eighteenth-Century Anatomy’, Representations, 14 (1986), 42–82, for gender bias in eighteenth-century anatomy. 59

Ferrari, p. 54; Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, pp. 15, 18. Saunders and O’Malley relate the tale of body snatching behind the illustration that Laqueur has called the ‘vagina as penis’, showing the lengths to which Vesalius and his students would go to secure a female cadaver (Saunders and O’Malley, p. 170). 60 61

Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York: Viking, 1978), p. 84.

Hollander bases this point on the wonderful historical works on fashion by Cecil and Phyllis Cunnington, which include a series of ‘handbooks’ of English costume from the medieval

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painting of nudes. Through the shaping and reshaping of the body by clothes, across time ‘some areas of the body are compressed, others padded, some kinds of movement are restricted, others liberated, and later perhaps all these are reversed’.62 So breasts that, to a modern eye, appear impossibly high and separated are a reflection of the way they were supposed to look under the influence of corsetry, not necessarily as they looked when that corsetry was removed. Legs on models, at other periods, are lengthened disproportionately to account for absent heels, and waists move up and down, bellies are held in or fecundly flop out, as the outer garment of a period determined under the influence of fashions of desirability. Painters are just as subject to the effect of constructions of corporeality influenced by fashion as the Galenic anatomists who, in good faith, described organs that were not ‘really’ there. Baroque fashions in the late seventeenth century, which relied on masses of bunched and textured cloth, were concomitantly reflected in the surface textures of female nudes: Nameless anatomical bubbles and unidentifiable waves agitated the formerly quiescent adipose tissue under the mobile hides of nymphs and goddesses as they simultaneously agitated the satin sleeves and skirts of the newly fashionable free-flowing clothes.63

Further, convention ensured that the unclothed female form was almost invariably depicted in secluded or interior settings, often surrounded by drapery, or on draped beds. The eroticism of this secluded, private imagery is carried over from the norms of painting and exploited in anatomical drawings, the text patronized by the French king referred to above being a notable example. Artistic practice also supported and reproduced the codes of bodily management carried in the conventions of posture and gesture. There was an increasing interest in the semiotics of gesture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Italy, which was catered for by books such as Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.64 The ideal of upright, elegant, masculine comportment required the practitioner to exercise moderation and control of the body at all times. This desire for ‘a reform of gesture formed part of the moral discipline of the Counter Reformation’,

period through to the twentieth century, as well as the more specific A Dictionary of English Costume (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), The History of Underclothes (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1980), and Phyllis Cunnington and Catherine Lucas, Costumes for Births, Marriages and Deaths (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1972). 62

Hollander, pp. 90–91.

63

Hollander, p. 106.

64

Peter Burke, ‘The Language of Gesture in Early Modern Italy’, in A Cultural History of Gesture (see n. 29, above), pp. 71–83 (p. 74).

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but it was peculiarly successful in northern Europe.65 The fact that the manners which Burke discusses were courtly, and masculine, is important. Gesture, like clothing, was an effective and recognizable marker of gender and class. As Anna Bryson has observed of the adoption of Continental norms of gesture in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an upright posture defined one’s social status, ‘proper’ carriage being a sign of a nobleman or a gentleman.66 Class boundaries could be policed through such a system of gesture, because a man who was using the rules to rise from his station should be obvious from either his slavish adherence to the rules of gesture or his excessive flouting of them. Whether this was the case or not is debatable. One suspects it just made it easier for the upper classes to change the ground rules as they saw fit in order to exclude ‘undesirable’ people. In England, ‘the “representational” principles of manners central to their codifications of conduct’67 were diffused by a newly mobile population of courtiers and, in a concomitant way and at a comparable time, representational principles of bodily knowledge in the form of anatomical tracts were being diffused in England. Those anatomical drawings bore within them images of the sorts of bearing and carriage that were being lauded by courtiers. Writing on the shifts in just these kinds of manners and gestures from medieval times to the twentieth century, Norbert Elias has argued that a variety of bodily behavioural controls — including the curbing of speech, movement, and bodily functions — have slowly been adopted down hierarchical social structures in a progressive movement of what the global North has thought of as the ‘civilizing process’. The shift in styles of behaviour made social divisions more obvious and acted as an exclusionary measure: courteous language, if too formal or archaic, made clear one’s social position and identified one as a try-hard. But, Elias argues, despite this the spread of the civilizing influence flattened out social difference: ‘Here, too, as with manners, there was a kind of double movement: a courtization of bourgeois people and a bourgeoisification of courtly people. Or, to put it more precisely: bourgeois people were influenced by the behaviour of courtly people and vice versa.’68 As it did so it contributed to the absorption of modes of increasing self65

Burke, p. 76.

66

Anna Bryson, ‘The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540–1660, ed. by Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion, 1990), pp. 136–53 (pp. 146–47). 67 68

Bryson, pp. 146–47.

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, ed. by Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell, rev. edn

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abstraction. Clothing and body adornment had always been bound up with coded and symbolic representation, but now we were starting to see the codes themselves being used to define self-consciously one’s self and one’s body. Through all this gestures in anatomical illustrations have held a very particular place in, and contributed to, the slow ‘downward’ movement of those codes as they infiltrated from ‘above’.69 More than that, the codes themselves became codified. Leonardo da Vinci, who we know was an avid anatomist, believed that ‘“the intention of the mind” is difficult to paint because it “has to be represented through gestures and movements of limbs”’.70 If one follows though on this observation of Leonardo’s, a language of gestures is necessary to the depiction of a pictorial narrative which involves expressing a state of mind, and conversely the mind is revealed through the gestures portrayed. Natural but ‘uncouth’ gestures, such as aggressively struck poses with elbows thrust at the viewer, can be read as an incursion of the everyday gestural norm of lower-class subjects into portraiture.71 So, as painting became more naturalistic not only were stylized gestures naturalized, ‘natural’ gestures also became stylized and systematized: but these were, of course, already subject to social codes and constructions of what was appropriate behaviour, thereby reclaiming the concrete from a more epistemological abstract ‘perspective’. If part of the function of a representation of a person was to express in gesture what was implicit in the mind, this had particular ramifications for female sitters: As for the weaker, perforce humbler sex, the arms akimbo might characterise a woman of princely status such as Queen Elizabeth I of England, or a female warrior such as Juno or Athena, but it was not an appropriate gesture for middle-class women of good standing […]. Standards of female comportment called for restraint on the part of the ‘morally weaker’ sex, containment, the avoidance of anything suggestive of personal pride or selfpossession […] except in allegories of Pride or Vanity such as cautionary images of Lady World or depictions of light company. 72

(London: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 93–94. Obviously when Elias was writing what is now called ‘the global North’ was called ‘the West’. 69 For a detailed argument of the differences in codification across social formations see James, chap. 8 and passim. 70

Cited in Spicer, p. 85. Spicer concentrates on the importance of gesture in the art of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. 71

Spicer, p. 93. Spicer argues further that this was the result of the adoption of naturalistic composition in paintings, p. 86. 72

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A proper woman would express her virtue in her comportment. If she was to be seen as thinking the right thoughts for her station and gender, she would be portrayed with her eyes downcast or averted, her hands held modestly clasped, and with a sombre and passive demeanour. Conversely, a potentially loose woman would betray her impure or immodest thoughts in her wide smile, her lively movements, and her direct gaze, looking boldly either at others in the painting or straight out at the viewer.73 As we have already seen in the discussion of Geminus’s Adam and Eve, and we shall see below in relation to further figures, this coding had direct ramifications for the depiction of the female body in anatomical illustrations. As Leonardo said, painters had to rely on the implied movements, or the posture of the body of their subject, in order to communicate the inner knowledge of that subject. A lewd woman would be depicted displaying lewd and immodest gestures, and a chaste woman would appear controlled and discrete. When painters depicted female biblical characters, laudable or admonitory, their gestures conveyed in a recognizable form their known morals by representing them in supplicant postures with their bodies held discretely.74 The same can be said of classical goddesses; their chastity or immodesty is written on their bodies in their gestures and the clothing of their skin, every bit as clearly as ‘inteftina’ is inscribed on the bowel of John Banister’s anatomy. All the vectors outlined above have a bearing on the interpretation of the anatomical drawings that circulated in England throughout the seventeenth century. Most of the drawings in use in the early part of the seventeenth century in England were originally drawn in mid-sixteenth-century Italy. They were a part of the re-evaluation of classical precepts on art, architecture, and medicine of that period. In their composition they display the preoccupation with gesture and deportment that was observed at court and in portraiture in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Italy, which eventually filtered into English culture and that were current in popular literature in the period we are examining. They display representations of figures consonant with religious iconography, with the martyrdom of saints and sinners. They also contain symbolism that purveys the hierarchy of gender and the eroticization of feminine bodies. This is not to make

73 74

Spicer, pp. 108–12.

This is a Hippocratic argument to which many sixteenth-century Dutch humanists subscribed. Ellen Muller and Jeanne Marie Noël, ‘Humanist Views on Art and Morality’, in Saints and She-Devils: Images of Women in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, ed. by Lène DresenCoenders and Petty Bange (London: Rubicon, 1987), pp. 129–59.

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a claim that these are the only influences at work in these illustrations, aesthetic or otherwise, but the rest of this chapter will be taken up with using the influences identified to interpret a specific selection of illustrations.

Helkiah Crooke Helkiah Crooke names John Banister as his predecessor in writing anatomical manuals for the benefit of barber-surgeons, but he also gestures towards his debt to Thomas Geminus at the end of his ‘Preface to the Chirurgeons’. His plates are in large part directly re-engraved from Geminus’s illustrations. This was no secret, as we can see from Crooke’s further defence of this use of the illustrations against an attack that ‘[t]he Figures are obfcoene as Aretines’ by arguing that ‘they are no other then thofe which were among our felues dedicated to three famous Princes, the laft a Mayden-Queene’,75 a clear reference to Geminus’s rededications to successive sovereigns.76 Although Vesalius complained bitterly that his work was being defiled when he learned that Geminus had copied the illustrations from both the Fabrica and the Epitome onto brass plates and published them in his Compendiosa, they are in fact beautifully engraved.77 Geminus was the first to make Vesalian illustrations available not only to the English but also in several vernacular versions for the Continent. 78 In the engraving of these illustrations, however, Geminus made several alterations that Crooke carries forward. In many cases the alterations merely consisted of the addition of a tuft of grass or some other peripheral enhancement, but as we have already seen some of the illustrations were adapted in ways that substantially changed their rhetorical content. By following Geminus, Crooke perpetuates the rhetoric of Geminus’s adaptation, though he also includes illustrations from other anatomical texts.

75

Crooke, p. 10.

76

Crooke, p. 10, also cites the same source that Geminus used for his illustrations, Vesalius, and he credits his use of other illustrations which do not appear in Geminus, those from the work of Juan Valverde de Hamusco. Hamusco was himself heavily influenced by Vesalius, and adapted many illustrations for his own work. A few, however, would appear to be original in their composition.

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Roberts and Tomlinson, p. 140.

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Roberts and Tomlinson, p. 141.

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Fig. 8: Gravid female figure, London, W ellcome Institute, from Juan Valverde de Hamusco, Historia De La Composición Del Cuerpo Humano (Rome: Antonio de Salamanca, 1556), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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For instance, Crooke did not use Geminus’s Adam and Eve pair of male and female figures. For the frontispiece of Microcosmographia he chose instead to use Juan Valverde de Hamusco’s gravid female figure from Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano […] (1556) and one of Vesalius’s flayed male figures. Valverde was an anatomist greatly influenced by Vesalius and another copier of his figures, but he also incorporated original illustrations. In these original illustrations he presents the body in a slightly different way from Vesalius’s artists. In the frontispiece of the first edition of Crooke’s text there is a figure of a woman which also appears within, in ‘The Fourth Booke: Of the Naturall Parts belonging to generation, as well in Man as in Women’.79 The figure shows a pregnant woman with her abdomen partly resected to display her distended uterus. This illustration originates in Valverde’s book (Fig. 8), and had already been reused in Andreas Laurentius’s Historia anatomica humani corporis (1600). Crooke acknowledges his debt to Laurentius and has quite obviously used this version of the figure rather than Valverde’s original. If one compares the three illustrations, Laurentius’s and Crooke’s are virtually identical, although the engraving in Crooke is a little cruder (Figs 9 and 10). Crooke chose to use Laurentius’s version when he obviously knew Valverde’s work.80 Gesturally, Valverde’s original owes much to Vesalius’s Eve and to artistic representations of an untouched Venus rising from the sea. She is seemingly even more modest than Vesalius’s penitent Eve, covering her right breast as well as her ‘shame’. Her expression is similarly solemn; her eyes are downcast as she gazes absently to her left. In displaying pregnancy, however, this is a woman who is soon to undergo the fulfilment of God’s edict: ‘in pain you shall bring forth children.’81 The reproduction found in Laurentius and Crooke, like Geminus’s reworking of Vesalius’s Eve, substantially alters the portrayal of the female figure, firstly and most obviously by reversing the figure. This figure of femininity has matured. Not only are the gestures that signify modesty altered, but so too are this figure’s gaze and expression. The fingers on the hand that covers her genitals have been splayed further open. This is a gesture that at once suggests concealment and invitation, signifying the characteristic potential for openness or incontinence of even the most chaste woman’s body. 79

Crooke, p. 197.

80

Crooke states that his illustrations ‘are no other then those of Vessalius, Plantinus, Platerus, Laurentius, Valverdus, Bauhinus and the rest’ (Crooke, p. 10). 81

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Fig. 9: Gravid female figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from Andreas Laurentius, De Anatomice […] (Paris, 1595), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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The left hand in this illustration covers the left breast, but in straightening the fingers of the hand and moving the point at which the tips of the fingers touch the sternum further across onto the right breast, the figure is made to appear to be presenting her breast to her (male) viewer, much as one presents a nipple to a hungry infant. This gesture may also hold the kind of association Carolyn Walker Bynum has argued for, that of Mary feeding the infant Christ and he in turn feeding the world with the blood of redemption that seeps from his chest wound.82 When one combines these factors that might otherwise be associated with the Madonna, with a direct and smiling gaze we see a seductress. The fact that this particular illustration appears on the frontispiece of the 1616 printing is contentious in itself. Crooke had been severely reprimanded for including explanations of the organs and process of generation in his book in the first edition (1615), and the book was under threat of destruction if the section in which this illustration appears (Book IV) was not removed. Crooke did not remove it and the books were not burned, which suggests that in using this figure at the front of the book, Crooke or his publisher, Jaggard, were thumbing their noses at the Physicians who had wished it to be suppressed.83 This figure and its Valverdean/Laurentian flayed companion were displaced on the frontispiece in the second edition (1631) by another Valverdean figure (Figs 11 and 12). This figure appeared in the body of the text in the first edition before being brought to prominence on the title page of the second. It shows the figure of a man who has seemingly obliged his audience and his anatomist by 82

Carolyn Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991). 83

Russell, British Anatomy, pp. 56–57. Russell quotes the following translation of an entry in the records of the Royal College of Physicians: “‘Comitia on the morrow of Palm Sunday 1615, April 3 […]. After the reading of the Statutes, the President informed the wife of Jaggard the printer with regard to Dr. Crooke’s book on anatomy and written in English, that the volume was completely condemned, and that if the fourth book were published in its present form, he would burn it wherever he might find it. Finally it was decided that Dr. Giffard and Dr. Clement should amend book four and book five, and the books were handed over to them. Each promised to read through and correct twenty four folios. The whole book was published.” Comparison of these books in the two issues does not reveal any evidence of alteration’ (p. 56). Crooke’s book went through at least four issues between 1615 and 1618 (ibid., pp. 56–57), which, if they went through similar runs of 48 per edition, means that approximately 192 copies of this book were produced, each to be sold at around six pounds, if the Barber-Surgeons’ ‘gift’ is any guide to its price. If there were that many copies produced in that short a span of time, it would seem to have been remarkably popular despite its price. Later editions are also known to have appeared in 1631, 1651, and 1695.

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flaying himself. Sawday has remarked of this and other male figures in anatomical illustrations that seem to be dissecting themselves, saying: The body which dissects itself is a graphic example of the willing acceptance of anatomical dissection. It is as though the anatomical demonstration is a project of such compelling intellectual excitement that even the dissected subject wishes to play an active part in the spectacle.84

Indeed. A male figure will take willing part for intellectual excitement, a female out of physical desire. It is generally accepted that the depiction of this figure has been influenced by representations of the Ethiopian Christian martyr St Bartholemew.85 Samuel Y. Edgerton has noted the striking similarity between the flayed skin that Valverde’s figure holds and Michelangelo’s depiction of St Bartholemew holding his own skin in The Last Judgement. He further suggests that the peeling off of the skin is analogous to the removal of one’s earthly sins, proposing that dissectors in Renaissance Italy would have been able to argue that they were performing a pious service to the community by transubstantiating criminals’ bodies whilst dissecting them.86 If one follows this through to the comparative import of the illustration, there is always hope of redemption for the male figures, but as we shall see below this is not the case for the female. This dermally deprived gentleman is, like the Venus figure, adapted from Valverde by Crooke’s engraver, but in this case only by the introduction of some crude changes to his musculature. His expression and stance still portray the nobility of bearing and saintly forbearance that characterizes the original. The only discernible difference is in the ghostly visage of the flayed skin. In Crooke’s version it appears to be looking out at the reader, and its expression is more pitiable than the fiercer-looking original. One could take this as a shift in emphasis from the stance of a proud Christian martyr to the resignation of a secularly punished criminal. However one interprets this, like Geminus’s use of Vesalius’s woodcuts, the majority of the illustrations used in Crooke’s text show little sign of emendation. This is a point to which I shall return at the end of this chapter. 84 Jonathan Sawday, ‘The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body’, in Renaissance Bodies (see n. 61, above), pp. 111–35 (p. 126). 85

Sawday prefers to read the figure as Marsyas and that the dissector, like Apollo, performs a libidinally charged act upon the anatomical subject. He believes that the anatomist is an extension of the sovereign’s word, inscribing a punishment on the body of the criminal; see Sawday, ‘The Fate of Marsyas’, pp. 113–16. 86

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Fig. 11: Male figure with flayed skin, London, W ellcome Institute, from Juan Valverde de Hamusco, Historia De La Composición Del Cuerpo Humano (Rome: Antonio de Salamanca, 1556), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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Whether or not this change from the provocative Eve to the martyred male figure was made because subversion of the Physician’s attempt to control the content of the text was no longer relevant, the choice of these two figures as the opening illustration to the book is pertinent. Like the Adam and Eve of Geminus, the male/masculine body is portrayed as martyred, thoughtful, and forbearing, and the female/feminine body is rendered in a sexualized form. Crooke’s detractor, who alluded to ‘Aretine’s’ postures, had a point. The representations of the female form in anatomical illustrations are, like ‘Aretine’s’ figures, highly eroticized. Jonathan Sawday argues that the trope of presenting the anatomical subjects as seemingly live creates the effect that the cadaver is complicit in the act of dissection. He notes that the cadaver in the frontispiece of Vesalius’s Fabrica, a female subject, looks toward Vesalius compliantly, as if yielding to the act, as if she ‘desires dissection’.87 One could also add to this that she is positioned with her genitals facing the reader, with her legs parted, breasts bared, and in a position that invites entry. As Laqueur notes, ‘she comes out at us from the plane of the picture’. Laqueur also observes that the rhetorical strategy of this frontispiece may be read as ‘an assertion of male power to know the female body and hence to know and control feminine Nature’.88 I would argue that it is not so much that the corpse desires dissection as that even a dead women is betrayed by her lustful nature. How could a Renaissance man conceive of a naked woman who does not express her sexual desires, those irresistible forces by which he believed she was ruled? Another critic’s objection, which Crooke defends himself and his publication against, brings out a certain irony in the terms he uses for his response: Another closeth more cunningly with me, Surely it is well done if it were well to do it. Such limited and reserued commendations I disavow: my reason is, because whilst they commend the beautie of the wall they vndermine and demolish the foundation [… ,] what [g]reater sort of wrong can there be, then to take a man by the beard with the one hand to kisse him, and to smite vnder the fift rib with the other & spil his bowels vpon the earth.89

Crooke seemingly echoes Macbeth’s complaint shortly before he goes to bloodily dispose of Duncan: ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well | It were done quickly.[…] | [W]e but teach Bloody instructions which, being taught, return | To plague th’ inventor.’90 Crooke’s ‘bloody instructions’ in the practice of anatomy

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87

Sawday, ‘The Fate of Marsyas’, p. 123; italics in the original.

88

Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 172–73.

89

Crooke, p. 10.

90

Shakespeare, Macbeth, I.7.1–2, 9–10.

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returned to plague him, but in a manner less fatal than that over which Macbeth worries. The fact that at one stage Crooke’s publication caused a stir at the College of Physicians did not stop his book from being extremely popular, nor did it stop the spawning of its even more popular epitome, Read’s Somatographia anthropine.

Alexander Read The fact that Read’s book followed Crooke’s ‘Booke at large’ would have made it a valuable pedagogical tool. As noted above, there is no conclusive evidence that they were used together in practice even if it is implied in Read’s dedication and the construction of his book. However, the popularity of each of the volumes, and the issuing of a second edition of Read by the same printer and at the same time as the second edition of Crooke’s volume certainly speaks of the breadth and the connection between the distribution of the two books.91 Indeed, Read, in his dedication ‘To the Courteous Reader’, certainly believes that his reasons for compiling his volume may be misconstrued, possibly because he feared being accused of conspiring with William Jaggard, the printer of both volumes, of taking advantage of Crooke’s work: The Printer therefore of the former great volume [Crooke’s], hath published this fmall Manuell, hoping it will prooue profitable and delightfull to fuch as are not able to buy or haue no time to perufe the other: defiring the Readers acceptance, becaufe it proceedeth frõ a mind defirous to giue fatifaction to all. Thus much I thought good to infinuate vnto thee, feeing we liue in a mifconftruing Age.92

However, it is the pedagogical function of the illustrations that appear in Read’s book that warrants attention. Read’s 1616 illustrations follow Crooke’s in all essential points (Fig. 13) except that the text is severely pared down, containing only brief explanatory information on the indicated structures. The page on which each of Read’s figures appears in Crooke’s book is given for all the plates, with directions to seek them in ‘the History of this Booke at large’. The volume is much smaller than Crooke’s and designed to be portable.

91

A second edition of Crooke appeared in 1631, and a second of Read in 1634, both printed by Cotes and sold by Michael Sparke ‘at the blew Bible in Green Arbor’ (Russell, British Anatomy, pp. 56–57, 161–62). 92

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Fig. 13: Anatomical illustration of a pregnant woman, London, Wellcome Institute, from Alexander Read, Somatographia anthropine, or a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1634), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute.

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We will not repeat ourselves by referring to the plates that recur in this ‘pocket’ edition of Crooke. Rather we will refer to part of Read’s preface ‘To the Courteous Reader’. Read justifies his distillation of Crooke’s compilation of the work of others, by pointing out some of the disadvantages of large anatomies, and the advantages of his own: [I]n the aforefaid Authors, the defcriptions of the parts being interpofed betweene the Figures, diftract the minde, and defraud the ftore houfe of memory; befides this the volumes are not portable: Whereas by the contrarie, this fmall volume prefenting all the partes of the body of man by continuation to the eie, impreffeth the Figures firmely in the mind, and being portable may be carried without trouble to the places appointed for diffection: where the collation of the Figures, with the Defcriptions, cannot but affoord greate contentment to the minde. The Printer therefore of the former great volume, hath publifhed this fmall Manuell, hoping it will prooue profitable and delightfull to fuch as are not able to buy or haue no time to perufe the other:93

The simplest justifications for the production of this volume are that it is affordable and readily portable, which the larger volumes are not. Read’s lauding of the lack of complex written explanation and disputation is intriguing. Read privileges the ‘Figures’, the illustrations, over the learned text, in essence because the written text is unnecessary. The written descriptions ‘distract the minde’ from the images which are clearly understandable to the observing eye. An illustration impresses the ‘Figures more firmely in the mind’, it aids in committing them to memory more forcefully: an anatomical picture is worth a thousand words. This privileging of the visual image over the written word is inherent in the titles of both Read’s reprinted Manuall (see Fig. 7) and the original Somatographia anthropine (1616) (Fig. 14). In the former the ‘Anatomy or dissection’ is not explained, it is ‘shewed’ so that it can be ‘methodically digested’ and thereby constructed. In the original it is much more simply stated. The purpose and means of the description of the body of man is by image first and words second: ‘by Artificiall Figures representing the members, and fit terms expressing the same’.94 When one reflects on just what is being presented to the eye for firm impression upon the mind this has important ramifications for the dynamics of the anatomy theatre. We have seen how the Vesalian woodcuts were re-engraved and made more easily accessible to the Barber-Surgeons and we have now seen the sorts of eroticized overlay which those engravings drew with them. The effect of these illustrations being firmly impressed on the minds of observers at public or

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Read, Somatographia anthropine, A3 r–v.

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Read, Somatographia anthropine, A3r.

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Fig. 14: Title-page, London, Wellcome Institute, from Alexander Read, Somatographia anthropine, or a Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1616), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute.

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private anatomies, then, is to propagate the idea that all the gendered, cultural, gestural, and aesthetic codes that are present in these representations of the bodies are in fact essential. This is not the same as saying they are biologically determined, as we will see is the case by the end of the century; it is more an affirmation of the Fallen Nature of Woman and the potential Divinity of Man as taught by the church. Read merely states explicitly what is already implicit in the whole process of theatrically displayed anatomy: the evidence of the eyes, and the comparison of the figure in the book with figure on the table, will render up the truth of embodiment. The same is no less true for the male body, but as we have seen in this period at least the male body does not have the same kind of capacity for being shifted so simply from laudable to venal: or if it does, it is rarely implemented. That ‘truth’ comes tied to a wealth of cultural presuppositions. The way in which the female body is depicted in the anatomical illustrations already discussed, and in others to be discussed in later chapters, together with the proliferation of small pamphlets that were indebted to them, is solely in terms of its generative function. The muscular, skeletal, and nervous systems are almost exclusively depicted on the male body, as are all the organs common to both males and females. The male form is predominantly shown as an écorché, flayed to varying degrees, like a martyred St Bartholomew or a Marsyas. The female body is never shown without some drapery of skin. The anatomized female is always seen in terms of her gender, her culture, and her sexual availability. This may in fact be the point upon which the differentiation between and the allied abstraction of the male and female body turns. The flayed and dismembered male body, even when depicted as the criminal he almost inevitably was in life has, as Park argues, a pathos thanks to the male body’s depiction as various martyrs of the faith. That is not the case for the smooth-skinned female body which is only shown in relation to its sexual capacity. A woman’s gender and sexuality are welded together in a way that a man’s is not and that affects ways and means by which it is abstracted. A woman’s body is only taken apart, rewritten, and resolidified in terms of the gendered codes that already defined her as ultimately subject to her sexual capacities. The sexual capacity of man is only one of many capacities, and when the organs of generation in a man are shown in dissection, they are excised from the body as a whole. It is ‘other’ than his essential likeness to God. Anatomy and anatomical illustration thereby becomes a vehicle for intensifying what is already explicit within the sociocultural context. The abstraction and resolidification of the male body, reflecting directly upon the men who sat in the scaffold stands from which they were learning to know themselves, is far more complex than the abstraction of the female form they carried out into the world.

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This has ramifications that reflect back on the representations of the feminine body in the books already discussed. If the figures that Geminus and Crooke disseminated were eroticized in their adaptation, expressing a moral disapprobation of the subject, this may also have been influenced by their knowledge of the conditions of supply of the bodies at anatomies. The Barber-Surgeons relied on the dissection of executed felons for their public anatomies even if they were able to perform ‘private’ anatomies and post-mortem on whatever bodies they could acquire. The rare feminine body on display in the public anatomies would have been that of a malefactor. As will be seen in Chapter 8, the crimes for which women found themselves at the gallows often involved sexual or sexually related misconduct. It is therefore consonant with Leonardo’s advice about representing the mind through the gestures of the body that the implied moral tenor of the mind of the ‘sitter’ should be visible in the codified figures which represented their deceased forms. The illustrations reflect an assumed moral turpitude regardless of the fact that pregnant women could not be hanged.

Reading the Anatomized Body In the preceding sections we have argued that aesthetic theories are necessarily infused with cultural assumptions about gender and that when those theories are mobilized in the depiction of the differentiated human form, those assumptions and prejudices are carried forward into anatomical illustrations. But as Park, Edgerton, and others argue, these illustrations do not express an evasion of a cultural taboo against the opening of bodies that existed in medieval and Renaissance Italy.95 When one takes into account that these manuals were designed to be used in front of a dissected cadaver, these drawings could not possibly allay the experience of the sight and smell of a dismembered body in front of the intended reader.96

95

Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, p. 3. Park argues that implicit in an anatomy is the punitive measure of public humiliation by forcible disrobing (pp. 12–13). See also Edgerton, Pictures and Punishment, pp. 233–34, on the callous attitudes to malefactors’ bodies in fifteenthand sixteenth-century Florence; and Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Not of Woman Born: Representations of Caesarean Birth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), on the frequency of caesarean sections and autopsies in medieval and Renaissance medicine. 96

Vesalius was also eager to observe his subjects in as fresh a state as possible, to the point of being able to observe the fluids in the pericardium of the heart while it was still beating. Hangings

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Nor, for similar reasons, does if follow that these illustrations betray an ‘anxiety that the processes of decomposition will efface not only status, wealth, ambition and knowledge […] but gender difference as well’.97 While it is possible to agree that ‘the destruction of gender [is] implicit in death’s disfigurement’98 — this is after all one of the promises of eternal life, equality of souls — these illustrations are really about death adding a layer of meaning to what existed on the operating table. They are about propagating a means of understanding, describing and abstracting the living even in death. The aesthetics that were unavoidably imported into the rendering of the anatomical subject through illustrations brought with them other implicit coding and significations. The codes that governed gender were inextricable from art theory and from general conceptions of the body. The practical effect of the policing of gender appropriate behaviour held a concomitant rhetorical function to that which is frequently accorded to sex today. The anatomical plates that circulated in England in the early seventeenth century are more about gender than what is now commonly understood by the term sex but, as such, their obsession with the conventions of what it is to be masculine or feminine is as socially and politically potent as any assertion of what it was to be ‘naturally’ male or female in the eighteenth century, or is to be genetically male or female in the twentieth. Anatomical treatises were used as pedagogical texts and, as such, were agents in justifying and proliferating stereotypical views of what it was to be a man or a woman. Anatomy theatres like that of the Barber-Surgeons of London supported and displayed the abstraction of the body: the eyes of an audience may have seen the same internal organs displayed in the cadaver before them as a medical student would today, but the intellectual conception of embodiment that resulted was subject to the contemporary cultural factors implicated in the abstraction of men and women, and mediated through, the illustrations in anatomical texts. The exemplary human body is a model of perfection, created by God in just and true proportions. It is the proper model for the construction of buildings, which will were also arranged to coincide with his dissections; see Park, ‘Criminal and Saintly Body’, p. 19. Further, if Vesalius had so particularly wanted to avoid showing the reality of a visceral lecture, why would he allow the first image to confront the reader on opening the text to be that of himself at the centre of lively scene of an anatomy in progress, staring out of the frame with his hand in the bowels of a female cadaver? 97

Valerie Traub, ‘Gendering Mortality in Early Modern Anatomies’, in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 44–92 (p. 50). 98

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reflect the harmony of Man’s God-given dimensions. It is also the proper form for contemplation, iconic representation, and anatomical investigation in order to know oneself and thereby know God and his wondrous works. The human body is, then, the model upon which the anatomical theatre is built, which, in turn, is built to explore the perfection (and imperfection) of that upon which it is modelled, the human body: that is to say, the male body. All this is framed within a dramatic context, both as the production in the theatre and the production of the theatre. Let us now look at two anatomical figures taken from life and at specific examples of cultural coding as presented to the wider audiences of the playhouses, including several that refer directly to the processes of the anatomy theatre.

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s in the anatomy theatre, so too in the playhouse and the courtroom the comportment and disposition of the body is integral to the construction of the figures who ‘strut and fret’ upon their stages. 1 Actors were and are active participants in the layered and ambiguous abstraction of meaning. It is the very foundation of performance — at once drawing away from the given embodiment of the persons doing the acting and the lifting out of the activity on the stage to inhabit the playwright’s projected time and place, but also constrained by the cultural understandings of the contemporary theatregoer. In London’s early-modern playhouses, gesture, clothing, and speech were used to construct characters the audience would recognise. Accustomed to identifying ‘types’, like those explicitly described in Thomas Overbury’s popular A Wife (London, 1614), an experienced playgoer knew what to expect of a player who exhibited certain behaviour patterns or spoke and dressed in a particular way. A basic condition of that recognition was there were no females in the plays, only feminine characters, so femininity was entirely ‘staged’. The audience was also frequently included in the action of the performance through the actors’ use of asides, and also through their own freely voiced approval or disapproval of the standard of performance. At the Sessions House a similar kind of rebellious interactivity was not unknown at the proceedings. Further, the same kind of visual literacy that allowed a playhouse audience to identify characters was at work in the courthouse. There the audience’s interpretation of the embodied experience of the unwilling actor in the

1

The discussion of The White Devil and Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry in this chapter is a reworked and extended version of what appeared in 2004 in my article ‘Blood and Circuses’.

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dock revealed the ‘truth’ as clearly as it was revealed to barber-surgical apprentices by the evidence of the body on the anatomy table. In Act III of The White Devil these three epistemological realms intersect. Vittoria Corombona — the central female character — has been arraigned for infidelity and on suspicion of being an accessory to the murder of her husband: W hat are whores? They are those flattering bels have all one tune At weddings, and at funerals: your ritch whores Are only treasuries by extortion fild, And empted by curs’d riot. They are worse, Worse then dead bodies, which are beg’d at gallowes And wrought upon by surgeons, to teach man W herin hee is imperfect. W hats a whore? Shees like the guilty counterfetted coine W hich who so eare first stampes it brings in trouble All the receave it. ( III .ii.92–102)

In Cardinal Monticelso’s biblically inspired rhetoric whores — and by extension potentially all women — are corrupt and corrupting in the most literal sense. The allusions to the gallows, anatomical pedagogy, whoredom, and the law contained within this one speech have a direct connection to, and draw together, all the concerns of this book. Webster is referring directly to the practices of the BarberSurgeons of London, whose hall was within easy walking distance of the Red Bull where this play was first staged. The criminal history of one woman — Elizabeth Evans, known as Canonbury Besse — extends upon the nexus of sex, death, and display at work in this dramatic example. Besse was hanged as an accessory to the murders committed by her partner in life and in crime, Thomas Sherwood, and she was ‘after her execution conveied to Barber Surgions Hal’.2

Besse and Tom Like Vittoria Corombona and other representations of exorbitant women of her time, in the pamphlet that records her fate Besse is depicted as being as free with her mouth as she is with her body. Sinfulness, criminality, and corruption are 2

H. G. [Henry Goodcole], Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry Sent after Lust and Murder (London: N. & I. Okes, 1635), C3 r.

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gendered, and Grandmother Eve is at the heart of Besse’s and consequently Tom’s fall. Though she died ‘very penitent’, she was not spared the fate of many a victim of the Tyburn Tree. None of the identifiable anatomized bodies from early in the century appear in Jeaffreson’s Middlesex records, nor has it been possible to trace any of them in the surviving pamphlets dedicated to notorious criminals.3 The burial records from St Olaves, Silver Street, which have notes next to names identifying them as anatomies from the hall may variously have been minor criminals, paupers from a hospital, or the subjects of ‘private’ anatomy. Without further supporting evidence such as legal records it is almost impossible to discern. While there are a handful of names identified as anatomies between 1600 and 1608, Besse is the only felon who became an anatomical subject whose tale it has been possible so far to trace prior to the Restoration.4 Indeed, from the offhand references made in contemporary plays, the clear right to attain bodies, and the lack of public anxiety about their retrieval it seems very much as if anatomy was a well-known but ‘unremarkable’ practice. As we shall see in more detail in Part III, the social and political conditions that led to the Tyburn riots at the end of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, which Peter Linebaugh has written of with such passion and clarity, did not obtain prior to the Restoration.5 While later in the century the names of numerous anatomized felons can be followed through the burial records and accounts of St Olaves, Besse does not appear in either for the very simple reason that she was never accorded the final dignity of being interred. She is, however, mentioned in the BarberSurgeons’ Court Minutes for 29 March 1638: It is ordered that Edward Arris and Hen: Boone shall have libertie to sett up in o r Theater a Sceleton by them wrought on when they were Masters Anatomysts on the body of Cañbury besse to be placed on the Corbell stone of the Signe of Libra6

Canonbury Besse and her confederate in crime, ‘Countrey Tom’ (Thomas Sherwood), had been hanged in April 1635 for the murder of three men. Tom had bludgeoned the men prior to robbing them, and Besse had assisted him by drawing in the ‘gulls’ and fleecing them once they had been attacked. Henry

3

Joseph H. Marshburn, Murder and Witchcraft in England, 1550–1640: As Recounted in Pamphlets, Ballads, Broadsides and Plays (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), and Dolan, Dangerous Familiars, are two detailed and useful studies of this genre.

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4

See the appendix, below.

5

Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riots’ and The London Hanged, passim.

6

Young, p. 337.

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Goodcole’s reporting of the confession and penitence of Tom demonstrates the kind of submission before God that Essex displayed in 1601, which was considered appropriate behaviour at the gallows.7 In Goodcole’s narrative Sherwood confesses all his crimes, including the murder of one victim for whose death he had not been indicted, and is brought to salvation in his final hours. Even though Goodcole reports that Tom was the one to wield the blows that killed each of the men who died, the bulk of the moral disapprobation in this ‘Hue and Cry’ falls to Besse.8 Goodcole relates how Besse broke at least half of God’s commandments, in the appropriate biblical order. Besse’s primary crime was that she was a disgrace to the ‘very good parentage’ in Shropshire from whom she was ‘descended’. When she was sent into service in London for her improvement she ‘grew acquainted with a young man in London, who tempted her unto folly, and by that ungodly act her suddain ruine insued’.9 Her ‘ungodly act’ was stereotypically sexual, and Goodcole relates that she became a prostitute for four years before she met Tom, from which time she was his constant companion until they were apprehended for their crimes a year later. As a prostitute Besse acted as the ‘decoy Ducke’,10 in order to tempt each of the victims from the main road, after which Tom then attacked and murdered them. 7

See J. A. Sharpe, ‘“Last Dying Speeches”: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present, 107 (1985), 144–67; Beach Langston, ‘Essex and the Art of Dying’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 13 (1950), 109–29; Samuel Y. Edgerton, ‘Maniera and the Mannaia: Decorum and Decapitation in the Sixteenth Century’, in The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. by Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1972), pp. 67–103; and Donald T. Siebert, ‘The Aesthetic Execution of Charles I: Clarendon to Hume’, in Executions and the British Experience from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century: A Collection of Essays, ed. by William B. Thesing (London: McFarland, 1990), pp. 7–27, for examples of the rhetoric of the penitent ‘good death’ at the gallows. 8

In this respect, as Langbein argues, it is a fairly representative example of its genre: ‘The crimes narrated [in Elizabethan and Jacobean chap-books] break down into three somewhat overlapping categories, each having a manifest appeal to sensation-seeking readers: (1) especially gruesome murders, often involving dismemberment of the burning of the corpse; (2) crimes of witchcraft (easily the most numerous); and (3) crimes of betrayal against a spouse or master.[…] Persons of gentle status appear as culprits and victims in a surprising proportion of the pamphlets, especially in non-witchcraft cases; perhaps it excited the readership when felony overflowed its normal course within the lower orders’ ( John H. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, Germany, France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 46). 9

H. G., [A4]v .

10

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Besse was tempted into a lustful life and death, just as Eve was tempted by the Devil, and in Tom’s gallows confession Besse, like Eve, is cast as the source of her partner’s downfall. Goodcole was a pious man of the cloth, so his rhetoric is far from unusual but it is pertinent as a background to Besse and Tom’s eventual fates. Tom’s confession lays the blame for the criminal turn his life took and his imminent execution squarely at Besse’s door, ‘admonishing all that did see him that day, to beware of Whores, for they were the worst Company in the World, wishing all to beware by his fall, and not to be seduced, or blind-fold led, as hee was by such bewitching creatures, to irrevocable ruine’.11 Between the narrative of Tom’s confession to the murders, and Besse’s gallows speech, there are a further two pages, supposedly imparted to Goodcole by Tom, warning both of the ways in which ‘lewd’ women may approach one, and the places where one can find such women at work. In her gallows speech, Besse is reported to have expressed ‘a perfect hate, and exclamation against all Theeves, which caused her destruction’.12 In the report of her contrition before her demise Besse is not allowed either the degree of dignity or the detailed reporting accorded to Tom. Further, at the moment when she is allowed to express herself, in a very public manner, her words do not form just a confession or warning; they become a shrewish railing of ‘perfect hate’. Is it any wonder that, though she ‘died very penitent’, she was ‘after her execution conveied to Barber Surgions Hal for a Skeleton having her bones reserved in a perfect forme of her body which is to beseene, and now remaines in the aforesaid Hall’.13 This information is repeated, with less sympathy and more relish, at the end of the pamphlet: ‘the Coy-duck, or divellish allurer to sinne and confusion, was dissected and her dryed Carkase or Sceleton of Bones and Gristles is reserv’d, in proportion to be seene in Barber Surgeons Hall.’14 The very notoriety of her crime may have influenced her anatomists to make her a permanent exhibit. And it appears Tom’s remains were retrieved from the gibbet at ‘Ring-crosse’ to join her at some date before 1638, the elements and the wildlife having done the anatomists’ work for them.15 Indeed it is intriguing both that Goodcole should have chosen to record 11

H. G., [B4]v .

12

H. G., C2 v.

13

H. G., C3r.

14

H. G., [C4]r.

15

Edward Hatton, New View of London, 2 vols (London: R . Chiswell, 1708), quoted in Young, p. 134. When Arris and Boone made their request to place Besse in the theatre a matching corbell stone was allotted for a male figure at the same time. From Hatton’s account it is clear the

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this particular crime after what he notes has been a long hiatus in his sermonising reports, and that this particular pair became a permanent exhibition at the hall. We will enter a fuller discussion of the aesthetics and material conditions of Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre in the following chapter but it is pertinent that this pair of skeletons was instated as an integral part of its decorative iconography which included the signs of the zodiac around its elliptical interior. Besse was such a perfect example of corrupt femininity that she was ensconced over Libra’s judicial scales, while Tom took up the position allotted to Taurus: both had ‘the planett Venus governeing those twoe signes underneath’.16 The irony of the astrological associations would surely not have been lost on anyone entering the theatre who knew the exhibits’ history — though the allusions to lust and judgement would have been patently obvious even without that knowledge. Although Besse and Tom’s crimes and their reporting took place twenty years after Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi were first performed, the connection between the construction of Besse’s criminal femininity and the Cardinal’s misogynistic declamation against whores is far from tenuous. Goodcole was a literate religious man writing across a period when the playhouses were the focus of great tension precisely because the characters they portrayed were considered a danger to the moral fabric of society. Whether he approved of the playhouses or not, his presentation of character and the shaping of the narrative of Besse’s and Tom’s demise and the abstraction of their persons as ‘characters’ are clearly influenced by broadly understood stereotypical flaws. Further, Goodcole is every bit as much a dramatist in his construction of their tale as Webster is in painting Vittoria’s descent into iniquity. These are stock characters, but Webster’s apparent fascination with the workings of this particular London anatomy theatre is a window to a wider understanding and abstraction of embodiment that gains in strength across the seventeenth century. In Besse we have an actual woman known to be a ‘whore’ whose dead body will ‘teache man wherein he is imperfect’ by showing him exactly wherein human imperfection lies. The remains of this feminine body are quite literally corrupt. Besse is a desiccated exemplar of the danger of the pleasures of the flesh. This felonious pair was still on display in the anatomy theatre in 1666, and one assumes that Tom’s and Besse’s skeletons were those whose safe return to

skeleton that was placed there by 1638 was popularly known as Country Tom and there is little reason to doubt that they were in fact his remains. 16

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the anatomy theatre was compensated after the confusion of the Great Fire.17 Though there are many popular allusions to their fate as a warning there is no other record of such a pair being prepared at the hall. Like the anatomical illustrations before the apprentices, she and Tom stood reinforcing the Delphic message, nosce te ipsum. The rhetoric surrounding her death and her anatomization casts her fate as a just end to a sinful career. It is applauded, at least by Goodcole. The anatomization of an individual person in such obvious and direct connection with the workings of justice does not reappear until well into the eighteenth century with the passing of the ‘Murder Act’ (1752). I do not believe legal justice is particularly important to Besse’s narrative. The judicial processes through which she and Tom passed, their imprisonment in Newgate and trial at the Sessions House, is dealt with and disposed of in little more than a paragraph. Rather, she is receiving God’s judgement and his punishment upon an aberrant, exorbitant woman, undisturbed by popular disapproval. By the beginning of the period that Linebaugh has studied, the public could no longer be relied upon to assent tacitly to anatomical dissection after capital punishment, as we shall see in Part III. But in the twenty years and more before Besse and Tom were hanged, revenge plays like The White Devil had been resolidifying an abstracted norm that Goodcole has them play out in their deaths.

Onstage and on Trial John Webster was merely one playwright whose dramatic works were a part of that process, but his plays stand out for the direct allusions he makes between sin and the practice of anatomical dissection in London. Two of his plays draw out the power of those connections. The White Devil (c. 1612) was first presented at a public theatre, the Red Bull, though apparently not with the success Webster desired.18 Two years later The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614), which is stylistically

17 Young, p. 414. During the fire the ‘valuables’ of the company, including the Holbein of Henry VIII’s incorporation of the company, were removed to places of safety, although by luck the theatre actually escaped any damage. One skeleton was returned by a ‘poore fellow’ and another had been in the possession of a ‘Cobler’. Besse was not the only feminine relic in the theatre. Apparently in 1645 two human skins ‘in imitation of Adam and Eve’ were erected in the theatre (Hatton, cited in Young, p. 134). 18

Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. by Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964). The Latin digressions are alienating enough to a modern reader of ‘small Latin and less Greek’, let alone the ‘ignorant asses’ looking for entertainment in a ‘black’ theatre on the

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similar to The White Devil,19 was a success at the Blackfriars private theatre and was subsequently transferred to even more popular approval at the Globe.20 These plays deal with the often bloody, maintenance of the boundaries of the body with a particular concentration on feminine corruption. Such concerns are the grist of revenge tragedy. In reading The White Devil we will confine the discussion to the ways in which the White Devil herself, Vittoria, is constructed as an abstract representation of one of the variations on femininity-in-general. We will interleave that with a discussion of a series of anatomical plates that support the same biblical allusions being made by both Goodcole and Webster. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, abstraction is the basic condition of ‘playing’. Characters are abstractions of the particularities of social being in the most basic and obvious sense. They are constructions made up of traits lifted away from any actual person, and transiently resolidified on and within the body of the actor. The same dynamic is present in Goodcole’s narrative. The abstraction of femininity on the stage is all the more intense during this period for the further obvious fact that all female characters were played out upon the bodies of males. James’s argument that female bodies are far more easily abstracted than the male body in political symbols — because men retain their individuality even when they are held up as abstract representations and women become ‘everywoman’ — both holds and is tested in this practice. The representation of a female persona is easily achieved and believed when played out on the body of a boy because ‘she’ is inevitably a recognizable stereotype whose being is based largely on appearance. ‘She’ is never anything but one of the variables of ‘everywoman’. When one looks to male characters they are no less stereotypical. However, they are given far more lines and a much greater range of language with which to weave a persona and to build a sense of abstracted

‘dull’ winter afternoon that Webster complains of in his preface to the first edition (1612). The Duchess of Malfi played at both the Blackfriars and the Globe according to the title page of its first edition (London: John Waterson, 1623), and to much greater acclaim. It is tempting to believe that Vittoria’s objection to the Latin pontificating of the prosecuting lawyer in the arraignment scene (III.ii) may have been ‘improved’ in the printed version in response to the disapprobation of the Red Bull audience. 19

Quotations from The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil are cited from The Works of John Webster, Volume I, ed. by David Gunby and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 20

See Charles R . Forker, The Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 114, for the possible sequence of events of its staging.

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individuality. The most notable ‘individual’ from this period, Hamlet, has a legendary number of lines for the actor to build the melancholy character of the Prince of Denmark, and has been held up by some as one of the finest studies in human psychology in the English language. Even the most verbose female character is lucky to have more lines than the smaller male characters of the earlymodern stage. Young actors were apprenticed for larger parts through playing females, so there are good practical reasons for this to be the case. However, that does not weaken the political outcome. If anything, it affirms it. The issue of women’s speech and the correlation with their sexually incontinent bodies is at the heart of the desires to control and suppress the female characters in this play.21 Within that context, Vittoria Corombona is overtly identified with concupiscent grandmother Eve. As Bromley puts it, ‘in this society, a woman who demands to be heard, who asserts herself rather than yielding to her adversary, proves herself to be a whore, fury, or devil.[…] The suggestions of devilry merge naturally with the sexual accusations through the connections with Eve, the woman as temptress in league with the devil.’22 Vittoria not only succumbs to the corrupting tongue of her brother Flamineo (a silver-tongued Serpent) who seeks to profit by bawding her to Brachiano, she in turn actively persuades Brachiano (a faltering Adam) to hasten his fall by suggesting how they may become one flesh. She teaches ‘him in a dreame | To make away his Dutchesse and her husband’ (I.ii.239–40). Vittoria.

Brachiano.

Methought I walkt about the mid of night, Into a Church-yard, where a goodly Eu Tree Spred her large roote in ground. Under that Eu, As I sat sadly leaning on a grave, Checkered with crosse-sticks, there came stealing in Your Dutchesse and my husband; one of them A picax bore, th’other a Rusty spade, And in rough termes they gan to challenge me, About this Eu. That Tree.

21

See Sheryl A. Stevenson, ‘“As Differing as Two Adamants”: Sexual Difference in The White Devil ’, in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, ed. by Carole Levin and Karen Robertson (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1991), pp. 159–74 (pp. 163–64). 22

Laura G. Bromley, ‘The Rhetoric of Feminine Identity in The White Devil ’, in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. by Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (London: Scarecrow, 1991), pp. 50–70 (pp. 50, 56).

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Fig. 15: Visio prima, Sydney, RACP Library, from Johannes Remmelin, Catoptrum Microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannis Görlini, 1639), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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This harmelesse Eu. They told me my entent was to root up That well-growne Eu, and plant i’th steed of it A withered blacke-thorne, and for that they vow’d To bury me alive: my husband straight W ith picax gan to dig, and your fell Dutchesse W ith shovell, like a fury, voyded out The earth and scattered bones — ( I .ii.216–31)

Vittoria uses this ‘harmless’ yew, a tree commonly planted in graveyards as a symbol of eternal life, to suggest her life is being threatened and urge the despatch of Isabella and Camillo. The delicious irony that Webster leads us to savour is that Vittoria is speaking the truth even as she means to deceive. In schooling Brachiano to commit murder, there is just such a threat not only to her husband and Isabella, but also to her own and Brachiano’s eternal lives. These are commonly understood conceits, appearing in the similarly corrupt Tamora’s bloody machinations in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (II.iii.92–108). The ‘dismal’, ‘barren and detested vale’, and the ‘abhorrèd pit’ that Tamora incants for those listening is a hellmouth, a fetid womb, and a prime example of dangerous untamed nature redolent with supernatural associations that is clearly related to Vittoria Corombona’s murder-inducing dream landscape.23 This imagery also circulated in anatomy theatres. If we look at the visio prima of Johannes Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum (Fig. 15), we can see an example of the explicit connection being made between the corrupting nature of a woman’s sexual organs, death, and anatomy that was in print contemporaneously with The White Devil. As we have seen, there was a great ‘trade’ between English and Continental students of anatomy and K. F. Russell’s detailed and careful work on this one publication shows how widely and speedily it was disseminated.24 It went on to appear in five languages and at least twenty-two printings 23

See Marion Wynne-Davies, ‘“The Swallowing Womb”: Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus’, in The Matter of Difference: Feminist Materialist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. by Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 129–51 (p. 135). See also Gillies, pp. 106–08. Dorothea Kehler actually sees Tamora as another white devil, connecting her more directly with Vittoria Corombona; see her ‘“That Ravenous Tiger Tamora”: Titus Andronicus’s Lusty Widow, Wife and M/Other’, in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. by Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 317–32 (p. 324). 24

Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin. In Chapter 8 we will see how Clopton Havers reworked this extremely popular flap-anatomy in his English-language version (London,

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in the space of the following 150 years.25 Remmelin’s flap-anatomy is representative of the kinds of plagiarized Vesalian plates that were in use in other publications and of the sorts of cheap ‘Adam and Eve’ flap-anatomy pamphlets and fugitive sheets that were extremely popular with Barber-Surgeons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which were used to illuminate the walls of their shops.26 So it was of a genre that had far wider compass than other anatomical texts. The plates in this text are surrounded by a surfeit of Christian moralizing. There are biblical verses and intercessional prayers printed around the borders and on the banderols, plaques, and iconic images scattered over the plates, all of which warn against the imminence and inevitability of death. Most of the marginal written exhortations were added after the first edition, not original to the 1613 version, but these wordy intercessions only serve to emphasize the rhetorical content that is already in place in the imagery of these illustrations. The moral rhetoric of the illustrations in this flap-anatomy is repeated across Vittoria’s speech, Goodcole’s narrative of Tom’s corruption, and in the Barber-Surgeons’ anatomization of Besse. This small publication makes explicit what we have already seen was rendered with barely more subtlety in Crooke and Read. The central object of the illustration, rising out of the foreground of the graveyard depicted in the visio prima, is a headless, limbless, pregnant female torso. It is flanked on either side by a male and a female figure, the male on the reader’s left and a female on the right. These two figures balance on one precarious leg apiece, on plinths. They participate in what is a conventional trope of using the trappings of classical statuary to illustrate human anatomy. These figures are covered by a series of flaps which may be lifted to discover representations of the venous, nervous, muscular, and skeletal systems. At the base and rising from behind each of these are further emblems: on the left a ‘King’ rises out of the earth holding not a ‘picax’ but a staff or sceptre, and on the right a skull emerges, holding a ‘Rusty spade’. 1695, 1702), based on two earlier printings which had been ‘Englished by John Ireton, Chirurgeon’ (London, 1670, 1675). 25 Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin, pp. 76–77. Russell states that all English editions were based on the 1613 printing, rather than the 1619 edition. The edition I have used for the early illustrations used in my figures come from the 1639 Ulm edition which is based on the 1619 edition. Russell states that there are some basic anatomical differences between the 1613 and the 1619 editions, that the allegorical scenes on the plinths replaced Remmelin’s family arms and his portrait, and that some peripheral scrollwork was added to the visio secunda and visio tertia. I have restricted my comments on the peripheral material to what was common, following Russell, to both the 1613 and the 1619 editions. 26

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Fig. 16: Visio prima, Sydney, RACP Library, from Johannes Remmelin, Catoptrum Microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannis Görlini, 1639), in folio. Detail: gravid female torso. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

This image has a lot to offer pedagogically on the construction of femininity and the literal and metaphorical corruption inherent in the female body; and it is a pictorial representation eerily redolent of Vittoria’s dream. The monumental supports from behind which the King/Camillo and the death’s head/Isabella appear are decorated with warnings about the transience of earthly life. Like the ‘harmless Eu’ with which Vittoria disingenuously associates herself, the fecund torso rises out of the soil, bearing the promise of regeneration. It also carries in it the more base associations the Cardinal attributes to Vittoria. Cast between Adam and Eve or Venus and Mars, resting on the soil from which Man came and to which he must return, this classical female torso has three concealing flaps. The flap at the base holds the two flaps above it closed. These two vertically opposed flaps have the contours of a pregnant belly drawn on them. The imagery and writing on the lower flap are a direct warning to those who would look under it at the dangerous organs beneath. The lower flap (Fig. 16) chastely conceals the external genitals, and the vertically opposed stomach flaps cover the internal reproductive organs. Beneath these two flaps there are several levels of representations, one of which is a foetus in situ. All of them are situated above the gaping vulva which is concealed by the lower flap. This lower flap is printed with the engraving of what appears to be Medusa’s, or possibly a devil’s, head which is surrounded by four words: invidia (envy), orge

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(anger), neanias (a young man or wilfulness), and diabole (slander).27 The traits being associated with female genitalia, and femininity in general, may be a general reference to the composition of womanhood or, in a related manner, refer specifically to four of the deadly sins (envy, wrath, pride, and avarice?), but it is difficult to make sense of the exact significance of the words. The use of the Medusa’s head ties in with some of Sawday’s arguments on the Medusa and the female organs of generation.28 But whatever the intention of the text, the overall effect is to convey an exhortation to every ‘young man’ that through this portal there lies danger. All the other flaps in this text either join together to form the surface of the body being displayed or are swathes of cloth, pieces of plant, or smoke, which assist in keeping bodily flaps closed. Although the other flaps may be redolent with allegorical content, this flap stands out. Both the flap and the disposition of the engravings upon it mimic what they hide; an explicit view of the external female genitalia. The view they mirror, however, is visible only during gynaecological examination, sexual intercourse, or in ancient representations of female fecundity such as the sheela-na-gig.29 The outer line of this flap, and the shape of the drawing upon it, follow the shape of the labia majora, and the inner tracery, that of the labia minora. The little teardrop on which invidia is inscribed mimics the position of the clitoris. The demon’s or gorgon’s face, with its open mouth, is positioned where the vaginal opening would be, and the word orge inscribed on its forehead follows the line of the upper curve of the vaginal opening. This is a figural representation of the abstraction of women’s bodies as sexually insatiable and available, and as possessed of multiple, interchangeable, incontinent, and dangerous orifices. The female body is both the gate to terrestrial life and, potentially, to eternal damnation. This flap presents a warning to ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here’ — the female genitals are potentially as dangerous as the head of the Medusa — warding off all who are tempted with further platitudes about the inherent danger and filthy state of the female genital organs. To enter the female

27

Kindly translated by Professor Saul Bastomsky of the Department of Classics, Monash University — invidia is Latin; the rest are Greek. 28

Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, pp. 6–15; and with Edwin Mullins’s observations on the linking of female sexuality in art with myths of the Medusa and witchcraft, The Painted Witch: Female Body; Male Art (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985), pp 40–45. 29

The sheela-na-gig is a medieval Celtic representation of femininity, usually carved in stone, in which the female genitals are prominently displayed. They are found in both Ireland and Britain.

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body one must expose oneself, memento mori. These organs are the epitome of the temptations of flesh and are both proffered and defended by a symbol of feminine power. But entry into this world via those organs is also the only hope ‘Man’ has of entering heaven. It is only through terrestrial life that one gains a chance of resurrection and life eternal. It is also a source of irresistible pleasure. The hope that can come out of this warning of danger is reinforced by the images which sit directly above this torso. Atop this truncated, heavily pregnant form — on the central axis of the plate — is a heart, exposed thorax, and anatomized head which appear to be straining towards the heavenly sunburst that sits above them. A Tetragrammaton 30 is engraved on the glowing clouds, which are flanked by angels. The banderol that encircles the angels is inscribed with Psalms 34. 8: ‘Oh taste and see that the Lord is good! Happy is the man who takes refuge in him’. Though this psalm is an addition from the 1619 edition, the head rising out of the torso which is fixed on the earth and wedded to corporeal decay dates from the original and it appears to be trying to do just as the Psalm exhorts. The gaping mouth, which as we have seen along with the heart and thorax would have been taken from a male body, stretches out to taste the lower reaches of heaven like the stretching limbs of a goodly yew tree. Man that is of woman born may have but a short time to live but if ‘he’ strives towards heaven ‘he’ may taste eternal life. Although there is every possibility that Webster had seen flap-anatomies in barber-surgeons’ shops, even visited the company and seen them at work anatomizing bodies with illustrated texts to aid them,31 I am not suggesting that there need be a direct correlation between the imagery Webster evokes and this particular anatomical illustration. I am suggesting that both playwrights and anatomists were influenced by a plethora of images and allegorical associations which would lead them to have strikingly similar visions of ‘corrupt’ femininity. Biblically inspired representations such as illustrations of Death and the Maiden, the Dance of Death, emblemata, and memento mori are just a few of the many influences that were circulating to which educated men like Crooke, Read, Remmelin, and 30 31

The sacred Hebrew four-letter name of God.

Webster has been identified as a Merchant Taylor, or as having been born ‘free’ of their company; see, Forker. Tailors and other guildsmen frequently bound their apprentices through the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons. Although one was required to legally bind (i.e., enter into a contract with) an apprentice for seven years, different companies charged different rates for performing this service and the Barber-Surgeons’ fees were probably lower than the Taylors’ and others: Mr Ian Murray, archivist at the Worshipful Company of Barbers, personal communication, July 1996.

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Webster would have been exposed. They all formed a part of the matrix of associations that helped to construct and abstract a particular view of embodiment, one which saw femininity and the female body — from one angle at least — as inherently, putridly sexual. This has a more benign expression in the illustrations that were discussed in Chapter 2 but they are nevertheless rhetorically related. There is a striking correlation between what Remmelin and other anatomists paid artists to render on the page in arresting visual images and what Webster makes flesh through an actor on the stage. The imputation against the feminine body contained in this drawing and in the passage quoted above is reiterated in great detail by Cardinal Monticelso regarding Vittoria in the arraignment scene: Monticelso.

Vittoria. Monticelso.

You see my Lords what goodly fruict she seemes, Yet like those apples travellers report To grow where Sodom and Gomora stood, I will but touch her and you straight shall see Sheele fall to soote and ashes. Your invenom’d Poticary should doo’t. I am resolved Were there a second Paradice to loose This Devell would betray it. ( III .ii.63–71)

Vittoria is a second Eve who will betray a second paradise and she is also a fruit that, once consumed, will lead to a descent into death.32 She also carries that most feminine of traits that appears in a more benign incarnation in Isabella and characters of her ilk, deceptiveness. Vittoria’s external mask looks wholesome enough but like a prostitute’s mask or the courtesan’s paint, it shields a rotten inside. Monticelso goes on to point to her untoward public life as more evidence of her looseness,33 eventually calling her a whore. Vittoria rebuts this charge by feigning ignorance of the concept,34 but Monticelso expounds upon the topic, all

32

See Bromley, p. 56.

33

Dena Goldberg has made an excellent case for the total lack of a private space in this play, which means that Vittoria has no choice but to be a ‘public’ woman; see her ‘“By Report”: The Spectator as Voyeur in Webster’s The White Devil’, English Literary Renaissance, 17 (1987), 67–84 (p. 77). 34

Bromley states that in rebuffing the application of the word whore Vittoria means ‘both that it is unrecognizable and inapplicable’ (p. 57).

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the while impugning her character by enthusiastically recounting her supposed venal qualities: Ile give their perfect character. They are first, Sweete meates which rot the eater: In mans nostrill Poison’d fumes. They are coosning Alcumy, Shipwrackes in Calmest weather. […] What are whores? They are those flattering bels have all one tune At weddings, and at funerals: your ritch whores Are only treasuries by extortion fild, And empted by curs’d riot. They are worse, Worse then dead bodies, which are beg’d at gallowes And wrought upon by surgeons, to teach man W herin hee is imperfect. ( III.ii.80–83, 92–99)

In structure this reads like one of Sir Thomas Overbury’s characters which were written as wryly or sarcastically ‘humourous’ stereotypes.35 The venom of Monticelso’s description and the seriousness of the charges being laid against Vittoria underscore the prejudices and negate any humour carried forward from the character genre. Nor do I believe that Monticelso’s speech is meant to be confined to encapsulating the character of a whore. By the time he finishes his diatribe he is naming and defining women in general.36 Monticelso constructs feminine subjectivity and he can do this because even though he is a ‘bad’ man, a representation of a cardinal soon to be pope being played in a fiercely Protestant land, he is still the character of a man, and epistemological power resides with him. If he says Vittoria is a whore, she is a whore.

35

As F. R . Lucas and other editors of Webster’s works have noted, Webster has been associated with the 1615 printing of Overbury’s Sir Thomas Overbury his Wife: With Additions of New Characters […] and probably contributed the ‘new characters’ to that printing; see The Complete Works of John Webster, ed. by F. L. Lucas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927; repr. 1966) I, 54). 36

‘Not only does the language of the dominant actually confer identity on the subordinate, but the latter can only resist this process in terms of the same language’ and ‘the figure of Vittoria should be viewed in relation to the image of the disorderly or unruly woman — the woman on top — found extensively in literature, wood cuts, broadsheets, pictorial illustrations and popular festivity’ ( Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1984), pp. 235, 240).

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Chapter 3 Play on words in itself does not damage a reputation; innuendo alone does not shift the emphasis from potentiality for blame (an incautious marriage, provocative behaviour) to blameworthiness. Reputations are damaged by harmful accusations made under socially significant circumstances.[…] It does not matter that a woman is called ‘whore’, it matters when and where she is.37

Vittoria, like Shakespeare’s Desdemona, undermines her own position by trying to enter into masculine discourse and, like Tamora, she thoroughly damns her character by doing so in the eyes of both her stage and her auditorium audience.38 Vittoria is like those ‘dead bodies’ taken to Barber-Surgeons’ Hall to be anatomized and ‘teach man | Wherin hee is imperfect’. Like the torso that grows up out of the graveyard, designed to teach apprentice barber-surgeons anatomy, Vittoria teaches ‘man’ that the womb is the means of entering into mortality and the inevitability of death. The idea of the female body being physically decayed also finds its way into Vittoria’s representation of herself.39 When Vittoria rejects Brachiano she says, ‘I had a limbe corrupted to an ulcer, | But I have cut it off’ (IV.ii.117–18). She sees her love for the jealous Brachiano as a putrescent extension of her body, infected by his lack of faith in her. Brachiano is invited to read into this his mortal and moral imperfection, just as an anatomist would from the body from the gallows. This idea of purulent female flesh is carried even further by Flamineo as he tries simultaneously to rebuke Vittoria and to placate Brachiano: W hat a damn’d impostume is a womans will! Can nothing break it? Fie, fie, my Lord. Women are caught as you take Tortoises, Shee must bee turn’d on her backe. ( IV .ii.145–48)

A woman’s will is a turgid boil, which can be lanced with a penis. Vittoria will be helpless once Brachiano ‘turns’ her. Even in a noble ‘masculine’ death Vittoria’s

37

Lisa Jardine, ‘“Why should he call her whore?”: Defamation and Desdemona’s Case’, in Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation, ed. by M. Tudeau-Clayton and M. Warren (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), pp. 126–27. 38

‘[T ]he arraignment proves nothing. It reveals no new damning facts about Vittoria beyond her ability to dissimulate with the best’ (Lee Bliss, The World’s Perspective: John Webster and the Jacobean Drama (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983), p. 112). 39

Beatrice-Joanna in Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling (London, c. 1622) similarly represents her own corruption — she likens herself to bad blood which has been purged from the patriarchal body, and she warns her father, Vermandero, to ‘But cast it to the ground regardlessly, | Let the common sewer take it from distinction’ (V .iii.152–53).

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character is associated with the fall of man, as reinforced in Flamineo’s dying ‘praise’ of her: Vittoria. Flamineo.

O my greatest sinne lay in my blood. Now my blood paies for’t. Th’art a noble sister, I love thee now; if woeman doe breed man She ought to teach him manhood: Fare thee well. Know many glorious woemen that are fam’d For masculine vertue, have bin vitious, Onely a happier silence did betyde them. Shee hath no faults, who hath the art to hide them. (V .vi.235–42)

Vittoria puns on the ill-inheritance of a morally infected family — she had a profligate father and an unregenerate brother — and her own sexual heat for her downfall. Like Goodcole’s faint praise of Besse’s repentance, Flamineo’s reflection on Vittoria’s death negates her mild confession and reinforces the blasts upon femininity which the rest of the play upholds. Woman is still teaching man his manhood, and wherein he is imperfect. Masculinity usurped by a woman becomes corrupted. For Flamineo, Vittoria’s only real sin as a woman was in not having sufficient feminine ability to fully conceal her corruption. True femininity and deception are inseparable. In Remmelin’s visio secunda (Fig. 17) we can see an Adam the depiction of whom enlarges upon the theme of man as the proper object for the revelation of God’s work. The male figure, who will teach man the potential for perfection to which he may aspire, is surrounded by more Psalms reminding the reader of the transience of earthly life. This Adam does not display quite as elegant a posture as the male figure in the visio prima, but his pose does show a certain confidence. His arms and legs are parted in actions suggesting imminent movement, and he gestures significantly towards the plaque reminding the reader that ‘Man is like a breath, his days are like a passing shadow’ (Psalms 144. 4). His gesture is combined with a steady gaze directed out at the reader that reinforces and amplifies the biblical injunction to the anatomy student, whilst his body stand as a proof. The colchicum plant that covers Adam’s pubic area also intensifies the message of the torso in visio prima, extending the metaphor of the corruption inherent in the generative organs. It carries the motto ‘As the colchicum plant is already rotten by the time it flowers | So you, man, must rot like the grass’. There is, however, hope implicit in this visio. The male urogenital tract, depicted in the characteristic Vesalian way to the left, is repeated with the penis pointing upwards

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directly above the crucifix reinforcing that God sent Christ as a flesh and blood man. Christ on his cross does to the serpent what God promised Eve’s seed would eventually do; Christ bruises the serpent’s head even as it promises to bruise Adam’s descendants’ heel. In fact, the crucifix is crushing the serpent’s head.

‘Continually we bear about us a rotten and dead body’ 40 Webster’s misogynistic vision of femininity as corrupt and deceitful is repeated in a similar manner in The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614) with, perhaps, slightly more sympathy for the female protagonist. This sympathy is possible because of the venality and incestuous longings of her brothers. She is a paragon of virtue in comparison with them but in herself and in her actions she is not constructed as being blameless. Before Antonio is allowed to colour our perception of the Duchess’s character by describing her, he first muses on the nature of a good ruler: Considring duely, that a Princes Court Is like a common Fountaine, whence should flow Pure silver-droppes in generall: But if’t chance Some curs’d example poyson’t neere the head, “Death, and diseases through the whole land spread. ( I .i.11–15)

Antonio’s Tacitean assessment of the French court also functions as a pattern for and a premonitory comment upon the actions of the Duchess and her brothers through the course of the play. It is clear that distemper is going to infect ‘the head’ and from thence it will flow down to the people and the ‘whole land’.41 As dowager ruler of a ducal court, the Duchess must be implicated in this warning even if Antonio initially presents her to us as a Madonna figure. In her glance There speaketh so divine a continence, As cuts off all lascivious, and vaine hope. Her dayes are practis’d in such noble vertue, That sure her nights (nay more her very Sleepes) Are more in Heaven, then other Ladies Shrifts. Let all sweet Ladies breake their flattring Glasses, And dresse themselves in her. ( I .i.187–93)

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40

Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, II.i.58–59.

41

It can also be read as a condemnatory comment upon the rule of James I.

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Yet within four lines Antonio is summoned by Cariola to a meeting with the Duchess in her private gallery, where we find that her intention is to woo him. Antonio’s praise of the Duchess is also swiftly undercut by her brothers’ view of her: she is a ‘lusty Widowe’(I.i.326), whose lands they both covet, and in whose body her brother Ferdinand has more than a simple fraternal interest.42 Where Antonio’s lesser nobility sees ‘continence’ her brother peers see she knows ‘already what man is’, that she has ‘high blood’, a ‘luxurious’ nature, and a desire for ‘that part, which (like the Lamprey) | Hath nev’r a bone in’t’(I.i.281, 284, 325, 322– 23). To them she is an incontinent dam about to burst.43 Although it is hard not to sympathize with the Duchess against two such distasteful siblings as Ferdinand and the Cardinal, the fact is that their warnings are born out in her actions the moment they exit the stage. She ‘winks’, woos, and wins Antonio. But in each of these views of her the Duchess remains a stereotype of femininity, whether negative or positive.44 Ferdinand’s and the Cardinal’s construction of the Duchess as a female betrayed by a passionate body, is upheld by her actions. She is not a monumental statue frozen in contemplation of her late husband’s remains — ‘This is flesh, and blood, (Sir,) | ’Tis not the figure cut in Allabaster | Kneeles at my husband’s tombe (I.i.43–44)’ — and her desire to remarry and subsequent rapid procreation admit of her sexual incontinence, whether we see this in a positive or a negative light. She symbolically hands over her chastity to Antonio in rubbing his eye with her wedding band, dazzling him with her sexuality just as in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus Bassianus’s bloodied wedding band dazzles Lavinia prior to the breaching of her continence.45 She then places it on his finger, 42 See Frank Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’, PMLA, 100 (1985), 167–86, for a discussion of Ferdinand’s incestuous and classist anxieties as they are centred on the Duchess’s body. 43

Or a ravenous and insatiable whore: ‘The devouring mouth — especially that of the pregnant women with irrational longings — becomes anxiously associated with the irrationally devouring womb, which in the medical discourse of the day was believed to be capable of scenting semen and moving down to suck it in hungrily’ (Lori Schroeder Haslem, ‘“Troubled with the Mother”: Longings, Purgings, and the Maternal Body in Bartholomew Fair and The Duchess of Malfi’, Modern Philology, 92 (1995), 438–59 (p. 443)). 44

See Christy Desmet, ‘“Neither Maid, Widow, nor Wife”: Rhetoric of the Woman Controversy in Measure for Measure and The Duchess of Malfi’, in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. by Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (London: Scarecrow, 1991), pp. 71–92 (p. 79). 45

See Dale B. J. Randall, ‘The Rank and Earthy Background of Certain Physical Symbols in The Duchess of Malfi’, Renaissance Drama, 18 (1987), 171–203, particularly pp. 175–79.

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‘forc’d to woe,46 because none dare woe’ her (I.i.42).47 It is she who lifts him from his kneeling position, informs him of the legality of their marriage, and directs him to come to bed. In courting and bedding Antonio, even though she is a Duchess, she exceeds ‘right’ masculine authority.48 She also defies her brothers by trying ‘to combine male and female modes here, and her world proves just as hostile to the androgyne as to any other sort of monster’.49 Further, she defies masculine religious authority in her marriage for the kind of union they have entered into, while it is legally binding, specifically prohibits consummation until a further ceremony has been performed.50 The Duchess improperly disports her sexual availability. All this smacks of intemperance and a form of the uncontrollability which we saw was associated with Vittoria’s speech, but in this case it is the Duchess’s own body that betrays her by exhibiting the physical symptoms of a lustful nature. Bosola, whose own corruption grows ‘out of horse-doong’(I.i.274) can easily make the Duchess’s swollen body betray her by pandering to her pregnant cravings with apricots ripened in horse dung, a taste she mistakes for musk.51 In contrast to this tendency to feminine self-betrayal, Bosola knows that his face, and by extension the masculine body, is unreadable: Doth he study Phisiognomie? There’s no more credit to be given to th’ face, Then to sicke mans uryn, which some call The Physitians whore, because she cozens him. ( I .i.222–25)

46

That is, woo, but as misery has just been mentioned it also contains a secondary allusion to

woe. 47 See also Dale B. J. Randall, ‘The Rank and Earthy Background of Certain Physical Symbols in The Duchess of Malfi’, Renaissance Drama, 18 (1987), 171–203, particularly pp. 175–79. 48

Following Emily C. Bartels, ‘Strategies of Submission: Desdemona, the Duchess and the Assertion of Desire’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 417–33, it is in authority that the Duchess is deficient here, not power. For a reading of the Duchess as excessive of masculine bounds of power and authority by being an unsuccessful supporter of protocapitalist meritocracy see John L. Selzer, ‘Merit and Degree in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’, English Literary Renaissance, 11 (1981), 70–80. 49

Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility’, p. 173.

50

Theodora A. Jankowski, ‘Defining/Confining the Duchess: Negotiating the Female Body in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi’, Studies in Philology, 87 (1990), 221–45 (p. 233). 51

See Randall, for a discussion of the various possible sexual allusions being made in the references to apricots and horse dung.

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Fig. 18: Visio tertia, Sydney, RACP Library, from Johannes Remmelin, Catoptrum Microcosmicum (Ulm: Johannis Görlini, 1639), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Certainly, neither the Duchess nor Antonio accurately judges the maliciousness and deceptiveness behind Bosola’s ingratiating manner. Conversely, Bosola explicitly states that the ‘painted’ feminine body is readable, as readable as an emblematic painting which cannot avoid betraying itself. Femininity is appearance, it is a carapace. Bosola’s haranguing and interrogation of the Old Woman over women’s use of cosmetics make this clear. Though we are eaten up of lice, and wormes, And though continually we beare about us A rotten and dead body, we delight To hide it in rich tissew — all our feare, (Nay all our terrour) is, least our Phisition Should put us in the ground, to be made sweete. ( II .i.51–56)

The paint, rich clothing, and artifice behind which women (and feminized men) try to hide, is also paradoxically indicative of their essential being. The transient and inevitably decaying beauty of these external vanities is an indicator of their moribund internal state, just the sort of decaying transience depicted emblematically in contemporary illustrations of ‘Death and the Maiden’ and ‘Vanity’. And as femininity is constructed as consisting in deceptive appearance, deception is feminized: hence, urine is the physician’s cozening whore. There are parallels with the Duchess’s plight and Remmelin’s visio tertia (Fig. 18). In it an ‘Eve’ stands with her foot on a skull out of which emerges a serpent that looks directly out at the viewer, carrying the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in its mouth. Again, this is wound about by a banderol which is inscribed with Genesis 3. 4: ‘But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die.”’ The irony of this quotation appearing with this anatomical image would not have been lost on the intended readers in the anatomy theatres. Eve died, all of her descendants are known to be similarly doomed, and the logical purpose of the drawing before the reader is that it be used in the presence of a female corpse laid before them for their better learning. The iconography in the visio tertia extends yet again upon that found in the prima and secunda and on that implicit in Geminus, Crooke, and Read. The gestures which, as we saw from the discussion of gestures in art in Chapter 2, are appropriate to a man have a different meaning when seen in a woman. In visio secunda Adam has his arms extending out from his body, enlarging the space he takes up and suggesting a masculine expansiveness, and potential mobility. A woman ought to display leggiadrìa, a modesty, composure and containedness

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suitable to her femininity.52 If this image of Eve is adhering to these gestural codes, it is not just the admonitions that surround her which remind the reader of her part in the downfall of ‘Man’, so too do her posture and gaze. Eve does not stand with her arms akimbo, exactly, but she comes very close to displaying the kind of posture that was considered highly immodest in a woman. Her arms project from her body, instead of following its lines. She also gestures to a plaque, in a mirror image of Adam in visio secunda, which reminds us that we are shadows on this earth: ‘For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as all our fathers were; our days on the earth are like a shadow, and there is no abiding’ (I Paralipomenon 29. 15). Eve’s reminder to the reader of the transience of earthly life is even more pointed than Adam’s. Above this warning plaque a skeleton reclines between a vase of rotting grasses on one side and a time-piece which has reached the eleventh hour on the other. Eve also looks straight out at the reader, with a half-smile which we have seen reinforces the suggestion of immodesty. The fact that she smiles, that her legs are parted, and that she has a direct and confrontational gaze, are all indicators of gendered behaviour inappropriate to ‘proper’ femininity. Like the Duchess, the smallest ‘flaws’ pattern this Eve. Although the posture of her immodestly parted legs is necessitated by the promise of resurrection, symbolized by the phoenix whose revivifying smoke rises into her genitals, this is offset by two images which parallel it. To her left the serpent is alive again, no longer pinned down and crushed by Christ the Redeemer, and it has the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in its mouth. To the right is the excised female urogenital tract from Vesalius. The rhetorical point of these three images is a repetition of the warnings surrounding the torso in the first plate and rendered more positively in the second. We are all fallen and only by a passage through the ‘stinking guts’ of a woman is rebirth and eternal life possible. This is made explicit in the prayer beneath this plate.53 If one takes the three visios as forming some sort of narrative progression, in visio prima Adam and Eve are fallen, in visio secunda Adam (Man) is offered salvation both 52

Fermor, Sharon, ‘Movement and Gender in Sixteenth Century Italian Painting’, in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance, ed. by Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 129–45 (p. 137). See also I. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) on the proper deportment of the female body. 53

This prayer is an addition which does not appear in the extant English versions. Professor Harold Love kindly did a ‘rough’ translation of this prayer for me in 1997, and part of it runs: ‘Among the moist channels of unclean urine | And surrounded by stinking excrement, man is born. | He whom the weeping mother brings forth into the wretched air | Inaugurates his own life by tears.’

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through the intercession of Christ (on the Cross), and through the redemptive possibilities offered through terrestrial life, in visio tertia, symbolized by the phoenix rising towards the womb of Eve’s body. This repetition of sin and redemption, death and resurrection reinforces the ongoing and cyclical struggle set before ‘Man’ as ‘he’ makes his way towards Judgement Day. Remmelin’s book is explicit in its iconography. It is an emblem book for the instruction of the physical interior of ‘Man’ as well as the instruction of the soul. If one follows the logical extension of Leonardo’s dictum that the exterior is the only means of depicting the mind, it is obvious that Eve’s lack of gestural modesty is completely in keeping with her presupposed mental qualities. This figure is drawn as the postlapsarian mother of us all. Her inability to resist the arguments of the serpent are written in the gestural language of her body. She is immodest, bold, and potentially sexually incontinent. She mirrors Adam, of whom she is only a lesser copy, not only in her generative organs but in her gestures. Her sins, particularly her pride, show in her stance. Similarly, femininity and the female body are detailed and railed against throughout Webster’s play. The majority of Ferdinand’s fears and anxieties about his sister relate to either the permeability or the corruption of her body.54 When Ferdinand becomes convinced that the Duchess has been ‘loose i’th hilts’ (II.v.3) but is unaware of the identity of his twin’s lover, he feverishly and obsessively imagines her taking multiple lower-class lovers — a ‘Bargeman’, ‘one [o’]th woodyard’, a ‘Squire’(II.v.42–44) — like a common prostitute. His rage at her body’s imagined looseness leads him to want to destroy it. He wants to tosse her pallace ‘bout her eares, Roote up her goodly forrests, blast her meades, And lay her generall territory as wast, As she hath done her honors. (II .v.18–21)

But Ferdinand does not restrict himself to wanting to destroy her lands as symbolic of her person: indeed, the desire to destroy her person is uppermost. He vows that his mind and memory will not be cleared ‘Till of her bleeding heart, I make a spunge | To wipe it out’ (II.v.15–16). His distempered mind drives him to seek ease in her dismemberment. He looks forward with relish to ‘When I have hewed her to peeces’ (II.v.31) and quenching himself with her ‘whores blood’ 54

Jankowski sites the impetus for Ferdinand’s anxieties in the nature of arranged marriages and the central importance of ‘untainted’ blood lines through the use of ‘untainted’ wombs (p. 228).

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(II.v.48). He does not just require her death in this fit of overheated choler, he requires her total destruction, her ‘rancke b[l]ood’ (III.i.78) and her anatomization. As we have seen, however, ‘the female body does not need to be dismembered to be marginalized. Sometimes the mere focus on a woman’s biology or her use of cosmetics serves negatively to contrast her body to the fixed image of maleness all men, by definition, possess.’55 Perhaps Ferdinand believes he will be able to read her guilt in her entrails, wherein she may teach him his own imperfection as her twin. This fear and the anxiety over femininity in general are linked to their potential visibility.56 As Flamineo says in The White Devil, ‘Shee hath no faults, who hath the art to hide them’ (V.vi.247). The Duchess cannot be publicly faulted, and therefore punished, until she moves out of the protection of her own court. Once her relationship with a man is so obvious that the ‘common-rable, do directly say | She is a Strumpet’ (III.i.25–26), her brothers are able to confront her with being ‘loose i’th’hilts’ (II.v.3). This in turn drives her into an even more public situation at the Shrine of Our Lady of Loreto: Cardinall.

Doth she make religion her riding hood To keepe her from the sun, and tempest?

Ferdinand.

That: That damnes her: Me thinkes her fault, and beauty Blended together, shew like leaprosie — The whiter, the fowler. ( III .iii.57–61)

Not only does the Duchess’s public appearance give her away; her personal demeanour, her faulty and infected exterior, now give away her deceptive nature. Again, the body allows the reading of that imperfection. Like leprosy, the symptoms of which are obvious in the physical decay of the extremities of the body, the corrupt female body can be read when it is seen. Similarly, the Duchess’s show of handing over the physical symbol of her chastity, her wedding ring, to Antonio, is repeated in Ferdinand’s making a public show of reclaiming it with ‘violence’ (III.iv.35) so that he may ‘sacrifice’ her ‘[t]o his revenge’ (III.iv.37–38). The lucidity of evidence in the body is not confined to the Duchess. Cariola says to Antonio when he doubts her fidelity and threatens to kill her: 55 56

Jankowski, p. 237.

For a discussion of the Duchess’s oral insatiability, incontinence, and grotesquery see Schroeder Haslem, p. 452: Ferdinand’s ‘language throughout this scene reveals his suspicion that female gastronomic and sexual appetites are dangerously linked’ (and passim).

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Pray sir doe: and when That you have cleft my heart, you shall read there, Mine innocence. ( III .ii.144–46)

Katharine Park cites an example of nuns performing an autopsy on a sister nun and finding in one of her atria or ventricles a growth in the shape of a crucifix. This was taken to be evidence of her piety in life.57 Similarly, the evidence of Cariola’s ‘perfection’, her fidelity, will be visible in her body. Bosola’s deceptive heart is also readable, it is the ‘booke’ (IV.i.16) in which Ferdinand can study his sister’s decline. The body, but particularly the feminine or feminized body, is a decipherable exemplar. The physical link between the Duchess and Ferdinand, the knowledge that they are twins, also provides a rationale for Ferdinand’s distemper. Ferdinand worries that ‘It is some sinne in us, God doth revenge | By her’ (II.v.65–66), and later damns her and that body of hers, W hile that my blood ran pure in’t, was more worth Then that which thou wouldst comfort, (call’d a soule) — […] W hether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like Diamonds, we are cut with our owne dust. (IV .i.118–20, V .v.71–72)

The Duchess falls because of lust, Antonio through ambition, and Ferdinand and the Cardinal by the sins of their blood. Some critics have psychoanalyzed Ferdinand and suggested that his incestuous preoccupation with the Duchess and his lycanthropy are a result of an infantile jealousy.58 Rather, in the early seventeenth century there were sound physical, medical reasons why the looseness of the Duchess and the lycanthropy of Ferdinand might be linked. Whether it is the matter donated by their father or the formative action of their mother’s womb which is at fault,59 these two siblings were similarly malformed and simultaneously corrupted; the fault merely appears in ways appropriate to their embodied subjectivity. 57

Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, pp. 1–2.

58

Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility’, p. 169.

59

For a description of the competing descriptions of conception and foetal growth in earlymodern medical thought, see Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

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In this play and The White Devil, Webster is preoccupied with the link between physical corruption and moral turpitude. The imagery to which he resorts to explain evil motivation and lustful excess is rooted in the charnel house and the graveyard.60 In that, it displays a more than common familiarity with the practices of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons. Many people in London, if not most, would have known that the Barber-Surgeons were legally entitled to four bodies a year from the gallows at Tyburn for their public anatomies but how many would have known as much about the practicalities of an anatomy as Webster’s Ferdinand seems to know? Ferdinand. Can you fetch your friskes, sir? I will stamp him into a Cullice: Flea off his skin, to cover one of the Anotomies, this rogue hath set i’th’ cold yonder, in BarberChyrurgeons hall: Hence, hence, you are all of you like beasts for sacrifice, there’s nothing left of you, but tongue, and belly, flattery and lechery. (V .ii.73–77)

The remains of anatomical subjects must indeed have been reminiscent of sacrificial animals whose entrails had been read. Shakespeare made this more than an allusion in Titus Andronicus; Alarbus is literally made a sacrifice upon a Roman altar. Webster gives Ferdinand knowledge of the storage conditions of the bodies for anatomy, which for practical reasons were kept for as short a time as possible at the Hall of the Barber-Surgeons. Further, in the progression of this verbal abuse that escalates to physical attack, Ferdinand seems to understand the stages of an anatomy. The abdomen was displayed first, then the muscles, then the skeleton. His words can be read as an indictment of the doctor’s character, but he also seems to be describing a half-finished dissection, with the belly and tongue disgorged and the skin removed in preparation to display the muscles. If we look again at Remmelin’s visio prima, above the torso a chest cavity and a head are displayed in just this manner, stretching toward that elusive heaven.61 The convergence of the corruptibility of femininity and the charnel house imagery in these two plays by Webster serves to intensify the identification of women, sin, and death, and the links between crime, punishment, and bodily

60

Much has been written on the preponderance of body parts brought onstage in this play. See Randall, for one very influential discussion. 61

There is another hint in the text of a connection to the Barber-Surgeons, in the wax figures which are used to trick the Duchess into believing Antonio and their children are dead. These lifelike wax figures were not only use as funerary effigies at royal funerals; there were also wax models used in the teaching of anatomy, at least on the Continent. For a lengthy discussion of the wax figures in the play see David Bergeron, ‘The Wax Figures in The Duchess of Malfi’, Studies in English Literature, 18 (1978), 331–39.

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scarification. This deathly imagery is not confined to the female characters. Bosola tells Ferdinand and the Cardinal that they have a paire of hearts, are hollow Graves, Rotten, and rotting others: and your vengeance, (Like two chain’d bullets) still goes arme in arme You may be Brothers: for treason, like the plague, Doth take much in a blood. ( IV .ii.306–10)

In his own death Bosola likens himself to ‘dead wals, or vaulted graves’(V.v.96). However, this perfidy in the men is inevitably linked back to feminine qualities and female sin: Oh this gloomy world, In what a shadow, or deepe pit of darknesse, Doth (womanish, and fearful) mankind live? (V.v.99–101)

It is not just timidity that plagues mankind, it is femininity in all its facets. In Webster’s Italianate vision, femininity is inseparable from decay, decline, and the Fall: the feminine body is a ‘box of worme-seede’ (IV.ii.116). Just how much Webster knew directly about anatomical dissection is impossible to confirm, but from what we can see in the concordances between his vision of a dark and bloody world and the images used to support the dark and bloody practices of teaching barber-surgical apprentices, combined with his direct references to the company it seems very much as if these were matters that influenced his art. Those factors persisted beyond his work. Like the life-cycle of Remmelin’s vanquished serpent, it is another revolution in the eternal wheel that is expressed in the demise of Besse and Tom. Frances Barker has shown that behind a momentary exchange in Titus Andronicus between the ‘walk-on’ comic character of the Clown and the tragic patriarchal figure of Titus lies the evidence of the death of thousands of people by hanging, most of whom died for paltry crimes. Barker writes, ‘I am suggesting that even when violence is shown it is occluded, and that occlusion is more than a mere lack of ostentation. Power is not made visible by Titus Andronicus; it is hidden, as we have seen, by other visualities.’62 I believe that what Barker says 62

Frances Barker, ‘Treasures of Culture: Titus Andronicus and Death by Hanging’, in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. by David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 257.

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regarding the state-sanctioned violence at the public gallows can also be said of the further use of the bodies which came from those gallows. Behind the abstraction and reconstruction of femininity in The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil lies the life (and death) reality of the epistemological formation of femininity and masculinity framed by the explanation and uncovering of the remains of those hanged at Tyburn. The power to construct and teach femininity by dissection is hidden at the edges of the castigation or murder of multitudes of stage whores.

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A NATOMICAL P RACTICES DURING THE C IVIL W AR

I

n 1638, after two years of construction and detailed decoration, Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre for the Barber-Surgeons of London was ceremonially and ceremoniously opened with Charles I in attendance. It was followed by a lavish dinner. Paid to the Master & Stewards of Anatomy towards their publique disceccion […] vi£ The Entertainement and Dyning of the Lords of the Councell in our great Parlour at the publique Anatomye […] 93£ 5s 4d [!]

The celebrations surrounding this public anatomy were so grand that ‘Mr Cooper the princes cooke’ was engaged at a cost of ‘5£’ to dress the dinner that followed. Barely four years later the public playhouses were closed and did not reopen for nearly two decades. With the closure of the playhouses in 1642, dramatic representations of heinous crimes and well-deserved fates ceased to be played out by actors. Many plays survived individually in quarto or in specifically printed collections but until the theatres were reopened in 1660 the primary stages on which dramatis personae played were in the minds of those able to access these publications. Apart from some closet plays and a very few operas (private displays) drama became a textual form. The kind of rowdy public assembly familiar across a wide cross-section of society was not encouraged for obvious reasons — massed gatherings are and always have been considered dangerous in times of civil unrest — and yet the same cannot be said of our other public arena. But then the law courts and the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre, which with only the odd hiatus continued unabated, had never inspired in the Puritans the kind of condemnation and resentment that the playhouses attracted. This being the case, we have only two sites to discuss over Chapters 4 and 5, taking the workings of the anatomy theatre first.

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The anatomy theatre was a locus in the production of a conception of embodiment which depended upon bloody spectacles. As we saw in the introduction the mortification of the flesh enacted in the anatomy theatre of the Barber-Surgeons of London was at least partially reliant on another site of sacrifice for the materials which it used in promoting an understanding of corporeality, the public gallows at Tyburn. We have already had a general description of the prosecution and punishment of those accused of criminal acts across the seventeenth century, in Chapter 1. Little had changed by mid-century, but as we approach this period a form of naming starts to arise in the records that is worth beginning to present and interpret in relation to the links between the convicted felons who travelled the road from Newgate Prison to the Tyburn Tree and the anatomies performed in the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre, and to elaborate on the processes undergone by those felons between the Sessions House and the anatomy theatre. The extant burial records and accounts for the Parish of St Olaves, Silver Street, pertaining to the bodies that can be identified as having passed from Tyburn to the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre are central in that chain. Francis Barker had no time for literary criticism that used the gory spectacle of the seventeenth-century gallows as part of a perverse intellectual game that aestheticizes real suffering, historical or otherwise. To do so is to risk repeating the politics of the period and the subsumption of lived realities from ‘below’ into a well of unimportance. However, the tendency to do so by literary critics who stop short at the closure of the playhouses and the onset of the Civil War is in one sense understandable. As we have already seen sufficient records relating to identifiable felons who were anatomically dissected do not exist up to this point. Nor, in this early period, were more than a handful of burials identified as anatomical dissections. With only one clear narrative to hand amongst a wider genre of deeply biased moralizing tales it is all too easy to submerge historically lived reality within a miasma of fictional characters. Not that narratives such as Goodcole’s are any less constructed — this is clearly not the case — but as we move further into the seventeenth century an increasing number of records do survive that allow us to identify the people who were dissected and thereby begin to gain a deeper understanding of the lives that ended so harshly. We can then begin to explore and explain how the abstraction of embodiment was shifting through the ways with which those felons were dealt both in the Sessions House, the anatomy theatre, and the burial ground. Certainly the idiosyncratic manner in which William Sheppard, the humorist clerk of the Parish of St Olaves (buried 3 November 1649), consistently recorded the unnamed burials of dissected persons gives us a starting point. It also seems to display a fascination with the anatomization of females, through a decided femini-

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zation of the anatomical subjects’ remains. From 1630 the churchwarden in his accounts had already begun to regularly record the one-shilling payment for the burial of ‘anatomies’. However, the clerk recorded in the parish burial records that An or Ann Athomy was buried approximately eighteen times in the space of four and a half years between 1644/45 and 1649/50. The seemingly facetious use of this pseudonym for the remains of a dissection suggests at once a desire to conceal the fact of the burial of anatomies within the churchyard, scattering them through the register amongst the other ‘Anns’ late of this parish, and a feminization of the generic subject of the Barber-Surgeons’ theatre. It also hints at a wider fascination, at least for this clerk, with the female subject of the anatomy theatre. For him, the splayed and eviscerated female body was seemingly indissociable from the general act of anatomy. And in this act of recording we have the naming but not naming of those people who otherwise would have passed anonymously into the graveyard or have been buried under their own names in the common burial pit. They are thereby rendered ambiguously as more and less than individual persons. The firming of this process so that they can comfortably be both individualized and categorized is still to come. In William Sheppard’s recording, they no longer warrant the name they carried in life but neither are they interred as nothing or noone. William Sheppard, close on the heels of the Barber-Surgeons, abstracts them into a generic category: ‘An Athomy’ — that is, the generic anatomized body. Sheppard himself was laid to rest in the same ground, under his own name, and those who continued on his work did not persist with his particular method of recording. In the few legible records to 1660 they did, however, follow the example of the Churchwarden who continued to regularly note the payments for the categories of ‘Anatomye’, ‘A Notomie’, ‘Anothomye’, ‘Anathomize’ and even ‘5 Nothomies’. The records through which it is possible to trace persons-as-individuals who were executed on the Tyburn Tree, and subsequently anatomized, bear witness to the shift in the understanding of embodied subjectivity in society. We have seen a characterization of anatomical subjects as exemplars for all humanity. Middleton’s Cardinal sees anonymous ‘dead bodies’ as an excised part of the social whole usefully used to remind living men of their sins. By the end of the century we see references that support an understanding of the increasing recognition of individuality: Poor Brother Tom had an Accident this time Twelvemonth, and so clever a made fellow he was, that I could not save him from those fleaing Rascals the Surgeons; and now, poor Man, he is among the Otamys at Surgeons Hall.1

1

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John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (London: John Watts, 1728), Act II, Scene 1.

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Though written nearly a hundred years after Countrey Tom’s execution, this seems very much like a reference to that infamous skeletal remnant. As we shall see in Chapters 7 and 8, the closer we come to John Gay’s canting rogues in The Beggar’s Opera the more clearly an ‘Otamy’ has become a pitiable individual with a name, a ‘poor Man’ who has been put to death by the courts and then flayed by ‘Rascals’. The characters Ben Budge and Matt the Mint, properly unsentimental roaring boys, do not dwell on Matt’s brother’s demise. In the next line Ben replies philosophically, ‘So it seems, his times was come’. In the middle of the seventeenth century anatomized felons were more likely to be entered in the parish records in ways that marked them out but did not yet identify them by name. By the close of the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century recording their status as named individuals had become the norm. As noted in the introduction, the processes of abstraction gave rise to outcomes that might be seen inexplicably paradoxical if understood in a one-dimensional way. However, consistent with the notion of the ‘recalling of the concrete’ discussed earlier, I have been suggesting that the more that bodies were codified and categorized, the more the particularized physicality of bodies could be asserted and ‘individualized’ by recording agents for whom those remains continued to be no more than the bodies of unknown strangers. The ‘turn’ we see so clearly in Gay’s lines happens across a time when the playhouses are silent while the work of the gallows and the anatomy theatre went on apace. In Chapter 1 we examined capital crimes and the structural spaces of the places where people were sentenced. What became of them after sentencing was a much more public series of events.

Inigo Jones’s Anatomy Theatre We have presaged several times that the use of the kind of temporary, scaffold anatomy theatre we saw operating within the hall in Chapter 1 was superseded in 1638 by Inigo Jones’s purpose-built anatomy theatre which emulated the anatomy theatre built in Padua in 1594 (see Figs 2, 3, and 4).2 The move from temporary scaffolding to the permanent theatre mimics the earlier transition of the dramatic theatres from temporary stages in inn yards and at fairs, to permanent purpose built playhouses. Young states that the building of this edifice was partly in response to the regular mess which was left behind in the upper kitchen. It is noted in the Annals of the Company that in October 1631 ‘hitherto the bodies have

2

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Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 81.

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been a great annoyance to the tables, dresser boards and utensils of the upper kitchen by reason of the blood, filth and entrails of these anatomies’.3 It appears that some of the kitchen’s implements had been employed in the dissections in the hall. Permanent anatomy theatres on the Continent were being built to meet the needs of what were becoming overflowing audiences.4 As Ferrari argues, the demand for anatomies at Bologna grew steadily during the sixteenth century.5 Hundreds clamoured to press into the poorly lit structures and, apparently, there was always a particular demand for seats to the spectacle when it displayed an anatomized female body.6 As the numbers with access to education increased, logically the pressures placed on the anatomy theatres, major sites of anatomical pedagogy, multiplied exponentially. Certainly, from the estimates of the numbers of apprentices bound at any one time at the Barber-Surgeons’, and the required attendance of those apprentices at those lectures, even without an eager public there would already have been a pressing demand for ample seating.7 The Annals of the Company do not mention attendance by members of the public as a factor in the construction of the 1638 theatre, nor have any supporting commentary from contemporary sources been traced, but it is not unreasonable to assume that a similar vogue for attending public anatomies would also have had an effect in England. Certainly, as we shall see in Chapter 5, by the time Samuel Pepys visited the theatre in 1662/63, an invitation to anatomy and dinner after was considered more than acceptable.8 The Barber-Surgeons may also have been motivated to build this new theatre in an attempt to mimic the prestige inherent in following the Continental model of anatomical teaching, rather than just by the demands placed upon the kitchen. Whatever the impetus, the construction of Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre brings into sharper focus the dramatic and spectacular concordances of the anatomical 3

Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 44, and Young, p. 334.

4

See Ferrari, pp. 61–66, for the hundreds who attended the Bologna anatomies, and Heckscher, Appendix 2, for the attendance at Dutch anatomies. 5

Ferrari, pp. 81–82.

6

See Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, p. 15, quoted below; and Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, pp. 220–21. 7 8

See Chapter 2, above.

Young, p. 373. Paradoxically, the seventeenth-century dissecting table was reputed later to have formed a part of the hall’s dining table. This was still in existence in the hall in the early nineteenth century, when Robert Peel apparently expressed a desire to sleep on it (Young, p. 91).

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practices of the Barber-Surgeons, and it bears a striking resemblance to his Cockpit Theatre.9 From Isaac Ware’s illustration of the interior of the theatre and the ground plans, one can see the regularization and centring of the audience’s attention inherent in the design of this theatre, and which we saw was expected of its temporary predecessor. The seats all directly face the central stage upon which the body was dissected. The risers ensure that those on the higher levels can see over the heads of those below them. The windows that are indicated would have facilitated ample natural light, a factor which was not a feature of most of the Continental anatomy theatres. The walls were also painted with ‘the figures of seven liberal sciences and the twelve signs of the zodiac’.10 It was also decorated, like the illustration of the Leiden anatomy theatre and museum, with the admonitory example of flayed skins and prepared skeletons of the bodies of felons. If one examines the interior illustration (see Fig. 4) closely one can see the wry antics of the imagined anatomical figures on the corbel stones around the walls — the jaunty ‘fellow’ on the far left appears intent on walking out into space and his five confederates hail each other from their astrally allotted positions. As we have seen Besse’s skeleton was placed ‘on the Corbell stone of the Signe Libra’ while Tom took up the position allotted to Taurus: both had ‘the planett Venus governeing those twoe signes underneath’.11 In other words, individual bodies were located within an abstracted cosmological setting that had become as much decoration as signifier of the Truth of the Cosmos. The use of decorative paintwork and astrological symbols has its counterpart in the paintwork described as being present in playhouses like the Globe.12 The anatomy theatre was also decked with carved angels and garlands over the ‘pulpitt in the lecture Roome’,13 to which we shall return below. The most startling similarity between this anatomy theatre and the dramatic theatres, but quite a logical one given that this theatre was designed by a man who had ample experience of playhouses, is between the dimensions and seating allowances. If one takes the illustration of the anatomy theatre and combines its 9

See Chapter 7, below.

10

Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 81.

11

Young, p. 337. This also seems to pun on their physical as well as criminal partnership.

12

The pillars on the stage were marbled, a painted effect, and there was a sun and other ornamental figures painted on the underside of the roof which covered the stage. 13

See Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MS D/2/1, The Wardens Great Accompt Book, 1603–1659, for the years 1627/28–1631/32, which detail records of the payments made for these and various other expenditures on decorations.

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scaled dimensions with the extant evidence of its height and circumference one can make some general but revealing remarks upon the space allowed for spectators, their distance from the cadaver’s platform, and the probable capacity of the theatre. It has been estimated that the theatre, which was elliptical in shape, measured 38.5 feet by 33.5 feet and its dome reached 57 feet in height.14 If these figures are reasonably accurate, then by scaling these figures to the plans the space allowed for the standing room farthest from the action, the fifth gallery, would have been eighteen inches from the wooden partition to the outer wall, precisely the figure calculated as being allowed fore and aft in the cheapest seating in the public and private playhouses.15 One can see from the interior of the theatre (see Fig. 3) that only the first two galleries contain seats. The two standing galleries in front of this, the fourth and the third rows, measured approximately twenty and a half inches from partition to partition, and the row with seating in front of these, the second row, measured twenty-seven inches. The seated row directly in front of the anatomy table was approximately thirty-six inches from the table at its closest point. Given that the stewards and masters of the anatomy had to move around in front of these seats, the actual room allowed for those seated would probably have been around thirty inches. It would seem that these more prestigious seats, closest to the action, also mirrored the division of allowance in seating space in the playhouses, which it has been estimated measured between twentyfour to thirty inches breadth for each courtier. If one takes these graduated allowances and the total dimensions of the theatre and calculates out the number of people who could be fitted around the circumferences of the divisions, an extremely conservative estimate would allow that the theatre could have held between approximately 195 and 210 people at an anatomy.16 This is between a 14

Professor Dennis Hill provided me with these figures, citing a city surveyor’s map from the late seventeenth century (personal communication, letter, 9 December 1996). Professor Hill has since located the foundations of the theatre by noninvasive electromagnetic resonancing. The theatre that had stood by the remains of the London Wall, which passes behind the present hall, was demolished in 1784 due to lack of use, the Surgeons having split from the Barbers by Act of Parliament on 24 June 1745. The present hall was reconstructed in the 1950s and 60s after the total destruction of its predecessor in the Blitz. This included the courtroom that Inigo Jones had also designed, and which along with the anatomy theatre were the only parts of the hall to survive the Great Fire of 1666; see Young, p. 144. 15 16

These figures were originally calculated by John Orrell and are quoted by Gurr, pp. 20–22.

I calculated these figures using the inner (smaller) circumference of each tier, and to take into account the space which could not be used where the entry is situated I reduced the size of those circumferences by calculating using a standard radius of seventeen feet for the lower figure and eighteen feet for the upper figure rather than extending it to the calculations which would

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quarter and a third of the projected capacities of the private theatres and a very poor turnout in comparison to the public playhouses, but it is still a substantial gathering of people within an enclosed structure. The semi-circular structure in which Vesalius stands in the frontispiece to his Fabrica (1543) has at least 83 bodies crushed into it, and assorted beasts, making a total of 170 beings if one projects it to being a circle. We have in that illustration, then, a representation that supports the possible numbers and crush of an anatomy in progress in London.17 The anatomy theatre in the Vesalian frontispiece mimics the model of a dramatic amphitheatre18 with the cadaver centrally located on a table, standing room by the ‘stage’, three raked levels of seating, and a ‘gods’. Even though the illustration is not a direct representation of the theatre where Vesalius worked, the contemporary sources already cited support the proposition that these theatres were structured much as dramatic theatres were. 19 This is certainly the case in later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anatomy theatres. The raked, crowded, theatre-in-the-round model of the Padua anatomy theatre was copied throughout Europe, its likeness being seen at Leiden and London, amongst other places. If the anatomy lectures given by William Harvey are any indication of the common process of English anatomies,20 the public anatomy lectures in London were certainly as well attended and were no less audience interactive than the productions in these theatres. At one of Harvey’s lectures in 1636 Caspar Hoffmann, anatomist and observer, was led to remark, If only, Harvey, you would not hold anatomies in front of jacks-in-office, petty lordlings, money-lenders, barbers and such like ignorant rabble, who, standing around openmouthed, blab that they are seeing miracles!21

have applied to the actual ellipse. On a less conservative estimate, and in an enthusiastic crush, attendances could therefore have been considerably higher, by perhaps thirty people. 17

See also Ferrari, p. 64.

18

An engraving of a performance of a Plautus play in a classical amphitheatre ‘served as inspiration for the student of Titian who designed the frontispiece’ (Ferrari, p. 84). 19

Ferrari, p. 64.

20

Harvey started lecturing at the Physicians in 1616; see Luke Wilson, ‘William Harvey’s Prelectiones: The Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theater of Anatomy’, Representations, 17 (1987), 74. See G. Clark, chap. 16, for a brief history of Harvey’s association with the Physicians. 21

Caspar Hoffmann, quoted in Schupbach, pp. 25–26. Hoffman had been a contemporary of Harvey’s when he studied at Padua, who was peeved at Harvey’s success. This comment came after Harvey performed an anatomy in Nuremburg while on a tour of the Continent, demonstrating his theories on circulation. See D’Arcy Power, ‘A Revised Chapter in the Life of William Harvey, 1636’, in Power, Selected Writings, pp. 147–49.

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Hoffmann’s complaint is as pertinent for its evocation of noise, movement, and spectacle as it is for the biased tone. As a physician Harvey is above the saw-bones and ‘commonalty’. However, for all his eminence Harvey seems to have had a less than happy association with the Barber-Surgeons and is not recorded as a reader though many of his colleagues and friends were. He was in fact prosecuted for ‘ill practise’ by them at the behest of member William Kellet, for not recognizing a fracture and prescribing physic instead. The patient died.22 This reference to his dissections does bear out what we know of the workings of the Barber-Surgeons’ theatre though. We saw in Chapter 1 that there are injunctions in the court records of the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall such as that minuted in 1628 which betrays the lack of decorum at anatomies, at which time it was ordered that the audience at the public anatomy ought not call out to correct the lecturer.23 Both Harvey and John Caius, first reader and lecturer in anatomy appointed to the Company of Barber-Surgeons from 1546 to 1563,24 had experienced Continental anatomical procedures firsthand. Caius returned from his studies in Padua with the experience of the model of anatomical demonstration that is evident in Vesalius’s practices. English anatomists were influenced by a history of what was by the beginning of the seventeenth century over three hundred years of a Continental tradition of anatomy and by mid-century over a hundred years of that tradition’s revolutionary upheaval. They took the example of the Paduan anatomy theatre, as did many others, for their model. They replayed the performance of dramatic spectacle which was inherent to that theatre. Further, as we have seen in earlier chapters the material conditions of the anatomy theatre at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall and its successor regulated and abstracted all of the bodies which attended its performances, not just the body of the corpse. They were all subject to its pedagogical abstraction. So in this period when civil unrest increased the functions of this company at least persisted, largely unmolested. That is even when that entailed sometimes unruly gatherings of large numbers of people in public or semipublic spaces. In the same period a strange form of anonymous subjectivity found its way into the recording of the burial of anatomies after more than twenty years of total silence. The nine anatomies that appear prior to the mid-century — all between 1600 and 1607 — are in the hand of the one clerk and all but the last has a name recorded. When he ceases to make entries, these entries stop. The one unnamed body is the

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22

Young, p. 336.

23

Young, p. 366.

24

Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 138.

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only one specifically identified as having been anatomized publicly. We have seen that Thomas Smith, anatomized in the days around Good Queen Besse’s death, was probably a public anatomy as well but perhaps this final entry of ‘another anatomized publickly’ for 24 March 1606/07 indicates a loss of importance given to the subjectivity of anatomical subjects, even if their remains were treated with respect as sovereign gifts. In 1638 the company spent nearly one hundred pounds on feasting the King. By 1642 that sovereign was at war with his subjects. In the period leading up to and throughout his imprisonment from 1647, regular anatomies were well attended despite the public gatherings they entailed. In the days following Charles I’s execution on 30 January 1648/49 his body-natural met a fate little removed from theirs. The main details of Charles I’s execution on that frosty January day are well known. Ample precautions had been taken against any attempt at a disturbance of the proceedings. The number of attendants on the monarch was severely restricted and a large contingent of the Army surrounded the gallows, forming a human barrier between the raised structure and those who came to watch. The executioners were disguised to protect their identities for fear of retribution and were hastily escorted from the scene afterwards. They were justifiably fearful of the consequences if they were known for their actions. We saw in our discussion of the death of Elizabeth I that certain offices were expected to be performed on the body of the sovereign before interment and that there were concordances between the ways in which both she and the protean nation she worked so hard to embody were particularized and resolidified. Here we shall look at how Charles I’s body-natural fared in parallel circumstances. Whereas I cast Banister’s mapped anatomical subject as a perverse reflection of the image of Elizabeth I standing over a particularized map of England in a world turned upside down, here the allusions to the vulnerability of the sovereign’s body-natural are much more direct. England was turned upside down and to all intents and purposes Charles I died an executed felon. We can see at once that in his case there was no ‘liminal’ period between death and interment in which the body politic inhabited an effigy before being ceremonially reincorporated in the body-natural of his successor. Charles II may have been declared king by his supporters but in practice the succession of sovereign power moved almost directly into the hands, if not the body-natural, of the Lord Protector. I affirmed in the introduction that, in death, the sovereign’s body-natural is vulnerable, violable, and subject to the power and authority of ontological systems which in life that same sovereign sanctioned and empowered. The dissection of the Queen and its connection to both mapping and anatomy that we saw undid the supposed concomitant inviolability of the

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boundaries and borders of the state she worked so hard to embody were perversely repeated in the post-mortem treatment of Charles I. Tried and executed on a charge of treason, in the circumstances there was little reason to delay burying Charles I longer than it took those responsible to argue over exactly where he should be set to rest but even without the elaborate preparations entailed in a state funeral embalming was required. Unlike the executioners, Thomas Trapham, the surgeon who after the beheading prepared the body for burial, had the courage of his convictions and never shied away from his actions.25 Charles I’s remains were buried in St George’s Chapel at Windsor on 9 February with minimal ceremony and in virtual silence, the use of the service in the Book of Common Prayer having been forbidden. While this was not in keeping with a regal interment or Charles I’s love of ceremony, which made occasions like the opening of the anatomy theatre so pleasurable to him, this quietness in itself need not be seen as disrespectful. It was in keeping with what David Cressy describes as a general Puritan rejection of pomp and a long-held distaste for the Book of Common Prayer.26 However, the circumstances surrounding Trapham’s embalming of the body, the ongoing workings of the Barber-Surgeons, and their commissioning of a particular commemorative portrait in the same year as the publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan (London, 1651) with its famous title page echo our earlier discussion and the comparison of John Banister’s anatomy with the ‘Ditchley’ portrait. We have already seen that there were implications for the wider abstraction of embodiment in our discussion of both state and private portraiture, and the obsequies performed for Elizabeth I’s body-natural and the felonious subjects of her sovereign law. It is not necessary to dwell on the politics that led to Charles I’s demise in order to draw out some of the implications for anatomical practice that are inherent in the circumstances surrounding his interment and the symbolism of these two images. In 1651 the Barber-Surgeons commissioned a painting of Edward Arris, master of the company in that year, and the physician reader appointed in 1649, Dr Charles Scarborough (Fig. 19). Arris made the regularization of ‘public’ 25

After performing this office ‘he was Chyrurgeon to Oliver Cromwell at the fight at Worcester against K. Ch. 2, was a great man among his party and got what he pleased. After his Majesties return, he retired to the fanatical Town of Abendon in Berks, practiced there among the Brethren, and dying an absolute Bigot for the cause’: Anthony Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses: An exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the most ancient and famous University of Oxford, 2 vols (London: printed for Tho. Bennet, 1692), II, 765. 26

David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 410, 450–51.

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Fig. 19: Robert Greenbury, Sir Charles Scarborough (MD) and Mr Edward Arris at Dissection, Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall. 1651. Reproduced with the permission of the W orshipful Company of Barbers, London.

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anatomies possible through a perpetual bequest in the form of a three-hundredpound annuity purchased in 1645. This provided an annual dividend which was disbursed on the anatomy or, in the years when they were suspended, distributed to the poor of the company and the Parish of St Sepulchres (where Arris is buried). Scarborough was an associate of William Harvey and was physician to Charles II from the time of his return, attending him in his final illness.27 In Chapter 2 we saw that the purpose of public anatomical dissections at the BarberSurgeons’ Hall was to teach barber-surgical apprentices, to remind those who had served their apprenticeship about the structure of the body, and in the rhetoric of the illustrations in the anatomical manuals before them to impress the observer with the wonder of God’s creation and an awe of his judgement. This portrait, painted in 1650/51 by ‘Master Greenebury’, shows Arris assisting the physician Scarborough in what appears to be a private anatomy. While it is in the genre of anatomical portraiture to which Banister’s painting also belongs, in its specifics it is an interesting choice of depiction for the patron of the public anatomies. Anatomical illustrations showed all concerned what to see, materially supporting the processes of abstraction of the human body through the technologies of anatomy and print. We have seen how that plays out in the anatomy manuals designed to be used in the anatomy theatre. The anatomical imperative to ‘know thyself’ was a literal as well as a metaphoric injunction. The body was not only a reminder of the transience of the flesh; it was also a mirror of the observer. The corpse reflected back upon the spectator, upon those performing the dissection, and in the public anatomies it embodied the power of sovereign law. In this portrait the ceremonial or ritual performance of anatomy becomes central. The kind of reiteration of the Virgin Queen’s power that is implicit in the Banister portrait — the process of reflection and representation — becomes unsettled and complicated in the context of the violent demise of Charles I. If Elizabeth I standing on the map of England is a direct parallel of Banister’s subject in a world turned upside down, what can be learned from the disposition of bodies-natural in Hobbes’s famous title page and the way in which the Barber-Surgeons chose to depict themselves at their work at a time when the bodies granted them are the gift of a headless state? The warranted right to retrieve bodies was reaffirmed by each sovereign who succeeded Henry VIII, including Charles I. The fact that sovereign law lived beyond the mortal form of embodied monarchy is amply borne out in the fact that the proceedings of the Sessions Houses and the Assizes were barely interrupted 27

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Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 140.

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after his death. Apart from a few brief hiatuses public anatomies on executed felons were held (and recorded) with a regularity and alacrity that matched the Barber-Surgeons’ royally warranted rights. The Barber-Surgeons’ Minutes and Accounts record payments for public dissections in Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre throughout the Civil War, supported by the evidence of the corresponding burials in the parish records of St Olaves, Silver Street. The extant records tell a story of prosperous anatomical endeavour.

The Death of Charles I Banister’s portrait has provided us with a clear exemplification of the abstraction of embodiment in anatomical practice from the early seventeenth century. We saw in the discussion in the introduction, above, that in the authorized technology of anatomy there is a new integration of the body-natural through a radical dis-integration of the object of dissection. Anatomy relies upon an interplay between artistic conventions and territorialization. In the examples given here we will concentrate on a portrait in which two anatomists are in the act of claiming professional power and discuss briefly the concordances and radical differences between Hobbes’s title page and the ‘Ditchly’ portrait. We saw in relation to Elizabeth I that in the act of embalming, the abstracted form of the sovereign’s body-natural is resubstantiated within a new dominant understanding of corporeality. This was as much the case for Charles I’s body-natural. Just as John Smith was anatomized in the days immediately prior to the Virgin Queen’s death, on 25 January 1649, five days prior to Charles I’s execution outside the Banqueting Hall, ‘An Athomy’ was buried in the grounds of St Olaves. Similarly, the Wardens Great Accompt Book of the Barber-Surgeons records that there was no public anatomy in the Lenten term in which Charles I died. This may have been out of respect, but it could also have been that in the confusion of the first days of the Parliament the Company were unsure that they had a warrant to do so. However, as we shall see in the following discussion, at mid-century there are ways in which the relationship between sovereignty and anatomy has altered. Unlike his predecessors or even his immediate (Republican) successor 28 Charles I was interred with no ceremony being ‘deposited simply and quietly in Henry VIII’s vault at Windsor, avoiding the possibility of a Westminster tomb becoming

28

Cromwell was embalmed and buried with full state honours, including a funeral effigy; see J. Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 199–201.

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a focus of pilgrimage and dissent’.29 There was absolutely no reason to produce a funeral effigy but he was properly embalmed. In the first (partisan) printed reports of the King’s execution ‘by a Stationer, for the good of the Common-Wealth’ we find the first indication of what happened to Charles, post-mortem: And after a very little pawse, the King stretching forth his hands, the Executioner at one blow severed his head from his body. That when the Kings head was cut off, the Executioner held it up, and shewed it to the Spectators. And his Body was put in a Coffin, covered with black Velvet, for that purpose. The Kings Body now lies in His Lodging Chamber at Whitehall.30

The raised gallows had been covered in black cloth, mimicking the stage-like funereal hearse on which Elizabeth’s effigy was laid. Like a body being taken to Barber-Surgeons’ Hall from Tyburn a black velvet funeral pall was provided to cover the plain wooden coffin in which his remains were placed. In keeping with Park’s arguments around the ambivalent position of the criminal and the saintly body, either of which categories Charles I fitted into depending on one’s point of view, people reputedly dipped what they could — cloth, swords — in the late king’s blood and sought locks of his hair.31 His cloak was souvenired into fragments and his Order of the Garter ‘George’ was confiscated from Bishop Juxon.32 After removal from the gallows, the body was put into the hands of a barbersurgeon to be embalmed before being made available for viewing. This duty was not given to the Sergeant-Surgeon Richard Pile. The entry for 1649 of Anthony Wood’s Fasti Oxoniensis gives the particulars of the surgeon concerned: May 19 1649 Thomas Trapham Chyrurgion to the General to the Parl. Army was then actually created Bach. Of Physick, while the said General, Cromwell and the aforesaid Officers were feasted in their Gowns in the Doctors seats [… he] practiced in the Parliament Army, and became a bitter enemy to his Majesty K. Ch. The first; to whose body after his decollation in the latter end of Jan. 1648 he put his hand to open and embalm, and when that was done, he sewed his head to his body; and that being done also, he said to the company then present, that he had sewed on the head of a Goose.33

29

J. Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 199.

30

Charles I, King Charls his Speech made upon the Scaffold at Whitehall-Gate (London: printed for Peter Cole, 1649), p. 8. 31

See A. A. Mitchell, ‘Charles the First in Death’, History Today, 16 (1966), 149–56, for an account, and Robert Partridge, ‘O Horrable Murder’: The Trial, Execution and Burial of King Charles I (London: Rubicon, 1998), for a more popular but detailed collation of the particulars.

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32

Partridge, pp. 91–93.

33

Wood, II, 765.

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We saw how political motivation appears to have been a factor in over-ruling Elizabeth’s known wishes about the treatment of her body. It is no great surprise that Pile was passed over and that instead Trapham, a committed Puritan, was called upon to deal with the body. Indeed, Trapham’s loyalty to the new regime seems to have brought on this elevation from military barber-surgeon to (titular) physician. The awarding to Trapham of the Bachelor of Physic at Oxford, on the same day that Cromwell was created a Doctor of Law, came little more than three months after performing the final offices on the King at the Lord Protector’s behest. In 1633, two months after he had been licensed to practise surgery by the same university, Trapham had been ‘received’ by the Company of BarberSurgeons.34 Charles I had stipulated in his affirmation of the company’s charter in 1629 that they had the right to license and control barber-surgeons within a seven mile radius of the city,35 so being received was a formality to enable him to practise and no marker of general acceptance within the company. Indeed, he held no office in the company; most information identifies Trapham with Abingdon, thirty miles from London. Thomas Trapham may have ‘got what he pleased’36 under Cromwell but that appears to have been as much as a result of his political ambitions and religious convictions as his medical training. When fuller (and competing) reports of the trial were published giving accounts of the legal arguments and the King’s conduct throughout, the passage cited above is repeated but we also gain more information about his interment: And after a very little pause, the King stretching forth his hands, the Executioner at one blow severed his head from his body, the head being off, the Executioner held it up, and shewed it to the people, which done, it was with the body put in a Coffin, covered with black Velvet for that purpose, and conveyed into his Lodging there: and from thence it was carried to his house at S. James’s where his body was put in a Coffin of Lead, laid there to be seen by the people, and about a fortnight later it was carried to Windsor, accompanied with the Duke of Lenox, the Marquess of Hartford, and the Earl of Southampton and Doctor Juxon, late Bishop of London, and others, and interred in the Chappel Royal, in the Vault with King Henry the eight, having onely this Inscription upon the Coffin, Charls, King of England. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.37

34

Manfred Brod, Abingdon Area Archaeological and Historical Society Newsletter (Spring 2005), 6–7. 35

Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 95.

36

Wood, II, 765.

37

Anon., The proceedings of the High Court of Iustice with Charls Stuart, late King of England, in Westminster Hall, begun January 20. ended Ianuary 27, 1648 (London: printed for VV.B., 1655), pp. 112–13.

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It was in fact barely a week later, on 7 February, that his remains were conveyed to Windsor. The body was made available for viewing in Whitehall after the execution and Trapham embalmed it two days later, on 1 February.38 Trapham undoubtedly treated Charles’s body in much the same manner as Elizabeth’s had been — as described in the introduction — using the standard preservative practices of the day. His only departure was to reattach the head. It has been asserted that this was to allow the body to be viewed, but given the embalming did not take place until after the body had already been publicly exposed — and the manner of execution was so well known — this would seem redundant. Despite Trapham’s claim to have sewn on the head of ‘a Goose’, the very act is also much more respectful than the usual treatment accorded even a noble traitor. A traitor’s head was usually displayed on a pike in pubic view, extending punishment to eternal damnation in terms of persistent beliefs of the importance of bodily integrity on Judgement Day. There would have been little purpose, and a lot of political foolishness, to have treated the remains with less respect, but the sum of the acts is at the very least contradictory. But in dying a felonious death the parallel between Charles and his felonious anatomical subjects, which in that moment became the gifts of the CommonWealth, is also far more concrete. The world-turned-upside-down was no longer a charivari game and Charles I’s unwavering adherence to his traditional rights as King was unsuited to the shifting social forces that resulted in the Revolution. Charles I’s understanding of himself as a monarch within a traditional system was in fatal tension with Cromwell’s more modern beliefs. Many have commented on Charles’s presentation of himself at trial in terms of his single-mindedness and refusal to accept a process he considered illegal. In the terms of our argument, though certainly not from his personal perspective or that of his contemporaries, it is entirely possible he was simply incapable of accommodating the kinds of tensions and revisions in traditional social practices that are symbolically expressed in the title page of Hobbes’s Leviathan. Hobbes is best known for his re-theorization of the body-politic in Leviathan, and for the image which dominates that publication. Just as I deferred to a wealth of expert scholarship in relation to the iconography and detailed meaning incorporated into ‘Ditchly’ portrait, here I defer to the excellent analyses of this image by experts such as Noel Malcolm and Raia Prokhovnik, and to the wealth

38

Reputedly this was done in the Dean of Westminster’s kitchen; see Partridge, p. 99. We have seen from the justifications for building Inigo Jones’s theatre that this is neither as absurd nor as salacious as it may sound to the modern reader.

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of scholarship on Hobbes’s texts. I also remind the reader that the body-politic is only mentioned in passing in our discussion; our object is the body-natural. As such, I shall confine myself to commenting on the upper half of this title page.39 The upper half of the title page is taken up by the image of the body of a sovereign colossus holding ‘aloft the sword of temporal power and authority in one hand, and grasps the crozier of ecclesiastical power and authority in the other’.40 His arms and torso are made up of multitude of smaller bodies and he rises above an English landscape scattered with settlements, and balanced by a church and cityscape in the foreground. The layout of the lower half of this image is similar to Crooke’s Microcosmographia in its use of the common conceit of an architectural facade,41 though in this case the imagery in each of the compartments is not medical; it is civil, military, ecclesiastical, and political. Malcolm’s main focus in connection to the central figure is on the differences between the manuscript illustration and the widely printed engraving, between which versions outward-turned floating faces have been replaced by full-length figures walking away from the viewer towards the sovereign head.42 Our interest is in the printed image that reached the widest audience, but his observations on the technical experiments in perspective in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that he holds lie behind Hobbes’s intentions in designing the first image is pertinent to our discussion. Malcolm argues that Hobbes was influenced by the transient creation of a single image from multiple images in the viewer’s perception by the use of optical or technical manipulation, giving the particular example of François Niceron’s 1638 illustration that uses already published illustrations of a dozen Ottoman rulers which when viewed through a tube containing a refracting lens create the single image of a portrait of Louis XIII. ‘In this way, as Niceron explained, “most of the emperors in this picture pay him homage, in so far as they each contribute a part of themselves to form his image, as if they were despoiling themselves to honour his triumph.”’43 That is, viewing from a particular perspective would induce an optical illusion of a unified image from many separate 39

See Raia Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’ Leviathan (New York: Garland, 1991), for a detailed discussion of the symbolism and iconography of the lower half of this image. 40

Prokhovnik, p. 142.

41

Prokhovnik, p. 136.

42

Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (London: Clarendon Press, 2002), in particular Chapter 7, ‘The Title-Page of Leviathan’, pp. 200–29. 43

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components. That unified image was abstracted away from its constituent parts and resubstantiated in the perception of the viewer. Such artistic exercises were most often commissioned by nobles or rulers as expressions of their power and the sum of the subordinate parts is the intended outcome: And yet at the same time there is a simple sense in which the multiple images are more real: they physically exist, as paint-marks on a panel or canvas, whereas the master-image itself is only an image, a visual construct. They, in other words, are natural bodies, while it is an artificial one.44

Malcolm asserts that Hobbes’s image of the body politic is an attempt to substantiate a similar kind of rhetorical or political point in two planes, ‘to perform an impossible task: to show simultaneously, in the same picture, both the painting and the master-image that arises out of it’.45 Multiple bodies-natural are held together in the openly metaphoric figure of the colossal sovereign as representative of the body-politic, which only exists ‘because they [the multitude of bodiesnatural] will it to do so; they are natural and real, while it is artificial’.46 There is definitely a sovereign invoked but no one sovereign’s body-natural in the image as such; rather the symbol of the sovereign is made up of hundreds of bodiesnatural. Unlike the depiction of Elizabeth gently reigning over Oxfordshire, whose absent body-natural flattens out and subsumes any notion of living persons into the map beneath her silk-shod feet, here we see purposeful people, dressed in a variety of clothing that differentiated rank,47 who might be imagined to be flowing out of the hamlets and villages dotted across the land in support of the commonwealth. No longer is the sovereign’s body-natural understood as an incarnation of the body-politic; bodies-natural are depicted as co-existing in intimate relation to the body-politic. Though he died before this image found expression in print, Charles I’s body-natural bore the consequences of not being able to accommodate such a shift in understanding that was slowly being generalized.

Sir Charles Scarborough and Edward Arris Painted by Robert Greenbury The Barber-Surgeons, like the rest of London, made adjustments but they continued to go about their lives and their work much as they had for over a century.

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44

Malcolm, p. 222.

45

Malcolm, p. 225.

46

Malcolm, p. 223

47

Prokhovnik, p. 142.

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Master Greenbury’s48 anatomy portrait of Edward Arris and Dr Charles Scarborough (Fig. 19) proclaims the same authority over the corpse and the technology of anatomy that we see Banister asserting in 1581. However, there are aspects of the means and manner of doing so that are radically different. Greenbury was a painter of some repute and his name appears a number of times in the accounts of the company apart from being paid £9 10s. for the completion of this painting: ‘1630/31 […] paid to Mr Greenebury for making Mr John Banks his picture for to hange in our hall xs […] paid to Mr Greenebury for recovering and amending the old table of the ancient Mrs faces in the hall v£’. In 1634/35 he was paid ten pounds for ‘rebewtifyenge’ the Holbein portrait of Henry VIII at the company’s incorporation and other pictures in the Hall, and in 1647/48 another eight pounds for ‘painting the pictures of three doctors & of our Clerke’. In 1646 Edward Arris gifted the company with three hundred pounds to provide an annuity of twenty-four pounds per annum, which rose to thirty pounds in 1653/54, that funded the Lenten public anatomy lectures of the company for decades to come.49 The payment for the painting which commemorates the man of such generosity is recorded in the accounts of 1650/51 after the Lenten anatomy of April 1651. This portrait offers some wonderful commentary on the relationship between surgeons and physicians. The distinction between the robes is definite and obvious. Scarborough has the gown and bonnet of a universityeducated physician. Arris is wearing the cap and gown of a surgeon, closer to the more common kind of gown used at ceremonial functions such as funerals. It is the described professional outfit of the master of the company, a position he held in 1651. In the rhetoric of the painting he is acting as surgeon dissector to the learned reader, which not only sets Scarborough apart, but also makes a claim of humility for a man of Arris’s prestige. Scarborough sits in a chair like the scholastic reader in the frontispiece of Johannes de Ketham’s Fasciculus medicinae (Venice, 1491) except that he is in much closer proximity to both the body and his attendant. Almost sitting over but not touching the corpse, the gesturing of his left hand takes precedence in front of Arris, while the surgeon stands in all too direct contact with the flayed corpse. Arris looks to Scarborough who in turn looks at neither his companion nor the body; instead he gazes out into the middle distance. They mimic the hierarchical position of man and wife in conventional marriage portraiture of the period, as we saw in the figures from Remmelin and 48 49

The Wardens Great Accompt Book.

The Wardens Great Accompt Book. Indeed the ‘Arrissian Lecture’ is continued to this day at the Royal College of Surgeons.

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Vesalius: the husband or dominant figure sits to the viewer’s left but, like Christ, at God’s right hand. The clear statement on the hierarchical relationship between the two professions is rendered all the more complex when one takes into consideration that it is Arris whose annuity is making the regular lecture, and the payment of Scarborough, possible. The following entry from the accounts shows just what Arris’s gift enabled: 1646/1647 pd to the Mrs & Stewards of Anathomye Paid to the Minister of Newgate by order of Court Presented to Doctor Goddard for his Anatomicall Lectures in Lent last […] The charges of the Anathomye between Michas and Christmas Last 50 Paid for Carrying the Cophin to Newgate ffor horsehire to the place of Execution ffor the ffees at the place of Execution ffor expenses at St Gyles xiid to the Carman xiid and for washing the body xiid ffor Perfumes xiid wax Candles iid & soape 1d ffor lynnen for the Bodye To the Beadles Assistant in taking the Bodye Paid the Parsons dutye for the buriall iis: for iid grave xiid for the Clerke & Sexton xxiid To the Bearers iis & expended at the burial iis vid ffor a Cophin to burye the bodye in To Doctor Godard for reading six lectures To Mr Nicolas Borthers and Mr W illiam Watson, who desected the bodye xls appeece Paid for 3 dynners for the Mrs: or Governers: Assistants/ Reader & Desectos ffor Candles for 3 mornings To the twoe Beadles their ffee for the three dayes attendence ffor washing the table lynnen and making cleane the house To the Clarkes maid servant iis & the woman xviiid To the Clerke his ffee & for makin this acct

6£ 10s 6£

6d 2s 5s 6d 3s 1s 3d 6s 8d 1s 4s 10d 4s 6d 3s 4d 6£ 4£ 10£ 11s 11d 10s 12s 3s 6d 10s

Perhaps because this is the first instance of the public anatomy being the result of Dr Arris’s bequest, for this year and the next a full record of the expenditure at the 50

The charges for this anatomy probably pertain to the dissection performed upon the unnamed body buried at St Olaves on 16 October 1646/47.

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anatomy is included. This full transcription from the 1646/47 account gives an extraordinary insight into the details of the procedure of the public anatomy under the bounty of Dr Arris. We can see that every step of the process incurred expense, whether to transport the coffin or the body; to pay the hangman for his assistance; to ensure cleanliness of the body and the surroundings both before and after the dissection (work which fell to women); to ensure there was linen, which may have been reused or served as the subjects’ final winding sheet; for adequate lighting in the early morning; to cover the various payments for services to the beadles, carriers, clergy, dissectors, and the reader; and, to wine and dine those worthies central to the activity on each of the three days. On the few occasions when they were suspended these monies were distributed charitably: ‘There being noe deseccon of the Anathomye of Mr Edward Arris his guift, the 24£ allowed for that use was distributed (vizt) xii£ thereof to the Poore of this Companie & xii£ to the poore of St Sepulchres parish […] 24£.’51 For whatever reason, that munificence could not be allowed to disrupt the hierarchy of Physician and Surgeon. The most striking difference between the composition of this painting and the Banister portrait is in the treatment of the cadaver. First and foremost, the face of the corpse is covered. This is far from usual in anatomy portraits. The body is swathed in clean linen but it is not covered by the black velvet pall embroidered with the company’s arms that is indicated in the records. The covering looks like some kind of bronze-coloured brocade that echoes the fabric of the chair in which Scarborough is seated. This may be artistic licence but it may also be an indication that it is the ‘Turkey workt Elbow chair’ mentioned as being in the Election Room or at least one of the ‘Two Elbow chairs’ in the Long Gallery.52 It is not the master’s chair, for that is still in the possession of the Company of Barbers and it has a high carved headpiece which this chair does not. One can posit that if they are in the process of a full dissection it must be the second day or second stage of anatomy — that is, the viscera must already have been removed though the sheet prevents us from seeing the abdomen — and they are in the process of anatomizing the muscles but not yet up to the stage of dissecting down to the bones. There is a correspondence between the covered or faceless corpse here and those depicted in the frontispieces of Alexander Read’s anatomical manuals, published throughout the 1630s and written with the company’s apprentices in mind. This may be as a result of the cranium being subject to separate investigation, as we see a decapitated head being lectured over in the frontispiece of Crooke (1615)

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51

The Wardens Great Accompt Book, 1652/53.

52

Young, p. 488. These are detailed in the inventory taken on 11 September 1728.

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(see Fig. 5). But it is unusual as far as anatomy portraiture goes. It is far more usual for the faces of the late (un)lamented to be seen. We can see from the wider aspect of the painting that, although Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre was in regular and enthusiastic use at the time this portrait was painted, we are not within that space. We appear to be in an anteroom or the Long Gallery which connected the upper chambers of the Hall to the theatre. While it is difficult to identify just which anteroom this is supposed to be from extant plans of the theatre and the buildings that were connected to it, it would be puzzling if a man as familiar with the company’s buildings as Greenbury chose to depict a dissection in a totally fictional room. We can see the interior of the theatre beyond an open doorway. Through this we can see a naked male form, the perfect model of surface anatomy. Figures such as this were certainly intended to be set on display in the Jones’s theatre as the illustrations of the proposed interior show (see Fig. 4), but it is hard to tell whether this is in fact a statue set back in a recess in the wall or a painting within the painting. From the records of inventories it seems possible that it is the latter. Just visible in centre of the background, below this Vesalian-inspired Adam on his plinth, and above the railings of the seats and standings, is the royally granted garland of the company flanked by two putti. The garland consists of a Tudor rose topped by a crown and there are references in the accounts to payments for the carving and painting of these combined objects in several parts of the hall. 53 There are also references under the Commonwealth to orders for the defacement of any emblem bearing the Royal Arms and in March 1649 for the removal of ‘allegiance to the King and his Successors’ from the Company Oath. This extended to the defacement of the burial pall.54 The centrality of the garland to the painting suggests a covert statement of allegiance — Scarborough was a known Royalist who attended Charles II in his final illness and Arris was similarly well regarded after the return of that king. I will offer a slightly more ambivalent interpretation. Above Arris and Scarborough, as in the Banister portrait, appear two sets of heraldic arms. Here however we have only the arms of each of the protagonists. We are looking at a new breed of self-made men. Simply translated, the cartouche below the body bears these sentiments: 53

‘18 of August 1630, paid to Samuell Egars for gilding and paynting the vayne and for painting the Angells and rose in the hall roofe and for painting in Oyle the 2 windows in the Lecture roome as [per] bill i£ is’ (The Wardens Great Accompt Book, fol. 273 v ); ‘6 th November 1631, paid the Carver for carveing the 2 Angells and garland over the pulpit in the lecture Roome xls’ 280r; and again in 1632 for painting ‘the carved Boyes’ in the ‘Lecture Rome’ (ibid., fol. 291 v). 54

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Chapter 4 Arrisius dedicates this to you, Scarburgius, whose spirit deeply considers the mobile work of the human body. The artificer of all things has opened the secrets of nature to you and ordered that his divinity should reside in your words. He, the giver of things, has granted you riches and a spirit that in turn bestows the riches that have been given. There will be another: who ever you are who follow these great examples, no other will be second to either of you.55

There is no sovereign intercession here. The sovereign gave authority to the company and gave them arms, but the sovereign is dead and the company exists under its own recognisance, or at least the recognisance of a monarch-free sovereign state that regulates such rights. In that context we see the master of a company of the city honouring a famous Doctor of Physic. There is no mediator between God and the illuminator of his works in this dedication. And yet that garland persists, central, glowing but distant, the putti on the left offering it up further than the reach of the second, again echoing that striving heavenward to an eternal crown. In the introduction we raised the possibility that the dissection of the Queen during the liminal period between death and interment and its connection to both mapping and anatomy raises serious questions about the supposed concomitant inviolability of the boundaries and borders of the state she worked so hard to embody. One famous and widely reprinted Royalist depiction of Charles I’s execution in front of an alternately sickened and jubilant audience outside the Banqueting Hall has two cherubs flanking a central portrait of the dead king suspended in the heavens above the scene, just as Remmelin’s Tetragrammaton is flanked by two archangels. The composition is eerily reminiscent of these ‘two painted boyes’ gesturing towards the Barber-Surgeons’ royal garland. Greenbury must have known these images, just as he is highly likely to have been acquainted with the illustrator and perhaps also the expert engraver of Hobbes’s title page. All turn on recognizable forms of representation of the time and assume a visual literacy in the intended audience just as much as this was expected of the reader of an illustrated anatomical manual. From our contemporary lens of abstraction, it is almost as if that royal emblem of a headless crown and the faceless corpse of this portrait stand in for the dead king’s body-natural: the usurpation of sovereign will concrete. Pierre Lombart’s adaptation of van Dyck’s portrait of Charles I on horseback, in which Charles I’s face is replaced with Cromwell’s whilst the rest of the image remains untouched, similarly proclaims that usurpation, and in our terms the lifting away and particularization of the sovereign to be resubstantiated in a new claim to power. Cromwell may not have accepted the

55

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My sincere thanks to Professor Harold Love for providing this translation.

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title of king when it was offered to him but the position he filled sat firmly inside that frame of reference. Finally, to follow through James’s assertion that the female body is easier to abstract into a universal icon while the male remains an individual or particular man, how then does this sit with Charles’s demise and the subsequent overwriting of his sovereign image? Engravings of royal portraits were often based on ‘patterns’ that could be reused, adapted, and added to as the occasion demanded, as we have seen was standard in the state images of Elizabeth I. Similarly, the reissuing of the portraits of James I with his family allowed for the addition of children as they were born and for the marking of each death by the addition of a skull (memento mori) to the same figures — rather than erasing them. This is not what is happening as Cromwell is re-engraved in imitation of the late king. Charles I’s image can be taken apart in this way, erasing his individuality and sardonically repeating his decapitation, because like the female being dissected in the frontispiece of the Fabrica whose carnality persists beyond death it is not possible to think of the head of state outside state portraiture when the only model you have for such depictions is the monarch. The shift from the dominance of one social formation to another, from the traditional to the modern, is a slow and uneven process that meets resistance and knows many reversals, even if political power can be wrested in a frosty and bloody instant.

After Tyburn What then of the commoners who died in the absence of a sovereign embodying the sovereign law? If the Barber-Surgeons had few impediments and a plentiful supply of bodies from the gallows for the majority of the seventeenth century, who then were the people they anatomized in their theatre? We have see that there is supporting evidence for both the regular performance of anatomies and the numbers of executed men and women anatomized at the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre, and a means of identifying individuals who had travelled the road to Tyburn in the extant records for the Parish of St Olaves, Silver Street, late in the century.56 We shall return to those later records in Part III. At mid-century while it is clear there were numerous anatomies being performed, in terms of

56

The Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials and Churchwarden’s Accounts. The accounts actually continue into the nineteenth century, but like the burial register, all mention of anatomies ceases in 1735.

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being able to identify persons we have still not moved beyond the facetiously anonymous subjectivity of Ann Athomy. Throughout the burial records, and the records for the payment of burial fees in the accounts, there are references to hundreds of anatomized bodies between 1600 and 1735.57 By a comparison of the entries in both of the parish records it is possible to estimate the total number of bodies known to have been anatomized between 1600 and 1740 as 306. But we know there must have been many more and if they had been taking full advantage of their warranted rights, that underestimates the real number of public anatomies by nearly half. In calculating the estimated totals, names which appear in both documents in the same year have been counted as one body; anonymous bodies which appear within a week after the date of an entry for a named body, or another anonymous body, have been counted as one body; and, in the years where no dates or names appear, the higher number of anonymous entries has been taken as that year’s total. They pepper the pages of the burial register and the churchwarden’s accounts. The method of recording an anatomized body varies both within and across these manuscripts, every clerk or churchwarden seemingly having an individual style of taking down these records, but there are clear indicators that distinguish anatomies from regular burials. Often a name appears, followed by the description ‘anatomized’. At other points no name appears but the word anatomy appears in a glorious variety of spelling. Late in the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century, a name may be given, followed by ‘an executed person’, or no name is recorded but ‘a body from the Surgeons’ or ‘from the Hall’ appears. Although these entries do not always also state that the body is anatomized it is clear that these entries indicate an anatomy, and the burial charges which accord with those entries is also the standard fee for the burial of an anatomy. There is one more piece of evidence related to post-mortem examination that may suggest an explanation for the known performance of anatomies, but the absence of recorded anatomies in the burial records at St Olaves. In the BarberSurgeons’ accounts there are regular annual payments to the coroner.58 The coroner was, and is, an officer of the law appointed to investigate cases of unexplained, sudden, or suspicious death. It is unlikely that the coroner was being paid in connection with the felons from the gallows — their deaths were sudden but 57

See the appendix, below, for year by year comparisons of the named and anonymous entries, including those dates which appear in the records. 58

See the appendix, below. There are few years in which the coroner was not paid his regular fee of 6s. 8d.

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amply explained. It is possible, however, that the coroner was facilitating the supply of bodies of post-mortem examinations to the Barber-Surgeons for private anatomies. Further, a post-mortem body is far more likely to have been anatomized and buried without that fact being noted in the burial records. We saw that in the burial records for the turn of the seventeenth century the name of the deceased appears followed by an indication that the body was anatomized. There is then an extended gap in the records, with no mention of anatomies in the burial records until 1630, when the churchwarden’s accounts of burial payments begin to indicate the interment of anatomized bodies relatively consistently until 1735, though they do not give specific dates or burial during the mid-century. The burial records are extant for this period, but there is no further indication of an anatomized body having been interred between 1608 and 1645. From the Wardens Great Accompt Book we can see how consistently public anatomies were performed throughout the 1610s and 1620s and between 1640 and 1660, with only brief suspensions, because payments continue to be made to the masters, stewards, and the reader for their attendance thereat and to the carpenter for erecting the scaffolds for the observation of the anatomy.59 The most significant aspect of the distribution of the total number of recorded anatomies across these records, in the light of the discussions of unrest at the gallows discussed above, is that it lends another piece of supporting evidence for Linebaugh’s arguments about increasing anxiety about the anatomization of felons in the late seventeenth century. By the 1690s the Barber-Surgeons were not only taking part in increased competition with the new private anatomists; they also appear gradually to have become more avid anatomists themselves, substantially increasing the number of anatomies they performed. The number of anatomies recorded for the 1650s is thirty-seven, which is second only to the 1690s in which forty-seven are recorded. The fact that Barber-Surgeons were encountering resistance at the gallows by the first decade of the eighteenth century could well have been exacerbated by their own increased consumption of bodies. This, eventually combined with a decreased supply from execution and increased competition, must have made their activities more obvious, and more odious.60

59 60

See the appendix, below, for transcriptions of some of these records.

‘Peachey lists twenty-four lecturers in anatomy — Cheselden among the earliest — based in London between 1701 and 1744’ (Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 39). William Cheselden was a warden of the company in its last year, 1744; see Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 57.

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Were barber-surgeons like Arris too successful for the company as a whole? In other words, by funding these lectures and proclaiming their expertise did the company (in a context of anatomy becoming increasingly attractive to physicians and ‘scientists’) help to bring about the demand for the subjects of their warranted right, to their own detriment? Did the funding of the lectures set the seeds that undermined the viability of the larger commonalty? The rising professionalism of early modernity was certainly a battleground of jealousies and demarcated epistemological territories of a new and different quality. We shall return to these questions as they played out in the final decades of the century below, in Part III. For the moment we turn our discussion to the narratives of the courts and the gallows in the years following the death of Charles I.

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harles I was executed in circumstances that were public in the same sense that anatomies were public. That is, they were both the public expression of official claims to authority and power. Attendance at each was otherwise private (and as we saw in the previous chapter, restricted) beyond the assertion of official responsibility.1 This is not the case for the felons whose narratives are detailed in our discussion of the workings of the courts and the gallows from 1650 onwards. From this point on we are concerned only with the bodies-natural of those commoners who, like Canonbury Besse and Country Tom, were convicted in the Sessions House and sentenced to hang at Tyburn. As we saw in the previous chapter, the means of identifying the subjects of anatomy lies in a cross-correlation of burial records and legal documents. The first section of this chapter gives a general background to the workings of the gallows at midcentury; some basic demographics of those whose lives ended at Tyburn; and a discussion of how that pertains to the bodies that were anatomized. The second section details two early narratives related to the fates of individual felons.

The Tyburn Tree In the late sixteenth and into the seventeenth century the crowds at the public gallows were large and executions well attended. John Chamberlain wrote on 11 June 1612 that when four priests were hanged, ‘[t]he Earl of Arundel with his 1

I thank the anonymous reviewer of this book for this excellent clarification of the specific distinction between public and private in this context.

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young son were present at the execution, and the Viscount Montague, with diverse ladies and gentlemen in coaches; and yet they were hanged early, between six and seven in the morning’,2 which suggests that witnessing an execution could be considered worth expending some effort. The popularity of witnessing gallows’ spectacles persisted across the century. As we shall see in more detail below, Pepys wrote on 21 January 1663/64 that from the vantage point of a cart wheel, for which privilege he paid a shilling, he saw the execution of ‘Turner’ amongst a crowd of twelve thousand to fourteen thousand onlookers.3 Purposebuilt galleries at Tyburn, like the scaffold seating we saw was in use at the beginning of the seventeenth century at state funerals or an anatomy lecture, were immortalized by Hogarth in the eighteenth century.4 Following his or her performance in the dock, whether being executed at Tyburn or (as was often the case) ‘at the scene of his or her crime’, the convicted felon waited in prison for the day of execution. The time one waited could vary, but in the ordinary course of events as witnessed by the case studies of traceable anatomized felons discussed below it seems not to have exceeded two weeks. The night before execution the bellman of St Sepulchre’s offered a prayer for the souls of the condemned whilst tolling his bell: All you that in the condemned hold do lie, Prepare you for to-morrow you shall die. Watch all, and pray, the hour is drawing near That you before th’ Almighty must appear. Examine well yourselves, in time repent, That you may not t’ eternal flames be sent; And when St Sepulchre’s bell to-morrow tolls, The Lord have mercy on your souls.5

This was repeated in the morning, when the condemned were displayed in an open cart as they travelled from Newgate to the designated place of execution. This journey could take up to two hours depending on the congestion caused by the crowds. There was ample opportunity for conversations to be had, last good-

2

Chamberlain, p. 125.

3

Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: Bell, 1970–83), V , 23–24. 4 See the famous final plate from William Hogarth’s ‘Industry and Idleness’ series, The Idle ’Prentice Executed at Tyburn (1747). 5

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byes to be said to friends and loved ones, and parting cups to be downed at inns along the way.6 At the gallows the criminal was at liberty to give a final speech,7 and indeed was encouraged to do so provided he or she was suitably penitent.8 Those who were dispatched to Tyburn from the late sixteenth century were confronted by gallows that were triangular in shape, consisting of three tall uprights with three crossbeams joining them.9 Each crossbeam was purportedly capable of holding up to eight people, making it possible to hang up to twentyfour people at the end of any given Sessions.10 Each condemned person, with hands bound, mounted a ladder with the aid of the executioner, had a noose secured about his or her neck and, if they were fortunate, a neckerchief tied over his or her eyes. The condemned person was then ‘turned off’ the ladder, to strangle to death.11 This would have taken at least fifteen minutes unaided, but often a friend, a relative, or even the hangman would pull down upon the victim’s legs to hasten death. Barker describes it with appalling clarity: Sometimes the spinal chord was snapped at once; or they hung by their necks until they suffocated or drowned; until their brains died of hypoxeia, or until the shock killed them. Pissing and shitting themselves. Bleeding from their eyes. Thinking.12

There were other methods of being executed, more gruesome and cruel than that suffered by the poor souls who were hanged, but the bodies of those who were pressed to death, immolated, or drawn and quartered escaped the anatomy theatre. The felon’s clothes and immediate effects were technically the property of the hangman after the execution — his perquisites — which he was entitled to sell.13 6

J. Laurence, pp. 184–88, gives a detailed, if heavily morally weighted, account of the progress of an execution. See also, Radzinowicz, pp. 172–73. 7

Radzinowicz, pp. 179–80.

8

See Sharpe, ‘Last Dying Speeches’, pp. 144–67.

9

‘“The first daye of June [1571] the saide Story was drawn upon an herdell from the Tower of London unto Tiborn, wher was prepared for him a newe payre of gallowes made in triangular maner”’: Dr Story, Harleian Misc., iii, 100–08, cited in Alfred Marks, Tyburn Tree, its History and Annals (London: Brown, Langham, 1908), p. 64. This was in service until 1759 when a ‘moveable’ gallows was introduced (ibid., p. 61). 10

Marks, p. 64.

11

Hanging by a ‘long drop’, which ‘scientifically’ broke the neck of the condemned, was not refined until the 1870s. See J. Laurence, p. 114. 12 13

Barker, The Culture of Violence, p. 190.

Radzinowicz, p. 191. See also Gerald D. Robin, ‘The Executioner: His Place in English Society’, British Journal of Sociology, 15 (1964), 234–53 (p. 238).

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The hangman also received a gratuity for helping the Barber-Surgeons to their legal entitlement of their choice of bodies for dissection. The Barber-Surgeons did not ‘buy’ bodies as such, until the very end of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century when competition from private anatomists made this necessary because ‘the Sheriff or his servants found it more profitable to sell their wares to private surgeons and others’.14 Until that time judicial activity and the frequency of the Sessions House ensured that an ample selection of subjects was provided for the Barber-Surgeons’ consumption. Vittoria Corombona’s dream in The White Devil of a ‘well-grown yew’ prospering in a graveyard, which I argued in Chapter 3 was central to the discourse of the corrupt feminine body both in the playhouse and the anatomy theatre, might serve equally well as an image of the voracious Tyburn Tree.

An Insatiable Yew Most of the figures quoted pertaining to the numbers of people executed around London in the Tudor and Stuart periods rely on the work of John Cordy Jeaffreson, who made his estimates from a diligent searching and transcription of the Middlesex County Records.15 The records are nevertheless patchy and any conclusions to be drawn from them, or from Barker’s reinterpretation of them, are necessarily speculative because of their incompleteness. Jeaffreson calculated from these records that the number of executions for the County of Middlesex in the reign of James I was approximately seventy per year, that it dropped in the reign of Charles I to about forty-five per year, and that this figure remained more or less constant throughout the Commonwealth period. Jeaffreson came to these figures by taking averages from periods for which relatively complete records exist, and by excluding death by peine forte et dure (pressing), or deaths in prison. Jeaffreson also argued that there is no reason to suppose that there would have been fewer executions in the reign of the Virgin Queen than in that of James I, though of course this is also a speculative claim. Further, the number of executions performed under the jurisdiction of Middlesex was probably roughly equivalent to that performed for London, thus allowing a doubling of each of his

14

Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 41. See also my discussion of the Barber-Surgeons’ accounts and the costs of anatomies across the century below. 15

Middlesex County Records, ed. by John Cordy Jeaffreson, 4 vols (London: Middlesex County Records Society, 1886–92). See particularly II, pp. xvii–xxii.

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figures to account for the death toll emanating from the Old Bailey from which the Barber-Surgeons could potentially profit.16 All this adds up to a conservatively estimated total execution rate over the reign of three monarchs and the Commonwealth period of about 12,390 people in the 101 years from 1559 to 1660. Francis Barker has gone back to these figures and, in an attempt to estimate the broader consequences of imprisonment and criminal prosecution in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, added to them an estimation of the number of capital sentences handed down in courts other than the Old Bailey and reinserted the figures for deaths by pressing and also the figures for deaths in prison. The death rate in London and Middlesex as a result of the penal system in the shorter time frame he covers (1559–1624) then begins to look more like an average of ‘at least 10,982.4 hangings during the whole period (or 168.96 each year), 416 executions by the peine (or 6.4 each year), and a further 5710.8 (or 87.86 people annually) dying in prison’.17 One does not need to detail the figures to realize that extrapolating the further thirty-six years of Jeaffreson’s records that his estimates could be added to by a further 50 per cent. But even if one relies on the most conservative estimates, in a city with a population that rose from approximately 125,000 to 700,000 over the seventeenth century, the annual human carnage implicit in those figures is unimaginable today outside warfare or natural disaster. This means, however, that the Barber-Surgeons would have had access, in theory, to anywhere between approximately 123 and 169 executed people from whom to choose their annual allotment of four anatomical subjects in the early to mid-seventeenth century. In the light of this book’s concern with the abstraction of embodiment, the effects of gender differences both in representation within narratives and crimes for which people were sentenced, and the anatomical representations of the male and female body, it is important to consider how many of these felons may have been women. From Barker’s figures and those available from the work of J. A. Sharpe, it is possible to attempt to estimate the proportion of those people sent to the gallows would have been women and, therefore, how many women’s bodies were potentially available to the BarberSurgeons. We have seen that trying to estimate the numbers of women hanged is complicated by the fact that women were sometimes burned at the stake rather than hanged,18 but it is possible to make a conservative estimate of the number of 16

Middlesex County Records, II, pp. xxi–xxii. Marks, p. 77.

17

These figures are extrapolated from adjusted figures for London but for a full explanation of the way he came to these figures; see Barker, The Culture of Violence, pp. 177–78. 18

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women who actually rode the ‘Three-legged Mare’. The results lead to an initially puzzling disjunction between the number of women whom it would appear were available from the gallows for anatomization and how many actually appear to have been chosen for that purpose. Using the figures of J. S. Cockburn for the Essex Assizes in the period 1559– 1624, Barker has tallied that of the 2828 people sentenced to be hanged, 2751 were men and 257 were women. This works out to 10 per cent of felons sentenced to be hanged being women. J. A. Sharpe’s work also draws on the judicial hearings in Essex, but his figures relate to actual executions rather than sentences, and cover the period 1620–80. With apologies, I have extracted figures from several of Sharpe’s tables to create my own in an attempt to approximate the total numbers of male and female offenders executed. Table 1: Male and female felons who suffered capital punishment at the Essex Assizes, 1620–8019 Crime

Female Offenders

Male Offenders

Total Executed

Homicide

6

42

48

Infanticide

31

0

31

Burglary

24

142

166

Theft

5

105

110

W itchcraft

20

0

20

Highway Robbery

0

38

38

Other Felonies

0

23

23

Total

86

350

436

Sharpe does not offer differentiations between male and female felons convicted and executed for ‘other felonies’ — the remaining capital offences of ‘Pickpocketing’, ‘Robbery’, ‘Sexual offences’, ‘Coining’, ‘Counterfeit gipsy’, and ‘Military desertion’ — but to err on the side of caution all these offenders have 19

The figures are culled from J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Tables 4, 5, 6, 12, 15, 16, on pp. 95–96, 108, 124, 136, 143.

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been treated as males. If the witchcraft figures are excluded as extraordinary, nineteen of the twenty being attributable to the work of one ‘witch-finder’ at one Assize, women account for about 15 per cent of those executed in this jurisdiction over a period of sixty years. J. M. Beattie’s figures for Surrey for 1663–94, based on a twelve-year sample, suggest a figure of about 14 per cent.20 In another table of Beattie’s which gives figures for executions in Surrey covering the extended period of 1663–1802, women represent only 7 per cent of the total number of those executed.21 These figures are drawn from geographically and temporally diverse studies and therefore I am extremely cautious in drawing any firm conclusions from them, but there are several observations that can be made. There seems to be a rise in the percentage of women suffering capital punishment between the early and the late seventeenth century just as there is a decrease in the total numbers of people executed22 although, admittedly, the difference in the percentage is small. It is also possible that the percentage of women executed at the Assizes was regularly higher than was the case at the Sessions House. At the end of the eighteenth century, when transportation to Australia got underway, there were deliberate social-engineering motivations for the transportation of women in preference to their execution. This may also have factored into why by the early eighteenth century the percentage of women executed seems to drop again, concomitant with the increased use of transportation as an alternative to capital punishment. This in some part reflects the general trends and fluctuations in the rates of execution in England from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century for which Jenkins argues:23 The Early Modern period — the years from perhaps 1500–1750 — was far from the homogeneous pre-Beccarian norm implied in some accounts, where broadly similar penal practices applied throughout. In fact, the years between about 1630 and 1750 may have marked the real shift away from mass capital punishment, when the gallows were replaced in the first instance not by the factory-prison, but by the much less studied expedient of transportation.24

20

Beattie, p. 454. Of 56 people hanged in Surrey, 8 were women, although it should be noted that of those originally found guilty, 49 men were pardoned out of 97 sentenced, whereas 22 women were pardoned out of 30, suggesting a greater leniency in the treatment of women. 21

Beattie, p. 591. Of a total of 518 people executed in Surrey over this period, 37 of them were women. 22

Philip Jenkins, ‘From Gallows to Prison? The Execution Rate in Early Modern England’, Criminal Justice History, 7 (1986), 51–71 (p. 54).

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23

Jenkins, pp. 55, 60.

24

Jenkins, pp. 51–52. See also Jenkins, p. 65, and Beattie, p. 619.

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Although the figures we have seen are diverse — 10 per cent at the beginning of the century, 16 per cent over the middle, and 14 per cent towards the end of the century — it is reasonable to assert that no fewer than 10 per cent of those being sentenced to death across the seventeenth century were women.25 This means that according to Jeaffreson’s figures about fourteen women were available for anatomization per annum in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, dropping to about 9 per annum until the Restoration.

Gender at the Gallows The rhetoric of pamphlets, plays, and anatomical illustrations places a heavy emphasis on feminine corruption and St Olaves William Sheppard at least seemed to associate anatomy with femininity, but from the extant records it appears that female anatomies were not in fact particularly numerous in the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre. From the 1660s onwards it becomes increasingly possible to trace the identity of dissected individuals through the parish records of St Olaves, Silver Street, and consequently make an attempt to calculate the actual number of women anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons at their ‘public anatomies’. The records of private anatomies are at best scant and anecdotal. From the parish records consulted between 1600 and 1735, it is evident that the number and the percentage of anatomized bodies readily identifiable as female (4 per cent) is very small in comparison with the numbers of bodies identifiable as male (40 per cent). Between 1600 and 1735 the Burial Register records a total of 164 bodies identifiable as anatomies, made up of 120 males, 12 females, and 32 bodies of unspecified sex — that is, the entries are ambiguous or the full names are illegible. Between the years 1608 and 1644 there are no burials specified as anatomies. The records between 1652 and 1665 contain many pages that are illegible and many of the pages of the 1690s and early 1700s are also difficult to decipher, much of the ink having flaked off. The mention of anatomies ceases altogether in 1735 though burials in that ground continue to be recorded, in steeply declining numbers, until 1771. The Churchwarden’s Accounts, which are concerned primarily with recording payments and less concerned with identities, note anatomies from 1630 until 1735 but only give the identities of 2 women and 44 men, the remaining 200 bodies being recorded simply as variations of ‘anatomy’, ‘executed 25 Even on a survey of the Sessions Papers I use directly (see below), which is far from a complete record of the Sessions held in the period they cover (1672–96), the conservatism of this figure is borne out: of the 299 sentenced to death, 67 (22.4 per cent) were women.

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person’, or ‘a body from the Hall’. It is important to note that even in the years when there are no burials specified as anatomies, particularly in the early seventeenth century, this does not mean that the names that appear do not include anatomized felons. Different clerks had different priorities. We do know that more women were anatomized than appear in the burial records, Canonbury Besse being a case in point. But if one assumes that similar proportions are reflected in the population of unidentifiable bodies in those parish records, by extrapolation the total percentage of women anatomized would then be nearly 10 per cent, the very figure that one can reasonably estimate as the percentage of female executed felons. In other words, there appears to be a direct concordance between the proportion of women executed and the proportion of women who were used in the public anatomies. Women may have been executed in far fewer numbers than men, but given the total number of people being executed, their presence at the gallows in England was not insignificant. It seems utterly reasonable that a similar proportion of women executed would then be anatomized. What this means in absolute numbers, however, is that even if thirty executed women were anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons between 1600 and 1740, this averages out to only 4.7 women per decade, or one every second or third year. The evidence from the years when women are named certainly seems to bear this out, with only the first decades of both the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries showing the numbers of women anatomized exceeding 10 per cent. In the first instance, the total number of anatomies between 1600 and 1610 is so small (nine) any estimation on that basis is meaningless. In the second instance between 1700 and 1710, the Barber-Surgeons seem to have been particularly active at the turn of the eighteenth century and their voracious consumption of bodies, under pressure from the competition they were experiencing from the rise of anatomy schools, may have forced them to take whatever bodies they could secure. If that is the case, it would suggest that the bodies of women were not greatly prized even if their representations were, as Sawday argues, objects of anatomical fascination. Over all, the Barber-Surgeons appear to have had the ability to take significantly more female bodies than they chose — even at the end of the century an average of about nine women would have been executed in a year and they had a legal right to any four bodies. Another factor which would ameliorate the seeming paucity of female subjects taken from the gallows that needs to be taken into consideration is that executed felons from Tyburn were not the only possible source of anatomical subjects. Postmortem examinations, either agreed to by members of the deceased families or obtained through barber-surgeons’ associations with hospitals, were another

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possible source of anatomical subjects.26 The fact that so many of the anatomical illustrations of women depict the various stages of pregnancy and fetal development leads one to suspect not only that this betrays a preoccupation with sexuality and generative capacity, but that the ‘grim lottery of the childbed’ may have also provided a regular supply of female subjects. As we have seen, successful pleas of ‘benefit of the belly’ ensured that pregnant women were not executed, therefore making it highly unlikely any such subject originated from Tyburn. It is clear from those same anatomical illustrations that it is a woman’s generative capacities that are of the greatest interest to the anatomist in a female body, the male body being the preferred example of the body for all else. Anatomization as post-mortem examination is virtually impossible to trace except on those rare occasions when an individual’s personal papers allude to such a fact.27 It may well be that amongst the lists of names recorded for St Olaves or in the records of other parishes to which the deceased belonged there are unacknowledged and undifferentiated postmortem and felonious anatomies, both male and female. However, the BarberSurgeons’ records are virtually silent on just who was anatomized. It is also possible that the remains of felons simply did not warrant identification early in the century.28 The records in the burial register for the 1640s certainly lead one to believe that this was the case. The entries of homogeneously anonymous anatomies during this period are scattered, but they are also regular, mimicking the pattern of the Sessions at the Old Bailey in the distribution of the 26

Post-mortem examination was not unusual, particularly amongst royalty as we saw in the introduction. Queen Mary’s heart was bound in red silk and lace, and placed in a velvet box with silver binding, and the bowels of Anne of Denmark (consort of James I) were buried separately in an urn covered with a black cloth (Cunnington and Lucas, p. 126). Anne’s son, Prince Henry, also underwent a post-mortem examination for fear he had been poisoned (Marshburn, p. 156). 27

David Harley gives examples of relatively famous post-mortem examinations (such as Prince Henry, James I, and Charles II) and less infamous examples which have come down to us in this way (‘Political Post-mortems and Morbid Anatomy in Seventeenth-century England’, Society for the Social History of Medicine, 7 (1994), 1–28). For example, William Harvey personally examined his father, sister, and cousin’s husband (p. 11); and John Evelyn consented to the examination of his five-year-old son, and also his brother (pp. 17, 21). 28

There are occasions when the dates of public anatomies appear in the Barber-Surgeons’ accounts but there is no payment for or record of burial. Anatomies were performed on 18, 19 and 20 December 1671 and 21, 23, and 24 December 1673 according to the Audit Book of the Barber-Surgeons, but no corresponding burial appears in the Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials or the Churchwarden’s Accounts. Considering the variation in the recording procedures over the three books, however, it is also possible simply that the burial was not recorded, that it was recorded by name but not the fact of anatomization or that it took place in another parish.

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dates for which the burial of anatomies is recorded. One would assume from the printed histories of the Barber-Surgeons that anatomies were only performed quarterly. It is clear, however, that there was a surprisingly even distribution of anatomies over the year. There is a marked decrease in anatomies in the summer months of June to August when, as we have seen, the performance of an anatomy would have been particularly unpleasant. There is also a concentration of anatomies around the time of the Lenten and Michaelmas terms.29 Overall, however, the dates for the burial of anatomies seem to follow a shorter cycle, much closer to the regular six-week cycle of the Sessions House. And as we shall see, while Jeaffreson gives declining figures for executions from James I into the reign of Charles I and the Commonwealth, we have seen that the Barber-Surgeons’ anatomies are relatively constant across this period from 1638 until the slow and uneven fracturing of the company took hold much later. When Samuel Pepys attended a public anatomy in 1662/63 he witnessed the calm continuity of those practices as they had been observed, unmolested, for decades.

Samuel Pepys and the Barber-Surgeons Samuel Pepys was a man who had a passion for all kinds of ‘knowing’, from the seriously scientific to the frivolously social and many and varied matters in between. Just short of his sixteenth birthday that included absenting himself from school to observe the execution of Charles I.30 Pepys was also a man-about-town who knew the fashionable places to be even before the demise of Cromwell, a man for whom he had some admiration. For all his success after the return of Charles II Pepys was not a Royalist during his absence. He was however particularly enthusiastic about the new ‘scientific’ means of investigating the natural world, a passion Charles II had also acquired while living on the Continent. Pepys included in his observations the construction and the properties of the human body. In early 1663 he made and recorded a visit to the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre, quoted here at length for the richness and the relevance of its details to our discussion:

29

Linebaugh has shown that these were particularly active seasons for indictments at the Middlesex Sessions between 1699 and 1754 (The London Hanged, Figure 3, p. 132.) 30

C. S. Knighton, ‘Pepys, Samuel (1633–1703)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), [accessed 7 July 2007].

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Chapter 5 [February] 27. [1662/63] Up and to my office, whither several persons came to me about office business. About 11 a-clock Commisioner Pett and I walked to Chyrurgeons hall (we being all invited thither and promised to dine there), where we were led into the Theatre; and by and by came the Reader, Dr Tearne, with the Maister and Company, in a very handsome manner; and all being settled, he begun his lecture, this being the second upon the Kidnys, Ureters, and yard, which was very fine; and his discourse being ended, we walked into the hall; and there being great store of company we had a fine dinner and good learned company, many Doctors of Physique, and we used with extraordinary great respect. […] After dinner Dr. Scarborough took some of his friends, and I went along with them, to see the body alone; which we did; he was a lusty fellow, a seaman that was hanged for a robbery. I did touch the dead body with my bare hand; it felt cold, but methought it was a very unpleasant sight. It seems one Dillon, of a great family, was after much endeavours to have saved him hanged with a silken halter this Sessions (of his owne preparing) not for honour only; but it seems, it being saft and slick, it doth slip close and kills, that is, strangles presently; whereas a stiff one doth not come so close together and so the party may live the longer before killed. But all the Doctors at table conclude that there is no pain at all in hanging, for that it both stop the circulacion of the blood and so stops all sense and motion in an instant. Thence we went into a private room, where I perceive they prepare the bodies, and there was the Kidnys, Ureters, yard, stones and semenary vessels31 upon which he read today. And Dr. Scarborough, upon my desire and the company’s, did show very clearly the manner of the disease of the stone and the cutting and all other Questions that I could think of, and of the manner of the seed, how it comes into the yard, and how the water into the bladder, through the three skinnes or coats, just as poor Dr Jolly had heretofore told me. Thence, with great satisfaction to me, back to the Company, where I heard good discourse; and so to the afternoon Lecture upon the heart and lungs, & c. And that being done, we broke up, took leave, and back to the office we two (Sir W. Battern who dined here also, being gone before).32

The first aspect of this passage that strikes one is how little has changed in the manner in which the anatomy is conducted. The Reader, Dr Tearne, processes ‘in a very handsome manner’ with his attendants into the Theatre, which has already been filled with the audience for what, from the subject matter, should be the first day of the public anatomy. For this, Dr Tearne was paid the usual sum: ‘To Dr Tearne for his Anatomicall Lectures on the Venters Lent last […] £10 […]. To the Mrs of Anatomy then […] £6’.33 The ceremonious manner of the entire

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31

That is the penis, the testes, and (probably) the vas deferens.

32

Pepys, IV , 59–60.

33

Audit Book, accounts for the year 1662/63.

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proceeding is in keeping with the earliest edicts from the court minutes on the proper conduct of an anatomy. Whether the anatomy was noisy or not, as had been complained of in the 1630s, is difficult to say with certainty. Pepys was used to noisy and interactive enclosed theatres and may not have thought anything of a level of conversation that did not directly interfere with Dr Tearne’s ‘discourse’, so his lack of remarks upon the audience’s behaviour cannot necessarily be taken as proof that they were silent and respectful. We are also given a description of the private room attached to the anatomy theatre which had been built to obviate the practice of fouling the kitchen boards and utensils in the preparation of the bodies. This may even be the room in which Arris and Scarborough were immortalized by Greenbury, through which Pepys may have walked to reach the hall. What is most striking about this continuation of ritual tradition dating back to the late sixteenth century is that though for the purposes of the kinds of rational scientific endeavour it is irrelevant, Pepys does not find it so. It is a fascinating moment of insight into the rubbing up against each other of a traditional practice and the early manifestations of a modern sensibility. From our perspective, Pepys is betwixt and between, admiring the pomp and ceremony of the traditional ritual with its explicit social hierarchies and simultaneously avid about the empirical observation and ‘good discourse’ on the anatomy of the body of man. Apart from what today appears to be a distasteful ease with which the audience moves from observing the anatomy to banqueting in the hall and back to observing the anatomy, the other notable aspect of this diary entry is the importance Pepys places on the individuality, the history, and the narrative of the corpse. In the company of Dr Scarborough, he visits the ‘body’, but unlike John Webster’s anonymous ‘anatomies’ who are ‘set i’th’ cold’, this body is a ‘he’, a ‘lusty fellow’, a ‘seaman’ who was found guilty of a felonious crime and hanged. Even though he expresses the particulars with brevity, Pepys locates this individual socioeconomically, identifying him within the levels of London society. Given their positions within the Admiralty, Pepys and Commissioner Pett may well have been invited specifically because this man had been a sailor. Or they may have sought the invitation, for similar reasons. Pepys then touches the body and observes it. The first of these actions is ambivalent. Pepys may have been acquiring empirical data — Q: How does a dead body feel? A: Cold to the touch. This seems unlikely given his age and the age in which he lived. He would surely have had ample opportunities to experience the feel of a dead body. He may also have been being curious; or, he may have been appealing to the magical or curative powers that were attributed to the touch of

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the hanged.34 Whatever the case, touching the body does not seem to alarm him. It is the sight of the sailor’s eviscerated body — the empirical observation of the subject now object — close to, which he finds ‘very unpleasant’. He also betrays anxiety about the manner of death that this sailor has undergone, appealing to the ‘Doctors’ present for their opinions on the experience of death by hanging. Curiously, their answer does not tally with either Dillon’s fears as Pepys has recorded them or the cases of ‘resurrections’ of which all concerned must have been aware. The infamous case of Anne Greene of Oxford, who revived after being unjustly convicted and hanged for infanticide on 14 December 1650, was a widely celebrated, circulated, and reported tale that would still have had popular currency.35 One can only hope that they were trying to allay Pepys’s concerns but one wonders, if they were being honest, if the imperfect understanding of circulation that their opinions display may not have been a contributing factor to the gradual increase in raising the ire of the ‘mob’ at the gallows whose own observations led them to a quite different conclusion. Pepys’s description of the process of anatomy, and his own reactions when he finds himself in close proximity to the anatomized body, show symptoms of both traditional and modern conceptions and constructions of the body. On the one hand he seems to show the kind of reverence for the touch of the cadaver that was accorded by those who attributed mystical powers to corpses. But at the same time, he also sees that this body was recently an individual who had an occupation, and therefore a place within society, lowly as that may have been. Like the anonymous entries in the burial records, he does not give the name of the sailor, but neither is the deceased felon anonymous matter. However, Pepys’s ‘scientific’ curiosity leads him to return to viewing the anatomization of this acknowledged individual with dispassionate ease in search of verification of information about his own famous ‘cutting for the stone’. Once he has satisfied himself that the explanation that Dr Jolly had given him of his own operation tallies with the knowledge of Dr Scarborough he is well content: ‘Thence, with great satisfaction 34 35

See Park, ‘The Criminal and the Saintly Body’, passim.

Laura Gowing, ‘Greene, Anne (c. 1628–1659)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (see n. 1, above), [accessed 7 July 2007]. See also her Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 48–50. The Barber-Surgeons themselves had had a nasty surprise in 1587 when a young felon revived on the table, after which they instituted that in any similar case the anatomists involved (who had not ensured that the subject was deceased) would bear all costs in treating the resurrected person and, further, that they would be subject to disciplinary action by the company; see Young, pp. 320–21.

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to me, back to the Company, where I heard good discourse; and so to the afternoon Lecture upon the heart and lungs, & c.’ This detached but decidedly curious interest in the fate of the individual appears again in Pepys’s observation of the moment of the demise of another felon eleven months later: [January] 21. [1663/64] Up; and after sending my wife to my aunt Wright’s to get a place to see Turner hanged, I to the office, where we sat all the morning. And at noon, going to the Change and seeing people flock in that, I enquired and found that Turner was not yet hanged; and so I went among them to Leadenhall-street at the end of Lyme-street, near where the robbery was done, and to St Mary Axe, where he lived; and there I got for a shilling to stand upon the wheel of a Cart, in great pain, above an hour before the execution was done — he delaying the time by long discourses and prayers one after another, in hopes of a reprieve; but none came, and at last was flung off the lather in his cloak. A comely-looked man he was, and kept his countenance to the end — I was sorry to see him. It was believed there was at least 12 to 14,000 people in the street.[…] Thence to the Coffee-house and heard the full of Turner’s discourse on the Cart, which was chiefly to clear himself of all things laid to his charge but this fault for which he now suffers, which he confesses. He deplored the condition of his family. But his chief design was to lengthen time, believing still a reprieve would come, though the Sheriffe advised him to expect no such thing, for the King was resolved to grant none.36

Turner died repentant, like Countrey Tom, but not totally acquiescent — he accepted the punishment meted out for his confessed crimes, but he would not admit to crimes he had not committed. He also had the wit to play for time, even if the case was hopeless. Dr Tearne was again paid for ‘his Anathomicall Lecture in the Venters in Lent last […] £10’ as were ‘the Masters of Anatomy then […] £6’ in the year 1663/64 but the burial records offer insufficient supporting information to indicate whether Turner also ended up as a Lenten public anatomy at the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre.37 One important aspect of this entry is the sympathy Pepys shows for the fate of this man. He is a ‘comely’ individual and it makes Pepys ‘sorry’ to see him die. His crime is admitted, and therefore he is ‘justly’ punished but there is an element of romance inserted into this military man’s end which was lacking in his encounter with the late seafarer of a year before. Perhaps it was easier for Pepys to sympathize with a felon, whom he had observed personally in his last hour of life, than with a cadaver whose narrative he only knew by report. Turner is seen and experienced as a subject, the sailor, as an object. The social standing of each of these felons’ backgrounds may also have had

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some bearing on Pepys’s perception of them. It is more likely that what made that ‘lusty fellow’ such a ‘very unpleasant’ sight to Pepys had something to do with the stage of the anatomy which he observed, and the gendering effect of the new science which held his imagination in thrall. In the course of investigating the natural world natural matter was observed with a scientific vision infused with concepts of reason, conquest, and control that were already associated with masculine endeavour. The new scientific methodologies carried forward much older assumptions about activity and passivity that led to a feminization of what they objectified. Even in the most rational and empirical discourses Nature is depicted as feminine. However, the body of the sailor which Pepys touched was feminized not only by being laid open before the observing gaze of these protoscientists in order that they could explore, disclose, and define its properties and parts, it was also emasculated. The ‘yard’ (penis) and ‘stones’ (testes) which had already been lectured over, and which Pepys later visited as they lay in the ‘private’ room where they had been placed after the morning’s lecture, had been removed from the body. The sailor whom Pepys observed and touched lay on the table in the Theatre sans genitals. For a man of Pepys’s devotion to the pleasures of the flesh, this must have been particularly confronting. The corpse was feminized as an object of discovery and investigation and this was possible precisely because the subject upon whom the anatomical lecture was based was, like Linebaugh’s mob, aberrant and marginalized. It was less disturbing to particularize and dismember the corpse of a male malefactor because he was a malefactor, an ‘other’. Like the criminal and the saintly bodies of the Italian Renaissance anatomy theatres, which were excoriated and yet perversely revered, the anatomized criminal of late-seventeenth-century London was one of the ‘mob’, yet he or she was also used as an exemplar of the human body. Despite Pepys’s moment of anxiety at being confronted with the dismembered male body, he is otherwise dispassionate in his observation of the anatomy. This is a passive source of knowledge, marginal to his citizen’s world; a marginal body on the way to becoming natural matter.

The Female Body before the Law By the mid to late seventeenth century the understanding of the embodied differentiation between men and women was taking on a different quality.38 We are 38

Physical hermaphrodites, who were once seen as ‘monsters’, were increasingly attributed a ‘real’ sex: see Huet, pp. 87–88, 117–19. In the same spirit children born intersex today are

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beginning to see that movement in Pepys’s reactions in the anatomy theatre. Those potentially fluid social traits over which there had been so much anxiety early in the century — that is, the gendered behaviour that men and women displayed — were gradually becoming attributed as the natural characteristics of males and females. Nobility became more than appropriate; it became physically natural to Man. Pepys can therefore feel sympathy for that ‘comely-looked man’, Turner, who in keeping with his maleness and (now inherent) masculinity ‘kept his countenance to the end’. Woman on the other hand was all that Man was not. It was not until thirteen years after this diary entry of Pepys’s that we find recorded the first identifiable female to be anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons since Canonbury Besse. While Elizabeth Malson’s trial takes us beyond the midcentury, she was convicted on the same charge as Anne Greene in 1650, infanticide. Anne was miraculously resurrected and that was taken as proof of the innocence she claimed at trial. Elizabeth Malson, ‘an executed person: buried January 24th 1676/7’, 39 like so many others found guilty of this charge, was not so fortunate. I want to contextualize the crime for which she was executed and to set it against Pepys’s account of his experiences. The distracted behaviour of this poor ‘woman above forty years of age’ was read by those who condemned her as falling within the boundaries of ‘normal’ female behaviour. Rationality and the seeking of empirical truths became the apex of ‘man’s endeavour. Irrationality, long seen as within the range of feminine behaviour as Besse’s shrewish railing of ‘perfect hate’ attests, became what is natural to Woman. By some perverse logic, by the time we come to this second narrative of feminine criminality, the act of keeping a dead baby on a shelf for three days is a sign of female ‘sense enough’ and a reasoned intention of concealment. The biblically and socially ascribed roles of masculinity and femininity gradually became constructed as core traits of males and females. In the face of increasingly ‘rational’ legal and medical interpretations Elizabeth Malson’s bizarre behaviour was considered natural enough for her sex to ensure that she was convicted, executed, and subsequently claimed and anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons. Let us begin with the background of the terms of this crime of which both she and Anne Greene were convicted. Apprehension in general over the single procreative female and the desire to control and contain the perceived threat she posed to the early-modern British state led directly to ‘her’ prosecution before the

assigned a sex and given surgery and hormone treatment to encourage and enhance the physical characteristics of the chosen sex. 39

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law. With the shift from ecclesiastical to criminal prosecution and punishment of issues related to moral turpitude in sixteenth-century England we can see that the regulation of social behaviour was subsumed into sovereign law. Under the Elizabethan Poor Laws ‘bastardy’ was specifically identified as a burden upon the state, and evidence of the paternity of illegitimate children was actively sought in the quest to remove the upkeep of these children from the parish, by returning that financial responsibility to the father of the child. Under the Poor Law 18 Eliz. I, c.3 (1576), identification of the father was accomplished by the prosecution of the unwed mother: ‘tremendous moral and legal pressure was exerted on these women to reveal the name of the child’s father, so that the parish could force him to support the destitute infant. Midwives were enjoined to ask the mother in labour for this information.’40 According to Hoffer and Hull in their germinal study of infanticide in earlymodern England and New England, this threat of social disgrace and financial burden consequent upon criminal prosecution under the Poor Law made infanticide an increasingly attractive course of action for some women.41 They argue that the number of cases of ‘bastard neo-naticides’ rose in the years following the introduction of the prosecution of bastardy and that this, in turn, led to the introduction of a law specifically designed to encompass the murder of illegitimate infants:42 21 Jac. I, c.27 (1623), ‘An Act to prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children’: Whereas many Lewd Women that have been delivered of Bastard Children, to avoid their shame and to escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the Death of their Children, and after, if the Child be found dead, the said Women do alledge that the said Child was born dead, whereas it falleth out some times (although hardly it is to be proved) that the said Child or Children were Murthered by the said Women their lewd Mothers, or by their assent or procurement. For the preventing therefore of this great mischief, Be it Enacted by the Authority of this present Parliament, that if any Women after one month next ensuing the end of this next Session of Parliament, be delivered of any Issue of her body, Male or Female, which being born a live, should by the Laws of this Realm be a bastard, and that she endeavour privately either by drowning or secret burying thereof, or any other way, either by her self or the procuring of others, so to conceal the

40 Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull, Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England 1558–1803 (New York: New York University Press, 1981), pp. 13–15. Today single mothers are not interrogated during labour, but in Australia at least they are repeatedly threatened with the suspension or loss of government benefits if they do not actively pursue maintenance orders against the father of their child, even in the face of a father’s proven indigence.

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Hoffer and Hull, p. 17.

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death thereof, as that it may not come to light whether it were born alive or not, but be concealed; In every such case the said Mother so offending shall suffer Death, as in the case of murther, except such Mother can make proof by one Witness at the least, that the Child (whose death by her so intended to be concealed) was born dead.43

This is the statute in full transcribed from a broadside printed and issued in 1680, which also contains orders for it to be read aloud at all parish churches four times a year. It was produced under the auspices of Charles II and his Parliament on the reconfirmation of the original statute of 1623/24, and speaks of the continued concern about the unruly female body ‘as fears about illegitimacy and infanticide were increasing’ across the seventeenth century.44 The terms of the statute are supported by the expectations placed on midwives, who were those most likely to be witness to a birth. The reiteration of and anxiety over this very feminine crime speaks of a continuity in the understanding and perception of the female body before the law on one level. At the same time, the specifics of Elizabeth Malson’s conviction, as suggested above, bespeaks a shift in what might be considered rational in a female. Her words are by and large discounted. Elizabeth Malson, ‘an executed person: buried January 24th 1676/7’45 is undoubtedly the lone, unnamed woman sentenced to be executed at the Old Bailey Sessions of 17 January 1676/7746 within the terms of this law. Her distressing story has the potential to be reported as a story of aberrant female sexuality of the sort that we saw permeated the construction of femininity in the early seventeenth century in characters such as the Duchess of Malfi, but the tone of the reporting in this narrative is startlingly different both from the reporting of our earlier female felon, Besse, and from the sympathetic tributes on Anne Greene’s revival: The next was a woman of about Forty years of age, and one that had six Children by a Husband since dead, but was, it seems still of too Youthful a temper; for being lately deliver’d, by her self, of a Bastard-child on a Wednesday morning, she most barbarously murthered it by crushing the head, and wounding it both in the scull and eyes (as is supposed) with a pair of Sizzars, and then fairly puts it into a Platter and sets it upon a shelf, where it continued till Saturday-morning, when a woman lodging above her in the same house, coming down to visit her, and examining her more strictly, by reason of some symptoms the [sic] observed, she now Prisoner confes’d she had miscarried, and looking

43

Anno vicesimo primo Jacobi Regis, &c. an act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children (London: printed by Samuel Roycroft, 1680). 44

Gowing, Common Bodies, 149.

45

Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials.

46

A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bayly, at the Sessions There Held On Wednesday the 17th of January 1676/7 (London: D. M., 1676).

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Chapter 5 for the Embryo they found a perfect child mirthered, as you have heard. She pretended her self distracted when the fact was done; but it appearing that she had sense enough to endeavour to conceal it, she was Convicted and Condemned.47

The brief aspersion cast upon this woman, that she was still of ‘too Youthful a temper’, upholds the kind of condemnation of feminine sexuality, particularly the belief that widows are sexually insatiable, that was rife in the early seventeenth century. However, where an earlier religiously inspired chronicler like Henry Goodcole would have used this as the basis for a diatribe against the wages of sin and the corrupting nature of women, this account goes on to relate — with a cool relish for the details — the alleged sequence of events of the crime, a report of her confession, the fact of her imprisonment, and the reality of her sentence. It takes part in a new style of writing that favoured plain language and a new form of publication aimed at communicating ‘news’ to ‘citizens’. Not only are epistemologies in the process of shifting, but the technologies by which those perceptions are communicated are taking on new forms that have their own effects on how that knowledge is conveyed as well. The Sessions Papers collect together multiple narratives presented in short, pithy detail. Moral lessons become absorbed into the story as much as gendered traits, and as we shall see in the following two chapters the moral epithets of anatomical illustrations become absorbed into the body of the protagonists. Does the evidence in the report of her crime fit the terms of the statute? It is clear she delivered the infant unaided, which is one indicator of ‘concealment’. She could not conceal the evidence of her body, however. It gave up symptoms that she had miscarried, which led to her being examined and her ‘guilt’ observed. Her alleged attempt at concealing the death of the infant and its remains is unconvincing in the extreme. It was left on a shelf, more or less in plain view. Further, without witnesses, the injuries to the infant can only be ‘supposed’ to have been deliberately inflicted. There may be other logical explanations for what was observed, three days after the fact. So was she convicted more on the evidence of bastardy, of her sexual insatiability and because she was of ‘too Youthful a temper’? Possibly. But perhaps the final line, ‘that she had sense enough to endeavour to conceal it’, holds the key to her conviction. It is not so important that concealment of the birth or the child was proved — the cited evidence suggests that it wasn’t — but an intent to conceal was asserted. Keeping the infant is in fact in accordance with the midwife’s oath that ‘If any childe bee dead borne’ that only the midwife may bury it and that under no circumstances should the 47

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‘childe be cast into the Jaques or any other inconvenient place’.48 Elizabeth Malson was unattended in the birth and as a poor widow was in danger of being punished for giving birth to a bastard had the child lived; as such, perhaps these were the grounds on which she was judged to have rationally concealed the birth. The fact that she kept the child on a plate in plain view suggests otherwise. It is unclear how long before her delivery Elizabeth Malson was widowed. The child may have been a posthumous birth and her husband’s issue, but if she had no husband to support her and six other children, she would already have been in a state of some financial distress. It is also clear that, from a modern point of view, Malson was in considerable mental distress. She may also have been the victim of the kind of blackmail that led Mary Goodenough of Oxford to the gallows in 1691/92: a widow, she was seduced by a baker on the promise of bread for her two children and was subsequently convicted of murdering the infant she bore him.49 In both cases, following the terms of the statute, these women were convicted at least as much on the basis of their single status and their assumed consequent lack of moral probity as on proof positive that they had killed their children. They were unruly, sexually active women, sites of rogue production. And as Gowing asserts, the almost exclusively female observation of the childbed could as easily have negative consequences as positive: This was not a world in which all-female environments were necessarily associated with support and validation […]. The divisions between women that helped enforce gender order outside the birthroom were likely to be reinforced inside it.50

It is Elizabeth’s female neighbour who suspects her, searches her, and provides the evidence by which she is convicted. We are not allowed the intimacy of Pepys’s personal observations in this report; it is a third-hand record of the actions of the accused and a second-hand narrative of the witness’s relation of her observations. As such, we cannot tell if it is the narrator or the neighbour who decides Elizabeth was feigning herself ‘distracted’, but it is recorded that ‘they’ looked for and found the ‘Embryo’ together which further contradicts the conclusion that she was attempting concealment. In any case, she suffered the consequences.

48

Richard Garnet, The Book of Oaths (London: H. Twyford, T. Basset, B. Griffin, C. Harper, T. Sawbridge, S. Keble, 1649), p. 287. 49

Fair Warning to Murderers of Infants: Being an Account of the Tryal, Codemnation and Execution of Mary Goodenough at the Assizes held at Oxon, in February 1691/2 (London: Jonathon Robinson, 1692). 50

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Birth Observed In the normal course of events childbirth was attended by a midwife and gossips (god-siblings), or, if the mother was too poor to employ a midwife, female friends or relatives who supported and sustained the labouring woman.51 It was an almost exclusively female rite, as Item 9 of the ecclesiastically sanctioned oath for midwives, which was reprinted under the Commonwealth in 1649 for the greater ease of its administration, makes clear.52 The midwife is enjoined to ‘be secret, and not open any matter appertaining to your Office in the presence of any man, unlesse necessity or great urgent cause do constraine you so to do’.53 Nevertheless, it allows that as a last resort in a difficult or arrested labour a man, that is a surgeon or barber-surgeon, might be called upon, usually in an attempt to save the life of the mother. As we shall see below, various attempts were made by those with medically vested interests to extend this professional territorialisation early in the century in proposals to organize and control midwives, but they were unsuccessful. While the primary object of the statute against infanticide is the murderous mother, it does also provide for her prosecution if she has permitted a second party (assent) or actively sought aid (procurement) to dispose of her infant. This implies that a birth attendant could be considered complicit in such a crime and possibly be prosecuted for murder in a separate charge, as several items in the midwife’s oath suggest, but under this particular statute it was the single mother who was charged, tried, and executed if found guilty. Hoffer and Hull argue that the above act of James I was formulated in response to a general rise in the number of prosecutions of infanticide.54 It was specifically aimed at capturing a newly defined cohort of female criminals. Like the suspected witch who was innocent if she drowned but condemned if she didn’t, the unwed mother who failed to call for assistance during labour and whose child failed to survive delivery was in sore danger of dying because of a lack of evidence. The birth of an illegitimate child who subsequently died had to be witnessed to be a stillbirth or an unsuspicious neonatal death. By implication, all births should be witnessed, a point affirmed by the oath. It is noteworthy that there is no provision for prosecuting married women who concealed a birth under this statute, but at 51

A. Wilson, The Making of Man-midwifery: Childbirth in England 1660–1770 (London: University College London Press, 1995), pp. 25–30.

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Garnet, pp. 284–90.

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Garnet, p. 287.

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Hoffer and Hull, p. 21.

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least on the ground of illegitimacy there would be little reason for a married woman to do so, it being almost impossible to prove the issue was not that of the husband unless there was evidence that sexual relations between the married couple had ceased. The statute and the midwife’s oath set out that it was important that all births were witnessed. Why? The witnessing of birth secured legitimacy — a given child was known to have issued from a given mother. Children as property and conduits for the legitimate succession of property was a serious preoccupation in earlymodern England. In the case of an illegitimate birth, having a witness present gave authorities the opportunity to redirect fiscal responsibility for children to their biological fathers. It would have been difficult to withstand interrogation in the throes of labour. And the witnessing and active assistance in birthing was a paid and increasingly professional activity. The preferred person and the one most likely to be called on to attend a birth was the midwife. But from the early seventeenth century she had rivals in London, in the form of self-styled manmidwives. The most territorial and determined of these practitioners in earlymodern London were a family of Huguenot immigrants, the Chamberlens, who flourished from c. 1610 until 1732.55 It was the Chamberlens who made attempts in 1616 and 1634 to regulate, and ultimately to gain control over, the midwives of London.56 They wanted a warrant to incorporate, train, and license midwives and to set themselves up as experts with more knowledge of obstetrics than these self-regulating women had. In the practice of normal healthy delivery this was clearly not the case: surgeons and barber-surgeons only had experience of pathological obstetrics and the morbid anatomy related to it. Midwives could gain an ecclesiastical licence by taking the aforementioned oath but it seems that many did not bother, or would do so only after many years of successful practice.57 A licence was not required to practise midwifery and these women already gained their expertise through a system of unofficial apprenticeship. The Chamberlens were unsuccessful in their greater aim but did make some incursions into the field they so forcefully desired to monopolize. The two elder Chamberlens were barbersurgeons and members of the company, and therefore were liable to be called upon

55

A. Wilson, pp. 53–57.

56

Helen King, ‘The Politic Midwife: Models of Midwifery in the Work of Elizabeth Cellier’, in The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe, ed. by Hilary Marland (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 115–30 (p. 120). 57

Doreen Evenden, ‘Mothers and their Midwives in Seventeenth-Century London’, in The Art of Midwifery, pp. 9–26 (pp. 9–10).

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for difficult deliveries. Their claim to special status was that they were not just capable of saving a mother’s life in a difficult delivery but that they could effect the safe delivery of the child as well rather than its posthumous removal. This claim was based in their monopoly ownership until at least the 1690s of three pieces of technology, guessed at but unidentified until the nineteenth century: the obstetric forceps, fillet, and vectis.58 Although their descendants branched out into the more prestigious realms of physic, they retained control of this mechanical advantage and continued to act as man-midwives. This extended the range of males who might attend a birth and paved the way for the eventual medicalization of normal birth. It is hard not to see the Chamberlen’s preoccupation with the control of midwives as an attempt to monopolize and control a lucrative market largely denied men. But where midwives worked and acted on the basis of trust and recommendation, these man-midwives operated on the bases of secrecy and exclusion, and their corporate motives were power, profit, and control. It is important then, that in the period when the act against infanticide was instituted — in terms that implicitly insisted upon the observation and examination of labouring women in general — that there was an avid contest over the professional monopoly to be performing the observation and examination. What more fortuitous law could be enacted than one that insisted upon the increased specularization of birth? This was of advantage to midwives in the first instance, as the knowledgeable persons most likely to be called to a delivery. They were also the persons called upon to comment within a ‘jury of matrons’ in cases of alleged witchcraft, for signs of childbirth in infanticide cases, and in determining evidence of pregnancy for those pleading ‘benefit of belly’ before a capital conviction. But as men-midwives gained more credibility as experts, other health practitioners started to find themselves in the birthing room, and as professionalization became a masculine domain in general this set up the conditions of possibility for the professionalization and pathologization of pregnancy and childbirth. In our terms, the processes of lifting away, codifying, and resolidifying an understanding of female embodiment in childbirth remained for the time-being in the hands of females, but women became complicit in observing and containing labouring women. This in turn became a first step in the transfer of that control to professionalized experts (men) in what was an increasingly contested field of authority over the childbed. Men already held the power of definition over embodiment in general, and the reproductive body in particular, in the anatomy theatre. 58

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Elizabeth Malson was an element at work in this dynamic. In her particular case this imperative to observe the aberrant female body extended beyond their prosecution and beyond her execution. She was used as an anatomical subject. It is almost inevitable that those women who were used as subjects in the anatomy theatre were friendless, single, poor women. If they had had friends or families they would have protected their shame, prevented the disclosure of their nakedness before an audience of apprentices and masters, and the uncovering of their reproductive organs and genitalia in a public forum, no matter what their crime. Within the anatomy theatre this woman stands in not only for a social evil, nor just for herself as a murderous single mother. As an anatomical subject she is both the obverse of the good woman, wantonly displaying her aberrance and shame, but also the model by which experts (men) may delineate and define female reproductive anatomy in general. Her body was used as an exemplar for the transmission of anatomical knowledge about female reproduction, knowledge that was applied in extremis in their intervention into difficult or arrested births. We have argued above that in the playhouses, in anatomical illustrations, and in crime chapbooks of the early seventeenth century women are defined by their aberrant sexual natures and their ability to corrupt men in openly biblical terms. After the disruption at mid-century we can see in the earliest reports of women’s crimes from the late seventeenth century that they begin to show traces of a shift in the understanding of the individual, and of bodily difference whereby outright moralization retreats and is normalized and absorbed, into the gendered subjectivity of the accused. It is most obvious in the retelling of tales of feminine corruptibility because the female body was already the primary locus for that perception, but as we shall see in later chapters it is not absent from the male form. The Civil War and Commonwealth saw a period when anatomical practices thrived with no difficulty, and that while one parish clerk chose to give a feminine pseudonym to all the anatomies during his tenure there was as yet no sense that it was appropriate to link a personal name, and thereby a personal history, to the felons interred in the common burial plot. In Chapter 8 we will return to relating the life and death narratives of many of those identifiable felons at length. In the succeeding two chapters we will look to the reopening of the dramatic theatres in the wake of Charles II’s return, and at the illustrated anatomical palimpsests of the latter part of the century. The anatomical illustrations we will discuss reflect this gradual naturalization of gender into embodiment. This, like the recording of names and particulars in the burial records and the Sessions Papers, was an uneven process. Some of the anatomical illustrations current, indeed notorious,

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in the Restoration deliberately feminized the masculine body in parody of the Rake or the Fop. Others towards the close of the century disturbingly display the individuality, the pathos, and the ‘reality’ of the dissected criminal corpse. Sawday is right that in this process Nature becomes subordinate to Science, but in following chapters we will see that Nature does not disappear. She is written over and what She represents becomes ‘natural’ instead. That is, what was once presented as overt abstraction displayed in didactic iconography becomes absorbed as implicit within the abstractions of the rational sciences. What had for centuries been cast as abstracted gender attributes become embodied abstractions of (gendered) truths.

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e have seen that the shifts we are tracing do not happen in a moment; prior perceptions and conceptions of embodied subjectivity will persist or overlap within a broader trajectory of change, and examples of succeeding norms may appear long before they become dominant. Thus, in the previous chapter we discussed two narratives from the first years of the Restoration that provide examples of just this kind of overlap. The statute under which Elizabeth Malson was condemned had its origins in the social unease of the 1620s but that had currency throughout the century, and Pepys was an early proponent of an intellectual sensibility that only gained dominance over time. The anatomically curious Samuel Pepys’s interest in public acts was not restricted to things scientific; it is most famously associated with his delight in music, women, printed matter, and the theatre to which we now return. When the theatres were reopened he took to attending them with enthusiasm. He was a small child when the playhouses closed and could only have had a distant recollection at best of earlier traditions of public playing. By the time companies of players re-formed very great changes had ensued. The new theatres were enclosed, the mechanics of staging had changed (in terms of sets and costuming), and most markedly, women trod the boards. The plays that were staged, however, relied heavily on the adaptation of earlier play-texts. The same is true of the texts in use at the Barber-Surgeons at this time. The ontological effects of reusing earlier anatomical and dramatic forms permeate Part III of the present study. It is also important that the end of the Commonwealth period is the point at which the Barber-Surgeons’ authority over anatomy begins its slow decline. In the face of both increasing competition for bodies with the rise of private anatomy schools and a push for separation by those hungry for prestige who saw themselves as

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surgeons — not barber-surgeons — that decline hastened in the final decades of the seventeenth century. It had been a long time coming. Attempts to split the company had been mooted for many decades, but it was not until their right to claim pre-eminence in anatomical practice came under concerted attack from individualistic men of science that the company’s authority finally slipped. We also saw that in the absence of a monarch the grim lottery of the law courts and the gallows, which equalled that of childbed, continued unabated. In the same way that there had been a shift from open playhouses to enclosed theatres, within a few years of the reopening of the theatres the Sessions House took on a new shape. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Sessions House that was in use from the time of Elizabeth I was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and a new structure was built to replace it in 1673.1 From surviving evidence we know that this building superficially resembled the newly built dramatic theatres of the period. It also resembled our anatomy theatre, which we know had clear connections to playhouse design. The new Sessions House had raked and ranked seating (for the judge and the juries), a holding pen in which the accused waited for the charges to be heard, and a dock that ensured the direct confrontation between the accused and his or her audience in the stalls. The judge and juries sat under a Doric portico that mimicked a theatrical arch and they were partitioned from the accused by the bar or ‘bail dock’ which consisted of a ‘low wall with short spikes affixed to the top, [which] marked the boundary between the yard’.2 In this open area fellow prisoners waited their turn, exposed to the elements and separated from where their ‘betters’ sat in judgement. The accused stood at the dock while conducting his or her defence3 and, if convicted of a capital offence, heard the sentence of death. The final phase of our survey of the abstraction of embodiment begins with those whose lives became narratives within this public space.

Linebaugh’s ‘Riot against the Surgeons’ Peter Linebaugh’s extremely influential ‘Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons’4 is a source frequently used to point out the difficulties experienced by the BarberSurgeons in pressing their rights to the bodies of felons, and the place of abhor1 See Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 76, for an engraving of this Sessions House. See also Donald Rumbelow, The Triple Tree: Newgate, Tyburn and the Old Bailey (London: Harrap, 1987).

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2

Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 75.

3

Linebaugh, The London Hanged, pp. 75–76.

4

Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot’ and The London Hanged.

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rence that they held in the popular imagination during the eighteenth century. Linebaugh’s work is meticulously researched and is indeed an invaluable work for scholars of the eighteenth century, as is his equally impressive book The London Hanged. The latter has been of inestimable worth in understanding the material collected here that relates to the end of the seventeenth century, and those records followed through into the early eighteenth century. His polemical studies of the social factors driving crime and its treatment from the 1690s to 1800 carefully builds a story of the rise of tensions brought on by new and changing social pressures in London as it experienced extraordinary urban growth and various waves of migration into the city. He argues convincingly that from the early eighteenth century the taking of executed felons at Tyburn by the Barber-Surgeons, the Physicians, and later the Surgeons, was a matter of dismay, disgust, and at times one of outright violent dispute: The possibility of resuscitation after hanging, the widespread belief in the therapeutic powers of the malefactor’s corpse, the view that the spirit of the dead could return to the living, and the treatment of a hanging as a wedding were some of the attitudes to death present among both the condemned and the Tyburn crowd. Suggesting as they do the complexity of plebeian conceptions of death and the gravity with which the fact of death was held, they contrast with the views presented by the surgeons and their advocates who mixed arguments of medical utility, traditional prerogative, and penal retribution with attitudes of class hatred. In part they explain the hostility to the surgeons.5

The plebeians were not alone in treating death as a wedding; Charles I met the gallows as an expectant betrothed of Christ reputedly having said to Sir Thomas Herbert on the morning of the execution ‘this is my second marriage day; I would be as trim today as may be, for before night I hope to be espoused to my blessed Jesus.’6 In our terms, the use of this metaphor is entwined with the persistence of traditionalism, whether expressed through piety or gallows-humour charivari. The full range of social factors that Linebaugh goes on the elaborate, which brought these hostilities to a head, were not in place in the seventeenth century as some who have cited his work have assumed (though he most certainly does not).7 It appears from the Barber-Surgeons’ records that they did not encounter any significant difficulties in obtaining bodies from the gallows until quite late in the century, nor did they have to bicker with competitors for the spoils of Justice’s 5

Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riot’, p. 115.

6

Partridge, p. 83.

7

For example, see Richardson, p. 32: ‘By these sixteenth-century royal enactments [the right to bodies granted by Henry VIII], dissection became recognised in law as a punishment, an aggravation to execution, a fate worse than death.’

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‘victory’. Put simply, the Barber-Surgeons did not have the sordid competition that heightened their visibility and the dislike of their practices until the end of the period that the present volume covers. Linebaugh used the company’s Audit Book, 1715–1785 as one of the bases from which to draw his conclusions about the Barber-Surgeons’ difficulties in securing their rights. Unfortunately, as Young tells us, the company’s Audit Book, 1675–1714, the source immediately prior to that used by Linebaugh, has been missing since at least the late nineteenth century. For this study all the entries of payments relevant to anatomies from the two extant books that cover the seventeenth century, the The Wardens Great Accompt Book, 1603–1659 and the Audit Book, 1630–1674,8 have been consulted and transcribed and it is not until the final years’ entries of the Audit Book that there is even a hint of difficulty over the retrieval of a body from Tyburn. The record of payments for the rest of the century tells a story of monotonously regular stipends, with some adjustment for inflation, for seventy years. To assume that, because dissent over the treatment of the bodies of felons was fierce by 1714, this was uniformly the case is unfounded. The audit books show that the Barber-Surgeons had no reason to recompense anyone for untoward behaviour at the gallows until at least 1674; all the payments prior to that were in the nature of regular gratuities or wages for a job performed. It is frustrating that the crucial audit book should be missing, but it is clear that it is within this intervening period that the pressures that created the circumstances behind the riots against the surgeons arose, creating the need to recompense the beadle, the porter, and the sheriff for their ‘pains’. Since execution was a public procedure and anatomy was relatively so, the promise of an execution must have held the implicit possibility of an anatomization throughout the period covered. Indeed, bodies were taken directly from the scaffold for the procedure by the anatomist’s agents who were ready to hand. The public signs of the deft hand of justice falling on malefactors, so visible because of the lengthy procession to the Tyburn gallows, would have suggested to a broad cross-section of people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that an anatomy was at hand. The answer to why their rights were not contested for so long lies at least in part in the absence of the two main factors causing dissension that Linebaugh demonstrates obtained in the eighteenth century: professional competition and solidified interest groups. The increasing importance of each of these is a symptom of the rise of modernity. The Worshipful Company of BarberSurgeons was a product of a traditional social formation in the long and slow 8

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See the appendix, below.

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process of being overwritten, to eventually be resolidified as the Worshipful Company of Barbers and the Royal College of Surgeons. There were only two rival factions with any impetus to compete for bodies until quite late in the seventeenth century, each backed by royal assent and the right to prosecute those who trespassed upon their rights; that is, the Physicians and the Barber-Surgeons. Private anatomy had been in existence since at least the turn of the century but, as we saw in Chapter 2, those who attempted to anatomize outside the regulation of the Barber-Surgeons were prosecuted effectively for doing so. We also saw that the Physicians were slow to take up their right. Private anatomists were not in sufficient numbers, nor of sufficient strength, to subvert the Barber-Surgeons’ authority in this matter until the closing decades of the century. Consequently, the unseemly competition for cadavers which helped to increase the public unease with anatomists was not a pressing issue prior to then. Further, the demographics of the population of London that Linebaugh outlines, which consisted of identifiable groups of interested people from whom the majority of protesters were drawn, was also a factor characteristic of the latter half of the seventeenth century brought on by an increase in rural poverty. Of the five groups of people that Linebaugh describes as those fighting the removal of the dead — ‘the family, personal friends, fellow workers, the Irish and sailors’9 — and following his own description of the conditions which solidified these groups, only the first two (family and friends) were likely to have been present in sufficient numbers to have caused a disturbance prior to the end of the period covered here. For the majority of the century the Barber-Surgeons did not experience the pressures of either professional competition or the ‘mob’ and went about their anatomical work relatively unmolested. In that sheltered position, their practices were in the process of changing in quite subtle ways. The kinds of anatomical texts they used persisted into the Restoration but they had been adapted. We saw in the anatomical illustrations in earlier chapters that the masculine bodies portrayed were rendered in the likeness of Adam, martyred saints, and Greek gods. They were, for the most part, nobly masculine and heroic figures. However, there is one notable exception of a Ganymede figure amongst the illustrations in Giulio Casserio’s Placentini Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627) — a large text that may be ‘Cafferius Placentius his booke of Anatomye’ known to have been in the Barber-Surgeons’ Library gifted on 9 August 1642 by

9

Linebaugh, ‘The Tyburn Riots’, p. 79. Linebaugh also notes the relative youth of those hanged, with three-quarters of the executed being between the ages of twenty and thirty (pp. 116–17).

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Dr Meverell.10 I have left discussion of Casserio’s book until this chapter because the original is unlikely to have been in regular use in the anatomy theatre. It has a particular resonance for our discussion nonetheless. Plates from it were reused in the late seventeenth century for a text that was intended to be used at the company’s dissections. In this chapter we shall begin discussing the illustrations of anatomical texts from earlier in the seventeenth century, as they have been adapted to suit a late-seventeenth-century barber-surgeon apprentice and his professional rivals. At times the Restoration adaptations of these illustrations betray a far more overt feminization of the male body than the metaphorical connections used thus far. By the time the final set of original anatomical illustrations discussed in Chapter 7 were produced the way of representing and constructing the human body had begun to shift even further and to reflect grotesquely empirical studies of the pathetic demise of (criminal) individuals, both male and female.

Embodiment and Science The work of the rationalist and empiricist philosophers of the mid to late seventeenth century in England and on the Continent emphasized the ability of the individual to observe, investigate, adduce (or induce) from evidence, introspect, and conclude for themselves what the nature of the material world might be: [T ]he natural philosophical programme that emerged in England in the seventeenth century […] involved the transformation of a disorganized, highly individualistic, practically oriented form of natural-philosophical practice into something in which enthusiast excesses could be reshaped or curbed. Tudor and Elizabethan England had raised practical above theoretical learning, and practical knowledge was very much a part of the attack on scholastic knowledge.11

This new method was indicative of a shift in the accepted balance of the relationship between ‘Man’ and God and is symptomatic of the quality of abstraction characteristic of modernity as earlier dominant cosmological abstractions of traditional understandings of Truth gave way, at one level, to the rationalization of knowledge and the analytical contestations of ‘truth’. As this slowly but increasingly attained dominance man’s subservience before God in Nature, gradually 10

Young, p. 405. Meverell had been reader in 1638 and was president of the College of Physicians, 1641–44; see Dobson and Milnes Walker, p. 139. 11

Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

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became man’s ability to uncover God’s work through the investigation and conquest of nature. Gaukroger states that from this basis [t]he West’s sense of itself, its relation to the past, and its sense of its future were all profoundly altered as cognitive values generally came to be shaped around scientific ones. The issue is not just that science brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather that it completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry.12

While agreeing with Gaukroger on this point, it is worth remembering that the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution is tangential to the work of the barber-surgeons, and that his detailing of the calls by university scholars for an increase in practical orientation are of a different order from the kinds of longheld traditional practices of apprenticed tradesmen like the barber-surgeons. The barber-surgeons’ studies clearly did not operate in a vacuum — they must have been exposed at some level to the kinds of attitudes expressed in the adaptation of illustrations that were influenced by learned debate and more directly through their continued interaction with physicians as readers at anatomies. At the same time, the barber-surgeons were by coincidence already practicing what became more valuable and attractive to other professionals as the new sciences became dominant. As the construction of the natural world as the object of scientific study prospered, through which ‘Man’ believed ‘he’ would be able to conquer the secrets and truths of the natural world, the ancient association of Nature and femininity and the discourses of the necessity for the subservience of femininity to masculinity were implicitly transmuted into the methods of the new sciences. The shift in the abstraction of embodiment from the traditional to the modern entails the gradual subsuming of gendered characteristics within a generalized codification of embodiment. This is intimately bound up in the concomitant shift across the seventeenth century to a ‘scientific’ or ‘mechanistic’ understanding of the world. That in turn is a part of a far wider process of shifting abstractions across time, space, and cultures. The preceding chapters have been concerned with an embodied abstraction that allowed for the far more fluid, person-centred understanding of bodily difference current in the early seventeenth century which is much closer to what we call gender today. Constance Jordan has argued of the understanding of sex and gender in the human body in this earlier period, that Patristic literature had quite clearly established that there were two aspects of personhood: that comprehended in the universal category homo or humankind, and that restricted to the categories of sex, vir and femina.[…] Persons who were sexually distinct were seen to

12

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Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, p. 1.

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Chapter 6 be capable of being behaviouristically androgynous; the more carefully their androgyny was described, the less close seemed the link between sex and gender.13

There were men and women, but they were capable of exhibiting masculine and feminine traits, that is, being ‘behaviouristically androgynous’. Thomas Laqueur has argued that women, at least, were also popularly perceived to be potentially physically mutable and that there were medical theories that lent weight to that belief: the Vesalian ‘vagina as penis’ thesis. It has now been shown that Laqueur somewhat overstated his case, but the dominant, traditional abstraction of embodiment in the early seventeenth century was able to be negotiated well enough within some ritually coded settings enough to make boys playing women normatively acceptable. The patriarchal dogma enshrined in the evolution of scientific methodologies helped support and rationalize the social subordination of women. The persistent association of women with nature therefore led the way to women increasingly being rendered publicly passive, even if individual women were capable of wielding agency. Jonathan Sawday’s characterization of the shift from an ‘uncanny’ spiritual body to a scientific ‘mechanistic’ body acknowledges and utilizes some of the theories from within these debates; however, it does not take account of the way in which ‘mechanical’ science was part of a reclaiming of the organicism of the body, even if from a different —more rationalized and codified — level of abstraction. Sawday argues that Nature and the natural phenomena under ‘her’ influence — uniformly feminized entities in allegory and iconography up to the mid-seventeenth century — became scientifically feminized within the new sciences. Within that women continued to be identified with the unfettered natural world, with images of Nature as both unruly and as a suitable subject for identification, classification, and containment.14 Merchant also argues that as natural phenomena were feminized, identified, particularized, and framed by the new sciences, gender traits simultaneously became scientifically naturalized — creating ‘the new image of nature as a female to be controlled and dissected through experiment’15 — and legitimated with the weight and power of a new 13

Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 135. 14 15

Sawday, The Body Emblazoned, chap. 8.

Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 189. Though a frequently vilified text, the respected historian of science and medicine Katharine Park, amongst others, has recently re-evaluated it and called for a recognition of what is sound in this book; see ‘Focus: Getting Back to The Death of Nature: Reading Carolyn Merchant’, ISIS, 97 (2006), 485–533.

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orthodoxy. The authority of an increasingly scientific terminology gradually revealed new explanations for the mysteries of generation, but in doing so they enshrined gender characteristics as inextricable traits of the new ‘biological’ perception of male and female.16 By the late seventeenth century English conceptions of biological sex and its depiction in anatomical illustration were showing evidence of this shift. The move from explanations of physical phenomena within natural philosophy to the understanding of the world in terms of the new physical sciences has been well documented by many historians.17 Most historians of science in seventeenthcentury England pay due attention to the importance of Protestantism in the superseding of a dogmatic adherence to scholastic beliefs and the valorization of individual witness through the observation of the senses in the emerging dominance of science. Ironically, Protestant reliance on the self as a basis of knowledge also assisted in a detheologization of both science and the sovereign law.18 However, rather than concentrating on why science became the dominant means of understanding the natural world our object is to concentrate on how the shift manifested in our three public arena. The influence of the ‘scientific revolution’ took time to be accepted. Like the conflicting theories on embodiment of the early seventeenth century, this was a site of disputation rather than a field that was won with the foundation of the Royal Society. Indeed, as stated above, at the beginning of the Restoration the barber-surgeons had different priorities from that institution or its fellows. As 16

See Emily Martin, ‘The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16 (1991), 485–501, for a discussion of the gender stereotypes of aggressive sperm and passive ova, which were instilled in this period and persist to this day. See also Huet, Monstrous Imagination. 17

For a small selection of influential writers on the ‘scientific revolution’ in England and on the Continent, see Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, and his Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and, more classically, Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York: Holms Meier, 1975): Christopher Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science, 1480–1700, trans. by Brian Pearce (Hassocks: Harvester, 1979); Hugh Kearney, Origins of the Scientific Revolution (London: Longman, 1964), A. Rupert Hall, The Revolution in Science (London: Longman, 1983); and Margaret C. Jacob, The Cultural Meanings of the Scientific Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). 18

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See C. Webster and also, Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution.

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anatomists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries looked further into the skeletal and muscular differences between men and women, they built on this shift and discovered even more reasons to justify the welding of gender traits to the differentiated sexes.19 The success of scientific discourse was merely one facet implicated in a wider social shift. Concomitant with the rise of science and the secularization of the state, the practical reality of women’s lives underwent a retreat into the domestic sphere and no less so amongst those women apprenticed through the company. It is clear from the records that in the early seventeenth century it was possible for women to become barber-surgeons by apprenticeship or by the inheritance of their husbands’ businesses. There were a few notable women both on the Continent and in England who managed to practice surgery into the eighteenth century, but the gradual diminution of their ranks and the contraction of opportunities open to the female healer began much earlier. In the Restoration the practical opportunities for women to take an active part in the surgical aspect of barber-surgery were decreasing.20 In the early years of the seventeenth century a group of widows not only took over their late husbands’ barber-surgical businesses, but they were also allowed to pay their quarterages as members of the livery of the Company. Mistresses Bovey, Atmer, Leycock, Coxe, Martyn, Hitchin, Gerard, and Rodes were all widows of former masters or dignitaries of the company, and they appear in the lists of quarterages for the livery in The Wardens Great Accompt Book, 1603–1659, between 1603 and 1613. These are most probably the widows who in Chapter 2 we saw were ‘bidden to the feasts’. A Mistress Stanthrop also appears, although her relationship to anyone in the company is uncertain. By the 1660s more girls were being bound as apprentices than had been the case early in the century, but almost exclusively as apprentice barbers or milliners and with no hope of entering the livery. The increase in female barbers was probably in response to a dramatic increase in the demand for the production of wigs. However, there appears to be one possible exception: Susan Pargiter. Pargiter had been apprenticed to Sarah and Henry Hodgekinson and gained her Admission

19

Schiebinger, ‘Skeletons in the Closet’, p. 53. Schiebinger notes that the female skeleton which appeared in Bauhinus’s Theatrum anatomicum (Frankfurt: printed by M. Beckeri, 1605) and which was reused by Crooke (London, 1615) was the only instance of a differentiation between man and woman, other than via the generative organs or the surface of the body, prior to the eighteenth century; ibid., pp. 51–82, passim. See also Daston and Galison. 20

See A. L. Wyman ‘The Surgeoness: The Female Practitioner of Surgery 1400–1800’, Medical History, 28 (1984), 22–41.

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of Freedom on 21 January 1661/62.21 Her name subsequently appears in the Apprentice Bindings22 for 5 March 1661 as the Mistress binding Beatrice Alderne in apprenticeship. On 1 July 1662 she bound another two female apprentices, Maria Adams and Maria Cunningham. In the entry for 1661 she is recorded as ‘Barbitonsor Chir’. Surrounding entries note when an apprentice was bound by a master or mistress practising as either a barber or a surgeon, or, on occasion, as a seamstress or milliner. This entry makes clear that Pargiter was recognized by the company as being qualified to practise as both a barber and a surgeon. In practical terms, however, in common with the slow, gradual, and generalized contraction of labour markets for women which began in the early seventeenth century, the range of opportunities within and outside the company for women and girls to find gainful employment and/or a full education was swiftly shrinking.23 One notable but hardly value-free exception was the actress. This intensification of the segregation of education and of social roles was concurrent with the absorption of traditional traits into the modern sense of embodiment. The stereotypical traits that had been associated with the natural world were already allied to femininity, and as we shall see in Chapter 7 the roles actresses played merely aided in the process of solidification. The new ‘Man of Science’ discovered that what had been traditionally attributed to men and women was biologically based. Science found anew what social stereotyping had said for centuries, but it said it with a forceful empirical authority because it was gathered from ‘objective’ evidence. That objectivity was still subject to aesthetic influences but they too had changed in quality. A selection of anatomical illustrations from the late seventeenth century carries evidence of this new expression of embodied abstraction.

Anatomical Adaptations: John Browne and Giulio Casserio We have covered a detailed foregrounding of the artistic and aesthetic imperatives at work in the early seventeenth century and how these impacted upon the creation of anatomical illustrations. In the anatomical adaptations of the late 21

Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, Register of Freedom of Admission, 1552–1666, MS 5265/1. 22

Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, Apprentice Bindings, 1657–1672 , MS 5266/1. 23

See Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: George Routledge, 1919; repr. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), passim, and Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500–1760: A Social History (London: Phoenix House, 1996).

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seventeenth century those imperatives have not been done away with; they have slipped beneath the surface. They are based on older Italian originals and therefore still display in the aesthetic stylistics and gestures already described. In their revivification they have undergone a reprise or a variation, for as we have seen even when another social formation becomes dominant after revolutionary events, it does not fully obliterate what came before. In the early seventeenth century, imitation truly was seen as the sincerest form of flattery or, at least, a legitimate strategy in constructing a work of literature or art. William Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, relied on earlier narratives to construct his ‘art’. With the rise of the individual in society and the professional man came a rise in the individual subject’s conception of his capacities to create original material — over which he could then claim ownership — as opposed to an earlier conception of individual authorship or intellectual generation. This kind of egoism was once solely God’s preserve, but the new modern subject had a peculiar attachment to the material products which he created. As we will see in the following chapter, Clopton Havers attributed the origin of the plates he used to Remmelin, but claimed that he was making them more accurate. Though William Cowper was tardy in admitting that the plates in his book were Govard Bidloo’s, he did so eventually. Cowper also made sure that people knew that his text was a significant adjunct to them. He was original in this at least. John Browne (1642–1702) was an ambitious man who rose to become a ‘Surgeon in Ordinary’ to Charles II, and attempted to secure a position of public prominence by publishing medical books.24 However, he made the mistake of adhering to an older set of values, reusing Giulio Casserio’s anatomical plates and the text from William Molins’s Myskotomia; or, The Anatomical Administration of all the Muscles of an Humane Body as they arise in Dissection (London, 1648) without open attribution in his own A compleat Treatise of the Muscles […] (London, 1681). As a result, Browne was vilified as a plagiarist. Molins’s text was obviously far too recent for a wholesale adoption of his writing to escape comment in the ‘age of the author’ but it seems Browne was also a contentious man and the vitriolic lambasting he received in James Young’s Medicaster Medicatus (London, 1685) may have had as much to do with his unpopular successes and professional rivalries as the fact that he had reused Casserio’s plates. Browne did have sense enough to attribute the inclusion of Dr Charles Scarborough’s Syllabus musculorum in the first Latin edition in 1684 and all others where it appears, which 24

See K. F. Russell, ‘John Browne, 1642–1702: A Seventeenth-century Surgeon, Anatomist, and Plagiarist’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 33 (1959), 393–97.

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Young incorrectly accuses him of omitting.25 This is the same Scarborough who appears in the Arris portrait and who was also attendant on Charles II. In a period when new values were not yet solidified Browne’s personal attributes may have been enough to outweigh any tolerance of mores that were giving way. What had once been common practice brought ridicule down upon his head.26 Even Vesalius’s piqued complaints about Geminus using his illustrations were more concerned with the assertion that Geminus had done a bad job, rather than that his right of ownership had been subverted. However, ridiculed or not, what Browne did with Casserio’s plates in A Complete treatise is intriguing. Casserio’s plates were old, but his work was well known. Casserio (1561– 1616) was from Piacenza (Placentia) and he had taught anatomy at Padua.27 He had been working on a complete anatomy of the human body, including a comprehensive series of copper plate engravings, for sixteen years before his death. These were published in 1627 in compilation with the written work of his successor at Padua, Adriaan van der Spieghel (Spigelius), by Bucretius as Julii Caserii Placentini Tabulae anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627). While it is not possible to prove, it is most probably either this text, with its seventy-seven illustrations created under Casserio’s direction and a further twenty by the same artists under Bucretius’s direction, or the 1632 quarto edition of it which Meverell donated to the Barber-Surgeons. In 1642 it would have been a relatively new text to England and a valuable addition to the library. Indeed Browne’s critic, Young, who was also a barber-surgeon, claimed to know the exact ‘cutts’ Browne used to have his plates engraved, which gives a credible hint that it may have been the very same copy in the Barber-Surgeons’ Library.28 In the analyses below we work from the same illustrations as they appear with the text of Spigelius in Opera, quae extant omnia […] (Amsterdam, 1645). They are Casserio’s illustrations in the same way we call Vesalius’s illustrations ‘his’, for Casserio’s illustrations were drawn by Oduardo Fialetti, ‘a pupil of Tintoretto and Jacomo Robusti’, and engraved by Francisco Valesio.29 Precisely which text the Barber-Surgeons possessed a copy of 25

Russell, ‘John Browne’, p. 514.

26

Russell, ‘John Browne’, provides a brief biography of Browne, as well as a full account of James Young’s vilifying accusations of plagiarism against Browne. 27

See Roberts and Tomlinson, pp. 259–61, and Ludwig Choulant, History and Bibliography of Anatomic Illustration, trans. by M. Frank (Leipzig: Rudolph Weigel, 1852; repr. New York: Schuman’s, 1945), pp. 223–28, for brief biographies and some discussion of Casserio’s engraving.

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28

Young, cited in Russell, ‘John Browne’, p. 503.

29

Choulant, pp. 223–28, and Roberts and Tomlinson, pp. 259–71.

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is less important here than the relation of Browne’s text to it, for the BarberSurgeons were the specific market on which he had set his sites. The book from which Browne adapted his plates is embroiled in the artistic and religious discourse on the female body which predominated in the early seventeenth century and contains a series of female figures that allude to goddesses such as Diana and Ceres. However, Browne’s book is on the muscles of the human body and as we have seen the female body was only believed to be appropriate material for showing surface differences and the reproductive organs. Quite logically then, Browne did not use any of Casserio’s dramatic and tragic goddesses. In adapting Casserio’s myographic illustrations, Browne and his engraver introduced contemporary Restoration elements to their framing and in the process imported more than just fashionable forms of dress and architecture. He was also original in introducing the kind of textual labelling on the identified item into anatomical illustrations that we saw in the introduction, above, was so against convention in our discussion of the ‘Ditchley’ and Banister portraits. K. F. Russell felt that the peripheral aesthetic additions were not a success: ‘Browne’s artist altered the pose of figures, used different backgrounds, and, in some cases, added XVIIth century wigs and costumes to the figures, the result, in many cases, being quite ludicrous.’30 One suspects that what Russell found ‘ludicrous’ in these illustrations is precisely what engages with our discussion. In Casserio’s illustrations all the figures are set in rustic or sylvan settings. Each figure in these illustrations has a distinct face and there are occasional indications of their possible employment. One may have been a shepherd, a second a labourer, another still a simple swain. It is as if they were portraits of known individuals. In all but one of his adapted plates Browne conformed to the original by placing the figures in a rural setting. While anatomical specificities were transposed onto slightly different bodies and most of them were reversed, they mimic the poses of Casserio’s originals and the faces they depict still belong to the same individuals. Browne’s musclemen differ in that they are all raised on pedestals, separating them slightly from the natural habitat which forms a backdrop to their anatomical lesson. As Russell notes, in Browne these formerly rustic figures take on effete postures and clothing. In one case at least, the simple shepherd becomes the simpleton fop. Each of these sets of illustrations represents the sociocultural influences and anxieties that were current both when they were produced and when they were reproduced. Looking at the earlier drawings paired with their palimpsests intensifies this point. 30

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In the first pairing both figures stand in front of a rural landscape with a building to the right (Figs 20 and 21). In Browne’s adaptation the building is brought closer into the foreground and the fact that the figure now stands on a classical pedestal, rather than resting one foot on a natural outcrop, introduces the suggestion that this muscleman is a statue in the garden of the villa close by. Buildings frequently appear in Casserio’s originals, but they are so far removed from the anatomical subject that one feels that there is no connection to the figures, or that if there had been one it has been severed. Casserio’s figures are like the souls of the dead, silently watching the living world across the Styx or the Lethe. Since Browne’s figure now stands with both feet on the pedestal this requires a change in the positioning, and gesturing, of the body. Casserio’s figure displays that masculine tendency to virile action that we saw was important in Chapters 2 and 3, his left leg muscles are taut and his testicles are made just visible by his stance. In Browne the action is toned down, the foot is in contact with the pedestal, and as a result the leg is more relaxed-looking: but oddly, considering the pose, the scrotum has become more prominent. The diminution of the ‘manliness’ but the increased sexualization of the pose is further magnified by changes in the gestures of the hands. In Casserio the right hand gently holds the corner of a flap of muscle to make viewing easier, and the left hand grasps the end of a strip of muscle which has been peeled away from beside the spine. There is a sense of weight in this ribbon of muscle as it hangs in the figure’s hand. In Browne, the fingers of the left hand now hold what is supposed to represent the same sheet of muscle, but they do so with the same delicacy of touch as the right hand, the thumbs pinched together with each forefinger. Consequently, the band of muscle no longer imparts a sense of weight. In fact the gesture makes the figure look as if he is holding the corner of a frock coat out so that he can show the viewer the fineness of the fabric. Similarly, the right hand is supposed to be holding the same muscle as Casserio’s figure but the result looks more like a quill than a piece of flesh. In the second example (Figs 22 and 23), in Casserio’s illustration a man sits in a lonely landscape on a rock, turned slightly so that his leg and back muscles are flexed, with his hands holding up behind him some of the muscles of his shoulder in an obliging display. His head, naturally for the posture he has adopted, is bent forward and like the previous figure with his back to the viewer, the face in unseen. Several factors immediately strike one about the adaptation. Again, Browne’s figure stands on a pedestal but rather than being in a closely framed, deserted spot he is within easy distance of what might be farm buildings. He has also become decidedly plump, has his foot awkwardly posed in the air for no apparent reason, and has unaccountably managed to turn his head to favour the viewer with a coy smile.

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Fig. 20: Muscles of the back, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula V , Lib IV . Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Fig. 21: Anatomical illustration showing the back of the human body, London, Wellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XVII. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute.

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Fig. 22: Muscles of the back, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice; 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula XIV , Lib IV . Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Fig. 23: Anatomical illustration showing the back of the human body, London, Wellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XIIII . Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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In fact the position of his face is physically impossible given the depiction of the disposition of his neck muscles. Any possible hint of masculine action suggested by the raised foot is undercut both by the pointlessness of its potential — he simply looks as if he is trying to stand on one foot — and by the smirking, curlframed visage that sits above it. He has also gained a femininely rounded belly as opposed to the masculinely taught stomach of Casserio’s original. The third example of adaptation is almost equally bizarre (Figs 24 and 25). In this case Casserio’s figure is presented from the front and in his downcast face we see the kind of pained resignation that earlier Adams or martyred saints displayed. He is a man of poor condition, perhaps a rural labourer, with all the cares of his position visible in the furrows of his brow which is framed by his worn leather cap. He sits on a moss-covered fragment of stonework with a cloth or a cloak or perhaps even his skin draped around his loins. Browne’s figure is, like Casserio’s original, facing forward but he is a different man indeed: he is a rake or a fop. The leather bonnet is replaced by the kind of tumbling curls common in men’s wigs at the time. Where the skin of the upper arms of Casserio’s figure were rolled down, as one would roll shirtsleeves up, this fellow’s skin falls from his elbows like elaborate lace cuffs. The material that covers his loins is clearly made of fabric now and he is seated not just on a pedestal, but on a pedestal atop a cherub-decked column. The staff upon which his elbow rests is similar to that which the rustic uses, except that with his elevation in class it has become a gentleman’s walking stick instead of a shepherd’s crook. Most importantly, his face has changed. He is still recognizable as the same swain, but now his slightly crossed eyes look up and out to the left over a river — or perhaps at his own diaphragm — and a half smile lights his self-satisfied face. The martyr has disappeared altogether. All the figures I have discussed so far have been adapted to include the dress and the disposition of a recognizable ‘type’ of man of the period in which they were printed. These figures are like the effeminate 31 sexual libertines who were 31

Randolph Trumbach has argued that until the late eighteenth century the word effeminate was applied to two types of men, ‘the smooth faced Ganymedes who might even be transvestite to attract their adult male partners; or the adult male obsessed with women […] by the early eighteenth century, the second of these two meanings had disappeared; by then an adult effeminate male was taken to be an exclusive sodomite’ (‘The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660–1750’, in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. by Martin B. Duberman, Martin Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 129–40 (p. 153)). I am using the word in the latter of these two senses — fops and rakes on the Restoration stage were generally ‘effeminate’ in the sense that they were obsessed with pursuing and winning women, even if they could also appear to be sexually omnivorous.

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appearing in droves on the Restoration stage: the city wit, the rake, the fop. They are recognizable, sexually transgressive social beings. The final pair of illustrations we shall look at takes this association even further (Figs 26 and 27). In Casserio’s original we see a strikingly immodest pose in a young Ganymede figure, who presents his anus to the viewer in the kind of sexualized pose usually reserved for the depiction of the female body. The closest models are the illustrations of female sexual organs in Charles Estienne and Étienne de la Rivière’s De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres (Paris, 1545) which we saw in Chapter 2 were themselves based on the loves of the ancient gods. The erotic posture that Casserio, radically, gives to a male figure may have been based in a decision to try and depict all of his figures in complete forms. The same view of the male genitals appears in other anatomical texts, but elsewhere it is uniformly excised from the body — just as Pepys’s ‘lusty sailor’ had been prepared. This excision avoids showing a man in a sexualized and feminized posture in illustrations while at the same time leaving an invisible emasculated form somewhere in the imagination, or as we saw in Pepys’s case the queasy presence, of the viewer. The adaptation of this image by Browne and his illustrator intensifies the Carravagian homoeroticism which is clearly implied in Casserio’s original. Casserio’s figure already suggests sexual rapture. By removing the figure from any direct contact with the earth in keeping with the other adapted illustrations, Browne was left with very few options in reusing this picture. The posture necessary for a whole figure to display the musculature of the penis and anus truly would look ludicrous set on a pedestal. Browne and his illustrator chose to remove it from the natural and/or mythical world of Casserio’s plates and to situate it in a bedroom. The figure is depicted on a bed of lust, in what is an even clearer parallel to contemporary paintings of the sexually enraptured Danaë. Once placed on a bed, and given fashionably long Restoration locks, a disproportionately enlarged member, and an even more obvious presentation of the anus than appears in the original, this figure is easily read as a passive, sexually available male. The figure mimics the earlier, common appropriation of the female body as insatiably sexually open. This is not the closed ‘classical’ body we are used to seeing in depictions of men; it is an open ‘grotesque’ body with an orifice that defies closure.32 His posture is basically the same as that depicted in Casserio’s plate but there are slight changes. The right hand comes around to support the raised right heel and possibly even to pull it closer to the buttock, the better to expose himself. 32

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

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Fig. 24: Muscles of the upper body, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice; 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula XV, Lib IV. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Fig. 25: Anatomical illustration showing muscles of the upper body, London, Wellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XVIII. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute.

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Fig. 26: Anatomical ‘Ganymede’, Sydney, RACP Library, from Giulio Casserio, Tabulae Anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice, 1627), in folio. Engraving. Tabula X V , Lib VIII . Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Fig. 27: Anatomical illustration showing male genitalia, London, W ellcome Institute, from John Browne, A Compleat treatise of the muscles […] (London: Thomas Newcombe, 1681), in folio. Engraving. Tab. XIII. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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This fellow no longer braces himself, as he could by grasping the bed head, but rather lets his left arm drape nonchalantly behind his fashionably curled head, as he relaxes against the bolster. Like the figure of the shepherd who had become a fop, this figure has a gently pleased and suggestively sated expression on his face. As such this figure can be read as a newly perceived kind of sexually active male individual emerging in the closing decades of the seventeenth century, the ‘Molly’. Molly was the epithet used to describe men who frequented inns and private houses (known as Molly-houses) in order to engage in affective and sexual relationships with one another in private.33 Early in the eighteenth century, some years after the publication of these illustrations, the prosecution and conviction of Mollies led to the inevitable connection between their demise and the anatomy theatre of the Barber-Surgeons. We will see in the final chapter amongst the felons’ narratives two such individuals, George Skelthorp (1709) and Gabriel (or John) Lawrence (1726). By adapting the illustrations of an earlier period and ‘modernizing’ them, Browne transposes the concerns of his own time onto an image that was already redolent with homoerotic associations at the time it was first produced. In choosing, or allowing his illustrator, to depict the male urogenital tract in this way Browne’s illustration manifests early signs of the anxieties and preoccupation with homoeroticism that were to come to a head in the early eighteenth century. In relation to the quality of the abstraction of this series of male figures, each of them remains individualized even when overtly turned into a passive object of our gaze, much as female figures had been treated earlier. The majority of them are changed slightly to fit with the expectations of the day. Only in the final pairing is there a significant change to the facial features of the figure. There is no reason to suppose that it is meant to be a portrait, and the look is certainly that favoured by many men at, or hangers-on of, the Restoration court. However, he does bear a striking resemblance to an engraving of man whose reputation as a debauchee was second to none; John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. Rochester had died in 1680 and one of his final orders was that his collection of ‘profane’ and ‘lewd’ writings and a similar collection of art be destroyed. Obviously this was not successfully done, for much survives including the play Sodom; or, The gentleman instructed (c. 1673). If this illustration makes a covert reference to the life and death of Rochester it lends strength to James’s argument on the persistent individuality of male universals at least in relation to (early) modernity. The rest of 33 I avoid using the epithet gay or homosexual, because it would be anachronistic. Homosexuality is a ‘discovery’ of the late nineteenth century; see David Halperin, ‘One Hundred Years of Homosexuality’, Diacritics, 16 (1986), 34–45.

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the illustrations also carry forward the sense of a ‘somebody’ in the associations of occupation or social rank. It is not until we reach the illustrations that appear in William Cowper’s and much later William Hunter’s anatomical atlases that we begin to see the particular captured in the female body, in a far more disturbing form. For now we will turn to how women were appearing in those other theatres.

The Reopened Theatres Despite the fact that it was a site of public congregation, and therefore potentially a site of militation, the anatomy theatre was allowed to continue to function during the period in which the playhouses remained closed. There are several factors which are likely to have ensured the continuation of anatomies. Firstly, it is improbable that this particular theatre would have been perceived as posing a serious threat to civil order, unlike the often rowdy and anarchic dramatic theatres. Playwrights and actors were often suspected of seditious behaviour. It has been shown that in their regular anatomization of felons, the Barber-Surgeons were liable to be perceived as assisting in the control of the ‘dangerous elements’ in society, rather than as being implicated in seditious acts. Further, as I demonstrated earlier, the audiences in the anatomy theatre, while not small, were less than a tenth of the alarming size of a capacity audience of a public playhouse and they were also relatively socially homogenous. Finally, while the Barber-Surgeons provided men and money for the king’s campaigns in 1640/41, by 1647/48 they were, pragmatically, providing payment for the upkeep of surgeons in the parliamentary army.34 Whether or not this shift in allegiance was consciously motivated by a desire to secure their rights, there is no doubt that compliance with those in power would not have harmed any petition or request to be allowed to practise their trade unmolested. By contrast, apart from a very few coterie productions and operas, the playhouses of London were forcibly closed between 1642 and 1660. Had performances continued in public dramatic theatres throughout this period the change 34

In 1640/41: ‘Received of ffrancis Soare in regards he is nowe in the kings fources in the North only ffive pounds for his ffine for not holding Mr of Anatomye the some of — 5£. Received of Hum. Painter in regard he is now in the kings fources in ye North only ten pounds for his two fines not holding the two places of Stewards and Mr of the Anathomie the sume of — 10£’ (The Wardens Great Accompt Book, fol. 371 v ), and in 1647/48 there are a series of payments relating to the barber-surgeons in the Parliament’s Army (ibid., fol. 427 v ). Of course, they were not alone in this — a range of similar institutions took the same pragmatic approach. See Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (London: Croom Helm, 1977).

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in the style of playwriting between the reigns of Charles I and Charles II, and in the theatrical depiction of male and female characters, probably would not be so striking. As we shall see in the following chapter, the shift in the abstraction of embodiment as it appears in dramatic representations seems so abrupt and is intensified in these plays because of the hiatus in theatrical production. Like the change in Hermione between Act III and Act V in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (c. 1610), dramatic constructions of embodiment continued to mutate unobserved. At the end of Act III the audience, along with Leontes, believes Paulina’s declaration that Hermione is dead, but when her ‘statue’ is presented in Act V it is made clear that ‘its’ visage bears signs of the passage of the sixteen years during which Hermione has supposedly been entombed. In being absent from the public’s attention Hermione has lived and aged in Paulina’s house, secluded but not entirely isolated from the world outside. In a similar manner theatrical practice and discourse were not totally isolated from ‘the cataclysmic changes in the intellectual, political, socio-economic, and religious frameworks’ of the seventeenth century.35 They were waiting in the wings or in France, ready to reappear, having already absorbed, in absentia as it were, the shift in the abstraction in construction of embodiment. By the time Charles II assumed the English throne and the theatres reopened the physical means of staging plays had also changed. During the prolonged period of the closure of the theatres the majority of the buildings in London that had housed the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical companies had fallen into disrepair, been disbanded, or been demolished. By the time Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant began to compete for the right to win an audience, tastes in the mechanics of theatrical production had also changed. The sorts of theatrical innovations that Inigo Jones had introduced to court masques early in the century, which were borrowed from theatrical innovations in use on the Continent,36 became widespread by the late seventeenth century. Members of the English court and its sympathizers, who in exile had enjoyed the benefit of seeing plays produced with shifting flats and perspective scenes, were inured to the kinds of theatrical 35

Katherine M. Quinsey, ‘Introduction’, in Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama, ed. by Katherine M. Quinsey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), pp. 1–2. 36

See Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court, 2 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), for a comprehensive discussion of Jones’s theatrical designs and staging innovations, and his early audiences’ inability to comprehend many of them.

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production once restricted to the masques written for James I and Charles I. Those people who were to become the new theatre audience in London who had not lived in exile, and of whom only a minority could have had personal experience of theatrical productions prior to the Civil War, also proved to be ready to be diverted and astounded by theatrical spectacles.

Restored Theatres In the early seventeenth century the public playhouses were exposed to the elements, and employed relatively little in the way of properties, stage devices, and costuming to create the fantasy of other worlds for their audiences. Each mode of theatre requires its audience to be ‘literate’ in the conventions specific to that style of theatrical performance. In the early-modern playhouses changes in time, place, and atmosphere had to be excited in the imagination of an audience, and that required a poetic diction capable of and suited to evoking powerful mental images. An Elizabethan or Jacobean playwright needed a sophisticated command of the ‘vulgar tongue’ to convey the sense of another time and place to his largely illiterate though certainly not ignorant audience. With the change in theatrical conventions at the reopening of the theatres came a change in these requirements. The new theatres had an array of technical innovations on which to rely: elaborate candle arrangements for lighting; flats and moving scenes to evoke time and place; and, the two theatre companies holding the duopoly on playing also made liberal use of costumes and properties.37 Further, the Restoration theatres were like the ‘private’ theatres of the early seventeenth century in being smaller, roofed, and relatively expensive. 38 As we saw in the case of the earlier private theatres, this meant that there were practical constraints on who could attend based on the ability to pay the entry fee.39 The 37

Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten, ‘Critical Introduction’, in London Stage, 1660– 1800, pt I: 1660–1700, ed. by William Van Lennep (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–68), I, pp. i–clxxvi (pp. lxxxiv–xcv), and Colin Visser, ‘Scenery and Technical Design’, in The London Theatre World, 1660–1800, ed. by Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), pp. 66–118. 38

Edward A. Langhans, ‘The Theatres’, in The London Theatre World (see n. 32, above), pp. 35–65. 39

See Harold Love, ‘The Myth of the Restoration Audience’, Komos, 1 (1968), 49–56, and his ‘Who Were the Restoration Audience?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 10 (1980), 21–44, on audiences and their interaction with the players.

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truly poor (labourers, journeymen, hawkers, seamstresses, etc.) would have been unlikely to attend but poorer people like servants, linkboys, orange-women, and prostitutes did attend at the behest of their masters or customers, to save seats, to see them home, or to offer their wares. Old plays were revived as they had been written, they were revived in adaptations, and new plays from new playwrights also started to appear. With the new emphasis on the use of elaborate costuming and scenery to effect the depiction of time, place, and period, the language or poetic diction of plays no longer needed to carry the kind of burden which had once been necessary to convey meaning. This coincided with the new playwrights beginning to use more prosodic English.40 Poetry or rhyme survived in prologues, epilogues, and in high tragedy, the one genre to which it was still deemed to be appropriate.41 In addition, with the introduction of actresses, playwrights no longer had to construct convincing feminine characters which young male actors then had to interpret and represent through feminine action and apparel. On the other hand this also limited a playwright’s ability to create moments of the kind of framebreaking, sexually transgressive humour — the frequent double entendres — which permeate both comic and tragic plays of the early seventeenth century. Certainly, the lines and character traits given to female characters after 1660 were no less representations of femininity and femaleness than the parts given to boys in Shakespeare’s time but in these later plays and adaptations femininity was no longer rendered on and through the male body. The absorption of gendered attributes into the body constructed an actress’s performance of femininity as ‘natural’ to her form. Actresses were introduced to and accepted on the stage at a time in which English society was experiencing a general contraction of the economic opportunities open to women. It has commonly been noted that while some sections of society experienced qualitative gains after the Restoration others suffered material losses, particularly those who were already socioeconomically disadvantaged. Those who had little or no power, through a lack of ready money or the want of property, were the most likely to be adversely affected. This encompassed the

40

‘According to the most common view [of the time], tragedy exalts nature while comedy leaves it as it is’ (Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 51): hence the shift in writing styles, with the playwrights’ preference for language closer to spoken English. 41

See Hume, The Development of English Drama, pp. 167–73, for a succinct summary of the early debates on the place of poetry and rhyme in tragedy.

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rural and urban poor, and the majority of women.42 The erosion of what little economic security these groups held was the result of gradual shifts taking place in the bases of economic structures and activities that took place over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.43 As Alice Clark and her more recent successors have shown, the change from an economy based largely on agricultural and cottage industry production to a more organized, proto-manufacturing economy, though still in its formative stages, began to affect the available labour opportunities for rural workers, the lower classes, and all ranks of women.44 It is true that some individual women were able to carry on as financially independent people: widows could still run the businesses of their deceased spouses, extraordinary women like Aphra Behn could write for a living, and those exorbitant creatures, actresses, found radical and public work opportunities at the reopening of the theatres. However, for those at the poorer end of society life only became harder. Unemployed rural labourers or disenfranchised common-land farmers had no choice but to starve or to move to the city and join the ranks of those who hired themselves out as day-labourers, servants, or prostitutes. In the late seventeenth century silence was deemed to be a lady’s best calling: ‘A womans tongue should indeed be like the imaginary Music of the sphers, sweet and charming, but not to be heard at a distance.’45 This sounds very similar to the ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’ maiden of the early seventeenth century but, with the restriction in the ability of women to lead public and financially independent lives and with a less practically useful education, girls were even more likely to have to abide by this masculine ideal than they had been in the early part of the century. Those like Bathsua Makin (c. 1600–73) and Mary Astell (1666–1731), who argued for the intellectual stimulation of girls through comprehensive education, were few and far between. This economic and educational marginalization of women supported and, in turn, was supported by the kind of ‘naturalization’ of gender traits I argue for in my comparison of anatomical illustrations. A woman’s body became her self. Her physical propensities became her whole persona. As we saw in the anatomical illustrations, morally imbued traits such as polluting sexual voraciousness and incontinence were incorporated into the new ‘scientific’ construction of the female body. 42

A. Laurence, chap. 8, passim.

43

A. Laurence, chap. 8, passim.

44

See A. Clark.

45

Richard Allestree, The ladies calling: in two parts (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, 1673), pt I, sec. 1, ‘Of Modesty’, p. 7.

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A publicly labouring woman, like an actress, was also suspected of being a sexually available woman;46 and at the same time it became physically ‘natural’ that a good woman should not be a public individual. Previously ideas about the innate tendency to immorality in women had been backed by religious dogma. In the late seventeenth century they become a matter of scientific ‘truth’. An actress, as an extraordinarily public female, was rarely believed to be chaste47 and, while there were exceptions like Anne Bracegirdle who worked hard at retaining a reputation for chastity, in many instances actresses were not only playing the wanton on the boards. Life after the stage for less successful actresses generally meant a move into prostitution. It is ironic, yet apposite, in the light of this that Joseph Moxon’s 1675 revised and translated English edition of Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum, which was dedicated to Samuel Pepys and forms part of the discussion in Chapter 7, was presented to one of Charles II’s most famous mistresses and one of the most popular actresses of her time, Nell Gwyn.48 Here both the anatomical and the dramatic theatres meet, in one man’s attempt to curry favour with a truly eroticized female, the King’s (Protestant) Whore. Gwyn was an exemplar of the construction of the actress as the sexually available woman, both on and off the stage. The first professional actress to appear on the English stage after 1660 was probably the unnamed ‘Woman’ who played Desdemona in a revival of Shakespeare’s Othello which was performed on Saturday, 8 December 1660.49 Certainly the first English women to take the stage professionally did so very soon after the reopening of the theatres, and actresses were an immediate success. Whether their roles reflected the innovativeness that their presence implied is a moot point. Elizabeth Howe argues that actresses were the objects of a voyeuristic, lascivious male gaze, particularly in tragedy.50 There was certainly a voyeuristic appeal in

46

See Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 4, for a detailed discussion of the popular conflation by audiences of the roles actresses played and their private characters. See also Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. 5, for the eighteenth century. 47

One early actress who really worked at retaining a reputation for chastity was Anne Bracegirdle, see Howe, pp. 98–101. 48

Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin, p. 28.

49

Van Lennep, p. 22.

50

Howe, p. 39. Howe also argues that the voyeurism of the female body frequently became more intense in adaptations of earlier tragic plays, because often in the adaptation additional

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having the female body onstage and the popularity of breeches parts for actresses in comedies attests to a desire to observe the female form.51 Howe argues that in effect actresses were erotic dolls, passive and masochistic in tragedies and active and stimulating in comedies. The new theatrical devices of painted scenery and shifting flats, which could be opened to reveal new scenes and posed characters, emphasized and were integral to the eroticized presentations of the female form, artistically framing it and enhancing ‘the sense of the actress’s body being offered to the audience as a piece of erotic entertainment — a kind of pornographic painting brought to life’.52 Whether one agrees with Howe’s interpretation or not, there was certainly an enormous vogue for sex-comedies in the following decades. The introduction of actresses did require some justification. Given that there had been Puritan attacks from the earliest years of the century against the immorality of the theatres, putting women on the stage was not an uncontentious matter; or, at least Thomas Killigrew anticipated criticism: [F]or as much as many playes formerly acted doe conteine severall prophane, obscene and scurrulous passages, and the women’s part therein have byn acted by men in the habit of women, at which some have taken offence, for the preventing of these abuses in the future […] wee doe likewise permit and give leave, that all woemen’s part […] may be performed by woemen soe long as their recreacones, which by reason of the abuses aforesaid were scandalous and offensive, may by such reformation be esteemed not onely harmless delight, but useful and instructive.

According to this patent issued to Killigrew, dated 25 April 1662, what was ‘profane, obscene, and scurrilous’ in a man playing a female character interacting with men playing adult male characters was in an actress potentially ‘not onely harmless delight, but useful and instructive’.53 Homoeroticism was immoral — ‘profane, obscene and scurrilous’ — but heteroeroticism was useful and instructive. While Killigrew appears sincere in his appeal for the moral instructiveness of women scenes were inserted which increased the number of depictions of the degradation and the rape of the heroines (p. 46). 51

Howe, p. 57. Howe states that a quarter of all female roles between 1660–1700 were breeches parts and that ‘Restoration adaptations of earlier comedies show very clearly the way in which the opportunity for […] explicit sex scenes was seized after 1660’ (p. 55). 52

Howe, p. 46. See also The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, ed. by Lynne Hunt (New York: Zone, 1992), for a series of articles on the rise of pornography. 53

This is part of the patent cited in Avery and Scouten, ‘Critical Introduction’, pp. xxiv–xxv, quoted from Percy Fitzgerald, A New History of the English Stage, 2 vols (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1882), I, 80.

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playing women, in our terms an actress playing out stereotypical feminine characteristics like passivity, lustfulness, or shrewishness was not only fulfilling a part, she was doing what was natural to feminine embodied subjectivity. Killigrew may have been reacting to an increased intolerance of homoeroticism or he may have been using those social anxieties strategically to justify his agenda. In any case the introduction of actresses succeeded at least in part because a priori it facilitated the viewing of the often ineffectively clad female body. The decline in popularity or rejection of the cross-dressing male actor was used as a propitious explanation, based on old attacks on cross-dressing like those found in Stubbes’s Anatomy of Abuses. There were certainly many attacks on the immorality of the stage and its players in the early part of the century, particularly for supposedly inspiring sexual desire in the men in the audience for the feminine characters on the stage and, by extension, for the boy beneath the skirts. However, by 1660 boyplayers had been absent from the stage for nearly twenty years and it is hard to see why this would have been seen as a pressing issue in promoting a preference for actresses over boy-heroines. Indeed, there were no boy-apprentices left to take the parts, and those few males like Edward Kynaston, William Betterton, and James Nokes who did attempt to revive the boy-heroine were lauded for their abilities, not decried.54 When Ben Jonson’s Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609) was revived on 7 January 1660/61, Kynaston’s performance as Epicoene was highly approved of by Samuel Pepys: Tom and I and my wife to the Theatre and there saw The Silent Woman, the first time that I ever did see it and it is an excellent play. Among other things here, Kinaston the boy had the good turn to appear in three shapes: 1, as a poor woman in ordinary clothes to please Morose; then in fine clothes as a gallant, and in them was clearly the prettiest woman in the whole house — and lastly, as a man; and then likewise did appear the handsomest man in the house.55

Despite the excellence of his performance, and the fact that the meta-theatrical joke implicit in the part of Epicoene56 relies on it being performed by a male, this part quickly became a breeches role and was thereafter played by actresses until the

54

Avery and Scouten, ‘Critical Introduction’, p. xxiv.

55

Pepys, II, 7. In fact, in the eighteenth century the casting of a woman in the part of Epicoene was increasingly believed to be inappropriate because it made a nonsense of the resolution of the play. See Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1660–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935; repr. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1963), chap. 4. 56

Epicoene is a boy pretending to be a woman who reveals ‘herself’ as a boy at the end of the play, though of course all women were played by boys when Jonson wrote the play.

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end of the eighteenth century. By 10 December 1666/67 Kynaston was playing the male lead instead, Dauphine Eugenie, and the part of Epicoene had been taken over by one of Pepys’s amours, Mrs Knepp.57

57

See A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, ed. by Philip Highfill, Jr, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93), vol. IX , for a full history of the careers of Kynaston and Knepp, and Knepp’s relationship with Pepys.

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e have already begun to explore some of the consequences of the adaptation of anatomical texts in our discussion of John Browne’s misreading of the times in Chapter 6. We shall begin our discussion here by returning to Remmelin’s symbolically rich anatomical illustrations to look at how these were adapted specifically for the use of the Barber-Surgeons and their competitors during the Restoration. This extends into a brief discussion of the rising dominance of a recognizably modern embodied subjectivity that starts to emerge in anatomical illustrations in the final decade of the seventeenth century. Our approach of concentrating on what is taken out and rewritten when adapting earlier representations, to suit altered sensibilities, is then extended to dramatic texts. When plays written for a time when boys were taken for women are revived or rewritten for a stage that took women for women we again have an opportunity to examine just what changes across time and space in the theatrical and social dynamic. In Chapter 2 a rationale was outlined for confining the discussion to detailed analyses of a selection of books and this has been extended to the readings of plays. For, while it would be possible to build a case using isolated evidence of changes from a larger number of adaptations, extended readings of paired plays draws this out in detail.1 Just as we confined ourselves to reading Webster’s two plays in Chapter 3 here we shall take one adaptation of Shakespeare and one translation of a recent French farce, both by Edward Ravenscroft, as our examples. 1

See Kate Cregan, ‘Microcosmographia: Seventeenth-Century Theatres of Blood and the Construction of the Sexed Body’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Monash University, 1999), for extended readings of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1593–94) and Titus Andronicus (c. 1592–94), paired with John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot; or, The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1667), and Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus; or, The Rape of Lavinia (1679).

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While there is a wealth of criticism available on the plays of Shakespeare, until very recently remarkably little critical work had been written on subsequent adaptations of them.2 Further, where the adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays, from the late seventeenth century through to the twentieth century, has been commented upon, most often it has been with the intention of rescuing Shakespeare’s texts from the perceived adulterations foisted upon them by presumptuous textual meddlers. Several such studies written in the early twentieth century pay particular attention to the first adaptations which appeared in the Restoration. Even in those critical works that do not deride these adaptations the emphasis is usually on Shakespeare’s text rather than the text which has sprung from it. Little of what has been published appraises why these adaptations were written and why they have since fallen out of favour.3 This chapter is concerned with what anatomical and playhouse adaptations have to say about their own time. The focus is on the points at which these plays depart from their originals to identify the ways in which they betray the shift in constructions of embodiment towards the modern body. The first of Ravenscroft’s plays, Titus Andronicus; or, The Rape of Lavinia (1679) makes few, but nonetheless significant, changes to Shakespeare’s gory Roman tragedy. The second, The Anatomist; or, The Sham Doctor (1696) has an immediate and obvious connection to the two other public arena we have been examining. Webster’s White Devil made much of the metaphorical connections between human iniquity and anatomical practices current in London at the time of its writing. Ravenscroft’s Anatomist is far more literal, in keeping with the growing preference for the plain, empirical, rational realities. Anatomical practices are not

2

Two early and influential books are Frederick Kilbourne’s Alterations and Adaptations of Shakespeare (Boston: Poet Lore, 1906) and Hazelton Spencer’s Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927). See also, George Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1920; repr. New York: Dover, 1966); Arthur Gerwitz, Restoration Adaptations of Early Seventeenth Century Comedies (Washington: University Press of America, 1982); and Gunnar Sorelius, ‘The Giant Race Before the Flood’: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration (Uppsala: ACTA Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1966). 3

Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 3–4. See also Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) and The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth, ed. by Jean I. Marsden (New York: St Martin’s, 1991) for a collection of essays on Shakespearean adaptations since 1660.

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metaphorical here for the action of this play takes us into the dissection room. Before we begin our readings of these adapted plays, however, we will first ‘set the scene’ by turning to the last of our readings of anatomical illustrations.

From Johannes Remmelin to Clopton Havers The public anatomy that Pepys attended is unlikely to have been dominated by Crooke’s and Read’s anatomical manuals — there were newer publications similarly aimed directly at a barber-surgical market. One of the most popular of those new texts was the adaptation of Johannes Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum (1613), which was introduced in Chapter 3 in our discussion of the Duchess of Malfi. This appeared in multiple editions in several languages between 1670 and 1695, and in the English editions it was consciously adapted to suit not only a late-seventeenth-century barber-surgical apprentice but also his professional rivals, the physicians. A number of these English editions between 1675 and 1691 were dedicated to Pepys. Our discussion will focus on the illustrations that appear in Clopton Havers’s adaptation A Survey of the Microcosme […] (London, 1695 and 1702). In essence the adapted illustrations are little different from each other from edition to edition but like Browne’s plagiarism what is changed is important for our purposes. We will also comment on the style of the illustrations from William Cowper’s Anatomy of humane bodies […] (London, 1698), which contains the appropriated plates of Govard Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis […] (Leiden, 1685). The illustrations in this last text mark the beginning of the decline in ascendancy of Vesalian depictions of the human form and the adoption of a preference for a more ‘realistic’ depiction of the anatomized body. Eventually, the perceived need for the display of a central, authorizing text during anatomical dissections would diminish, as the professionalization of surgeons confirmed their embeddedness within a textual culture of codified enquiry. While texts and visual imagery remain a key element of anatomical learning to this day, by the time Hogarth was satirizing the Surgeons of London and Gondouin was immortalizing the anatomy theatre at the École de Chirurgie in Paris,4 what Read termed ‘the Booke at large’ was no longer needed beside the reader to frame and legitimize the performance of what was being learned.

4

See Hogarth’s ‘Four Stage of Cruelty: The Reward of Cruelty’ (London: 1751) and ‘Anatomy Theatre, École de Chirurgie, Paris’, in Jacque Gondouin, Description des École de Chirurgie, (Paris: P. D. Pierres, 1780).

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We saw earlier that Johannes Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum was first published in Latin in 1613, was revised in 1619, and went on to appear in five languages and at least twenty-two printings in the space of the following 150 years.5 Clopton Havers reworked this extremely popular flap-anatomy in his Englishlanguage version (London, 1695 and 1702), based on two earlier printings which had been ‘Englished by John Ireton, Chirurgeon’ (London, 1670, 1675). Havers was, like Crooke and Read, well known at the Barber-Surgeons’ Hall: 30th June, 1698: Ordrd that there bee an Anatomy Lecture called Gales Anatomy. Dr Havers & Dr Hands being put in nominacon for reading of the same Dr Havers was choosen for three yeares & to read on the second Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday in July next by three of the clock in the afternoone & to have thirty shillings for his paines & the remainder to bee disposed of by the Comitee.6

Havers adapted Remmelin’s publication with the express intention that it be of use to ‘Physicians, Chyrurgeons, Staturies, Painters & c.’7 As I proposed with regard to Read’s ‘epitome’ of Crooke, it would have been logical for Havers to have recommended this text to his audience at Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre as an appropriate adjunct to his lectures. Like Read’s illustrations, the images were used to instruct the student how to ‘read’ the cadaver. A comparison between the illustrations from the early part of the century and those in both Ireton’s and Havers’s ‘corrections’ betrays yet more evidence of the shift which resulted in the welding of what we would now call behaviour to biology. The most notable factor of Havers’s adaptation is that his illustrations are much less ornate than Remmelin’s originals. He follows Ireton in this, yet Ireton’s illustrations also provide a bridging point in retaining some elements that Havers then chose to excise. There is the possibility that the differences found in Havers’s edition were based in a desire to simplify the book to avoid increasing the cost of engraving by repeating the detailed work evident in the early editions.8 This certainly holds true for the replacement of the elaborately engraved frontispiece with a plain typeface title page, but when one considers the comparable detail involved in the engraving which has been used to replace parts of the anatomical plates, the reduction of the workload to be allotted to the engraver of the 5

For an excellent, meticulously detailed bibliographic history of this small anatomical text see Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin. 6

Young, p. 373.

7

Clopton Havers, A Survey of the Microcosme; or, The Anatomy of the Bodies of Man and Woman […] (London: James Moxon, 1695), title page. 8

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I am indebted to Professor Harold Love for pointing this out to me.

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‘corrected’ illustrations does not seem to be overwhelming. Neither does this render insignificant the choice of the details which are omitted. The detailed engraving in each version of the visio prima, secunda, and tertia is considerable. The semiotic content of Remmelin’s illustrations is similar to that which survives in Havers’s adaptation, but its signification is radically altered by what has been removed from the illustrations. Many of the omissions that I discuss here are the result of Havers’s following the excisions made in Ireton’s second edition (1675) in which nearly all the overt biblical exhortations have been removed.9 What then does Ireton retain that Havers does not? In the visio prima (Fig. 28) of the 1670 edition all the peripheral admonitions are gone except for those in the two main banderols which retain the quotation from Psalms, which is repeated in Hebrews 2: What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou has put all things under his feet. (Psalms 8. 4–6)

The Tetragrammaton and the seven levels of heaven for which the outstretched mouth yearns is also still in place and still flanked by the archangels. At the feet of the two main figures the worldly concerns and mortal realities signified in the globe, orb, staff, and spade quietly impart an older message of memento mori. Most obviously, the Medusa’s head continues to cover woman’s shame while also mimicking its external anatomy (Fig. 29). The verse beneath is in place but the specific words of warning that once appeared are absent and the re-engraved face has become slightly less tortured and fearsome. Apart from these exceptions the few banderols which survive are left blank. In terms of our discussion of the shifting nature of abstraction, this is a stunning turning point in representation. Prior forms of abstraction linger but they are in the process of being modified and written over, of losing their potency and fluency. As the editions continue to be adapted even these remnants recede. In Havers’s visio prima the angels surrounding God in his heaven, along with the clouds and the inscriptions, have been replaced by a cartouche commemorating the printer and, in keeping with changing mores, the originator Remmelin (Fig. 30). A dedication to Samuel Pepys on the plinth under Eve was added in the 1675 edition but by the 1695 edition it has been removed (although Pepys lived

9

See Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin, Appendix 4, for a detailed description of all the editions of this text, and in particular pp. 74–84 for the English editions.

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until 1703) as have the last of the overtly religious banderols. Of most note is that in the 1695 edition ‘the genitalia has [sic] been redrawn on the torso’.10 All the explicit and implicit warnings about the carnality and sinfulness of women, and their Medusa-like power, are jettisoned. While the threat of female carnality was a means of attempting to control women through a negative construction of femininity, the effect of rendering the female body as benignly carnal is totally disempowering. The truncated Eve has now become part of a naked woman who has been mastered, with only a skimpy piece of cloth covering her external genitalia. Further the (ambiguously) positive construction of women’s bodies as being the necessary means of attaining eternal salvation is also disrupted. The dissected head and thorax that once strained to rise out of an earthbound female torso to touch God’s dominion now strains towards an emblem of the material success of an emergent professionalized man. The presence of this cartouche in place of heaven is emblematic of a kind of individualism which I have asserted is evident in the felons’ narratives and the professional tensions between the Barbers and the Surgeons, an individualism intimately connected with the concerns and desires of middle-class men reacting to and entering into the fray of a re-established parliamentary monarchy. In visio secunda and tertia the cartouches to which Adam and Eve once made portentous gestures have been removed (Figs 31 and 32). Adam now points towards a dissected heart and Eve cradles a dissected face. Christ no longer smites the serpent for Adam, nor is the serpent revivified in an eternal temptation of Eve. The colchicum plant and the puff of smoke which once rose behind the phoenix are retained for modesty’s sake, but their plaintive admonitions have been banished. These omissions suppress Adam’s warning of the corrupt nature of human flesh, and Eve no longer explicitly extends the hope of the resurrection through a baptism of fire. The phoenix is replaced by branching cranial nerves.11 Again, we see a repetition of the message inherent in visio prima but its import has shifted. In a manner concomitant with the shift in the legal system we will see in Chapter 8, anatomy is in the process of being gradually detheologized.

10

Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin, p. 82. All the factual observations on the difference between the 1670, 1675, and 1695 editions are from Russell, ibid., pp. 75–84. I have used the visio secunda and tertia from the 1702 edition because there are no substantial differences between them and the images were more readily available being in better physical condition. 11

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Fig. 28: Visio prima, London, W ellcome Institute, from Johann Remmelin, An exact survey of the microcosmus or little world […] (London: Joseph Moxon, 1670), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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Fig. 29: Visio prima, London, W ellcome Institute, from Johann Remmelin, An exact survey of the microcosmus or little world […] (London: Joseph Moxon, 1670), in folio. Engraving. Detail: gravid female torso. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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Fig. 30: Visio prima, London, Wellcome Institute, from Clopton Havers, A survey of the microcosme; or, The anatomy of the bodies of man and woman (London: Joseph Moxon, 1695), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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Fig. 31: Visio secunda, London, Wellcome Institute, from Clopton Havers, A survey of the microcosme; or, The anatomy of the bodies of man and woman (London: D. Midwinter and T. Leigh, 1702), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the Wellcome Institute.

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Fig. 32: Visio tertia, London, Wellcome Institute, from Clopton Havers, A survey of the microcosme; or, The anatomy of the bodies of man and woman (London: D. Midwinter and T. Leigh, 1702), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the W ellcome Institute.

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The two figures’ gestures are also in tension with the debilitation inherent in the removal of the biblical references. The gestures still display the artistic and aesthetic codes that associated strength and potential action with masculinity and wantonness with femininity, but their implied actions are not in keeping with the expressions on their faces. Both Adam and Eve have taken on a far more passive gaze. Eve no longer coyly confronts her observer. She gazes vacantly off into the right middle distance. Adam looks out from the plane of the illustration, but with deadened eyes; they have lost their rakish glint. Each of these figures is like an inactive puppet. In the terms of Leonardo’s theories on expression these figures no longer have internal lives; they are marionettes. Nevertheless, old associations are absorbed into and infused throughout these figures. Instead of gesturing to a sententious warning of the transience of the flesh, Eve gently indicates a dissected face. She now offers a subliminal confirmation of the inherent vanity of women and its natural consequences but in a far more subtle way than Bosola was capable of in his haranguing of the Duchess of Malfi’s nurse. The sexual incontinence of the ‘female’ body is still reinforced before the apprentice and the anatomist, for lift the ‘cloth’ and it reveals a gaping ‘shame’ just as the puerile Ward tries to catch a glimpse of Isabella’s in Middleton’s Women Beware Women. Adam, on the other hand, now gestures to what was once seen as the seat of the soul, the heart. This is at once intertwined with earlier associations of the sacred heart bleeding for the redemption of man, and also with the most famous scientific ‘discovery’ of the seventeenth century, the circulation of the blood. William Harvey’s experiments and empirical proofs of earlier observations discursively repositioned the heart firmly within the realm of male-dominated science. Finally, the depiction of the vulva as a gaping orifice barely contained by a twitch of cloth in the torso on the visio prima supersedes the Medusa’s head as an emblem of femininity. It solidifies the open and subordinate sexual construction of the female. It is unclear whether the excision of the religious imagery for an English market was based in anxieties over what may have been seen as overtly papist iconography; a residual Puritan iconoclasm; a desire to make the useful information in them accord with new ‘scientific’ principles of clarity; or, a combination of these and other factors. What is important, however, is that these illustrations take part in a shift in both the understanding and the conventions for representing the human body. These illustrations are evidence of a resolidification of gendered moral associations into a naturalization of gendered characteristics. The gendered, moral attributes of Adam and Eve no longer need to be explicit in the new science. What was once assumed to be spiritually inherent is in the process of being reconceived as biologically fixed. The fact that gendered traits and

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associations were still rendered even if in subtly shifted forms, assisted in their becoming ingrained. Virtually contemporaneously with the production of these detheologized palimpsests, another Barber-Surgeon was arranging for the production of an anatomical atlas which marked a significant moment in its trajectory.

Govard Bidloo and William Cowper William Cowper was a surgeon, a member of the Barber-Surgeon’s Company, and a fellow of the Royal Society.12 He is best known for his The anatomy of human bodies […] (London, 1698) for which he wrote an original, empirically observed text. Cowper was held in good regard for his empiricist methods and his more accurate text was applauded even if he was disciplined for the plagiarism of the illustrations.13 The remarkable plates of this text were drawn by Gerard de Lairesse and had already been issued with a written commentary by Govard Bidloo as Anatomia humani corporis […] (Amsterdam, 1685), and when Bidloo discovered that Cowper had used these plates without attribution Cowper, like Browne before him, was lambasted.14 Like Crooke’s anatomy, this book is large and lengthy and was doubtless out of the financial reach of the average barbersurgeon let alone his apprentice. It was probably more useful as a reference work or as one from which a reader might lecture. It was also, like most of the illustrated anatomy texts discussed previously, a synthesis of Continental imagery and British interpretation. In this case the interpretation or colloquial rendering is confined to the interpolation of English written text. Adaptation was not deemed to be necessary in the case of these illustrations. Since Cowper considered them appropriate for his market as they were, even though the illustrations were of Dutch origin, I shall comment on the rhetorical content of these illustrations as they applied to the culture into which they had been imported. The plates in this book exemplify what Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have described as the gradual move towards a refinement in the conception of a scientific, mechanical form of objectivity which truly came into its own in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the use of mechanical instruments. Mechanical objectivity is inextricably woven into a moralistic discourse even as it attempts to display that it is value-free. Daston and Galison differentiate this 12

Roberts and Tomlinson, p. 412.

13

Roberts and Tomlinson, p. 415; and K. F. Russell, ‘The Anatomical Plagiarist’, Medical Journal of Australia, 1 (1959), 249–52 (p. 252). 14

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late-nineteenth-century concept of scientific objectivity from its morally imbued predecessor, science as a mirror of nature. This idea of science as claiming to be ‘true to nature’15 while carrying within it morally imbued abstracting constructions, which they argue obtained up until the late eighteenth century, supports the notion of the subsumption of gender into sex. The images I have been describing in these adapted illustrations are marks of an earlier transitional moment between traditional spiritual subjectivity and the early forms of modern mechanical objectivity. Moralizing imagery was still in use in late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century objectivity, but it began to recede into what has become modern science’s self-actualizing mechanical objectivity: The discipline earlier [pre-eighteenth century] atlas makers had imposed in their artists had been in the interests of truth to nature (construed as variously as nature itself), but they had deemed judgment and selection essential to the portrayal of the truly typical or characteristic. Later atlas makers, as fearful of themselves as of their artists, eschewed the typical because judgment and selection were needed to detect it, and judgment and selection bordered in the dread subjectivity of interpretation.16

Cowper’s plagiarized plates adhere to this idea of being true to nature in the first sense. There is enough individuality allotted to the cadavers in some of his illustrations to give the impression of the immediacy of their anatomization and to persuade the reader that they are true to nature, but obviously the examples are also intended to convey standardized anatomical information.17 The images of ‘natural’ gender which they purvey are as disturbing as they are arresting. The plates that Cowper used in his book were like the illustrations we have seen from Casserio, groundbreaking in that they moved away from a long tradition of adapting Vesalian illustrations. Although they produced a new vision of the human body, like Casserio’s plates they still adhered to earlier conventional associations in using classical statuary, sylvan settings, and memento mori imagery. The rhetorical content of many of the images harks back to earlier conventions of anatomical illustrations, although it is more restrained and the moral invective less blatant. It no longer requires the blandishment of mottoes to warn the innocent or the ignorant of the nature of woman. The two figures depicting the surface anatomy of the male and female body are classically restrained images, through which one can still see the traces of earlier associations in the smooth and steady lines of the engraver. In the three images I have chosen to examine more closely

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15

Daston and Galison, p. 87.

16

Daston and Galison, p. 117.

17

Daston and Galison, pp. 88–89.

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(Figs 33, 34, and 35) the empirical facts of anatomical dissection and of statesanctioned murder are finally made painfully clear. These are so true to nature each detail of the process of anatomy is faithfully and meticulously recorded. The folds of the sheet covering the upper half of the face of an anatomy are rendered with as much care as the folds in the silken dishabille of a portrait. These plates cry out the individuality of the corpses and the reality of the process of anatomical dissection and illustration. In Figure 33 an obviously dead body is suspended by a noose around its neck in order to allow the muscles of the back to be displayed in a view which appears in many anatomical texts. A piece of knotted string ties the cadaver’s hands behind its back so that the shoulder muscles and the spinal vertebrae can be viewed with ease. Some of Vesalius’s living dead are drawn with ropes around them to hold them up, and Berengario da Carpi made a point of reminding the reader of the criminality and/or saintliness of the corpse by including nooses and executioners axes, but in all of those illustrations the imperative to display the dead as in some sense ‘quick’ won out. There is still some pretence that the rope is only there for assistance, somehow the figure still retains life. Only in the work of those following the Dutch vogue for paintings of anatomists at work, such as the group portrait of The Anatomy of Dr Nicolaas Tulp or our portrait of Scarborough and Arris, is the means of production behind anatomical illustrations made so apparent. In Figure 34 the figure of an identifiable male has his chest muscles pinned back against a board to facilitate a better view. I call him an identifiable male because Lairesse allows us to view his individuality. There is a cloth half-covering this man’s face, but it only half covers it. We have seen that sometimes during an anatomy a cloth was used to cover the face of the cadaver, but this cloth has been allowed to fall back so that the reader can see most of his face. Again, we have seen faces before, even individual faces, but they still retained a lifelike expression. There is no way one could conceive of this figure as anything but dead. The lower sheet is drawn back and we can see the contours of the surface of his abdomen. This detail further individualizes and humanizes the body. When the male body is depicted in this way it serves as a reminder of the concrete dangers of criminality. The wages of sin is death — and, as the London ‘mob’ were aware, it could also be anatomization. The pins which hold back the muscle flap of the male cadaver are a standard anatomical implement but they also, very discretely, echo the martyrdom of Christ upon the Cross. These plates have been ‘detheologized’ in their shift towards naturalistic observation but at the same time cultural assumptions about death and martyrdom linger in these nauseatingly realistic representations, instilling wider associations into the material remains of a the body.

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Fig. 33: Hanged figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from William Cowper, Anatomy of humane bodies […] (London: Sam. Smith & Benj. Walford, 1698), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Fig. 34: Male figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from William Cowper, Anatomy of humane bodies […] (London: Sam. Smith & Benj. Walford, 1698), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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Fig. 35: Gravid female figure, Sydney, RACP Library, from W illiam Cowper, Anatomy of humane bodies […] (London: Sam. Smith & Benj. W alford, 1698), in folio. Engraving. Reproduced with the permission of the RACP Library.

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However, it is when one comes to the images of the pregnant corpse that the naturalization of gender to the female body becomes most apparent (Fig. 35). The allegorical or rhetorical denunciations of the carnal dangers of the female body have become much more muted, as is the case in the opening illustrations depicting the corporeal surface of a woman. In this female figure it is also clear that the subject is a dead body. This is one of several views of this dissection, and in each illustration of this body her sexual ‘nature’ intrudes. The resected abdominal flaps hang down across the thighs of the cadaver, but not so low as to obstruct a clear view of the external genitals, with its light covering of pubic hair. The left breast lies exposed in the upper right-hand corner of the illustration. Like the male figure, we can see the lower half of her face. In this case, however, the combination of images does not invoke associations with martyrdom but with those of feminine abandonment. As Christ’s crucifixion is implied in the nailed male corpse, Eve’s sin is inculcated in this female cadaver. In two of the five illustrations of this female body, more than half of her face is visible. All five illustrations expose her breasts, and only one does not expose her genitals. The male genitals in these grotesques are covered by a cloth. Further, when the male genitals are dissected in this book, it is done in a view excised from the body as we have seen was the convention which only Casserio flouted. Male modesty and anonymity is maintained in these life- drawings. It is obviously not possible to render the naked female body with modesty, however, even when she is so patently dead.18 One can argue that the external genitals have been included in the anatomized depiction of the reproductive organs because they are part of the same system. Why the breasts are bared is less obvious, unless one tries to argue that they too have their process in reproduction, changing during pregnancy in anticipation of lactation. The cumulative sense of the engravings does not accord with this line of argument, however. This body is not a living nude like all the other illustrations of the female and feminine body we have seen. Both the breasts and the genitals are visible because the cloths which covered them have been pulled aside to reveal them, in a parallel gesture to those playful gusts of wind which twitched away the diaphanous fabric from the breast of many a nymph in Renaissance art. These illustrations take part in a subtle reworking of the construction of female embodiment as sexually available and sexually indiscrete. Not only is the female body contained and controlled in this illustration, but it is also thoroughly objectified. In this particular series of illustrations the female cannot contain the 18

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evidence of her sin; her skin realistically peels back to show the wages of her sin, the foetus. As we know, pregnant women could not be hanged in London and were similarly unlikely to suffer that fate on the Continent. The fact that this cadaver is being used for illustrations suggests that she was not an executed felon, but neither did she come from that section of society where women who died in childbirth had families to protect and inter their remains. If she were a post-mortem of a goodwife, a respectable matron, surely her modesty and her identity would be guarded at all costs. This suggests that this woman was either destitute and/or a prostitute. But whatever her background, the sum effect of the associations built into these illustrations supports the welding of stereotypical gender attributions to the body. Stereotypical assumptions about women’s roles and women’s perfidy are absorbed into her embodied subjectivity. They no longer need to be grossly and clumsily inscribed in religious quotations. The vision of corporeality which these plates present is disturbing to say the least. They are also the forebears of a style of anatomical realism which was to dominate until the mid-nineteenth century. The baroque excesses of these plates is repeated and intensified even more shockingly in William Hunter’s The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (Birmingham, 1774),19 where we are not only made aware of the death of a whole human being, but of the fact that the human bodies used for these illustrations were treated no differently than a contemporary butcher would have treated a side of beef. The use of even the smallest of allegorical pointers is no longer necessary by then. The fact that these plates, Browne’s plagiarized engravings, Havers’s ‘correction’ of Remmelin’s deficiencies, and all the texts which were discussed in previous chapters, were in circulation virtually at the same time is a testament to the volatility of perceptions and constructions of the human body at the end of the seventeenth century. Browne’s illustrations were based on a view of the body that was going out of circulation, but they betray broader cultural concerns of the late seventeenth century to do with gender and sexuality. Havers’s adaptation of Remmelin shows the specific pressures that the new science’s challenge imposed upon older conceptions of the body. Cowper’s reuse of Bidloo’s plates provide evidence of the mechanistic and objectivist conception of the body towards which anatomy was shifting. The texts which we saw in Chapter 2 had been dedicated to the BarberSurgeons and were used by them to uphold earlier constructions of corporeality 19

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Daston and Galison, pp. 91–93.

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gradually became outmoded. Indeed, the Barber-Surgeons themselves were eventually outmoded by the shift to professionalization. The illustrations we have been discussing are in the most obvious sense palimpsests. In following what was gradually removed we can follow the earliest stages of modern embodied subjectivity gaining purchase in dominance in a slow and uneven process of overwriting traditional embodied subjectivity. We can see the gradual movement from a prior form of abstraction wherein embodiment is conceived of within a traditional cosmology. Through the process of the adaptation of illustrations, combined with the pedagogical intent of these illustrations which reflect back on the viewer telling the barber-surgeon how he should understand himself and others, we see one of the mechanisms by which the shift in dominance succeeds. The intensification of abstraction for which this book argues is bound up in the shift across the seventeenth century to a scientific, analytic, early technological understanding of the world. The concept of the modern individual was inextricable from this new method, both as investigative subject and investigated object. At the end of the seventeenth century the anatomical practices of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons, and the texts they used in their pedagogic practices, were mirroring the construction of embodiment as it was articulated on the Restoration stage. I have already intimated that the intervention of the professional actress was central to the shift I have been describing and that ‘she’ would be central to the forthcoming discussion. These two worlds met in the dedication to Moxon’s 1675 edition: To the most Excellent Lady Maddam Ellen Gwyn. Maddam., In this Book of Anatomy the curious Invention of our Authour has lively represented us to our Selves; and so contrived this Epitomy of Man and Woman that from the Skin to the Bone we may see the true shape and disposition of our frame and composition; & by his Alphabetical referrences has taught us to distinguish every part by their proper Names. Thus Maddam, presuming this peece of curiousity may be acceptable to a Lady so wel accomplisht and so excellently Ingenious as your Self, I present this to your fair hands, humbly begging that you will pardon the boldness of Your most humble and most obedient Servant. Joseph Moxon.20

Moxon presented this personally dedicated copy to Nell Gwyn. There is a concatenation of associations in this one act. A woman best known for her amours is presented with a manual that is part of the matrix of abstractions that brought the modern body to dominance, which Gwyn also had a part in actively disseminating. Actresses like Gwyn were agents in the production and promulgation of re-visioned abstractions of embodiment as they were played out in theatrical

20

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Russell, A Bibliography of Johannes Remmelin, Plate 7.

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adaptations. Anatomical manuals were not the only texts from the first half of the century which were used as templates in which to order new ideas in the dramatic reconstruction of the body. Old plays also had new life, and new concepts, instilled in them. In the most general sense the plays of the reopened theatres were characterized by a general preference for singularity of character and a lack of ambiguity that assisted in the presentation of characters between whom clear lines can be drawn: right and wrong, good and evil, white and black, Roman and Goth/Moor, male and female. Such characterizations made it much simpler to patrol those borders and ensure that they remained discrete by magnifying differences between the attributes accorded to each of those binary pairs. Facets of early-modern understandings of corporeality lingered well into the eighteenth century and even the nineteenth century,21 and traces of the change in the conception of embodiment which has dominated up to the present can also be found in textual sources which circulated before the idea of modern ‘Man’ took a firm hold. The movement from the dominance of one social formation to another is gradual, and the exact processes by which these shifts occur are occluded as a result. Examination of these further adaptations leaves readable traces of those processes. Because it is the female body that is so new to the stage and bears the weight of adaptation to the new forms, in discussing Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus it is the female characters that will form the basis of our analysis. To paraphrase Cennini, I will acquaint you with the proportions of woman; I omit those of man because not one of them is imperfectly proportioned.

The R ape of Lavinia In his introduction to the printed text of the play first staged in 1679, Ravenscroft disingenuously remarks that ‘there is a Play in Mr Shakespears Volume under the name of Titus Andronicus, from whence I drew part of this’ 22 and protests that this work is a substantially original play; this is a patent untruth. Unlike other adaptations such as John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot, a reworking of The Taming of the

21

The belief in harelips and other congenital abnormalities being caused by maternal impressions lingered into the nineteenth century. See Huet. 22

Edward Ravenscroft, Titus Andronicus; or, The R ape of Lavinia (London: J. Hindmarsh, 1687), A2 r. This edition has no line numbers, but it does have act, scene, and page numbers, by which I have identified quotations.

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Shrew, very few substantial changes have been made to Shakespeare’s text in this case. Lines have been liberally carried over and only a few additions have been made to the plot.23 This means that some of the poetic diction of the original survives, but as Robert Hume points out, tragedy is the one dramatic form in which poetic hyperbole is still considered acceptable in the late seventeenth century. It is also the genre in which, as Howe argues, pathetic and eroticized representations of femininity were extremely popular. Shakespeare’s The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedy of Titus Andronicus is certainly a bloody and tragic tale in its original form, and Ravenscroft has not diminished the horror of it. In adapting this play Ravenscroft makes the ‘good’ woman who will suffer cruelly even more prominent by inserting her name and her fate into the title of his play: Titus Andronicus; or, The Rape of Lavinia. In Shakespeare the central tragedy is that of Titus the noble Roman, even though his fate is intertwined with that of his daughter Lavinia. Ravenscroft elevates Lavinia’s rape and torture to the same level of importance as her father’s demise. When Lavinia first enters the Roman Capitol she is treated in much the same way as she is in Shakespeare, as a chattel to be exchanged between the most senior of Roman citizens to cement family and political bonds. Indeed, there are only very subtle changes in Lavinia’s lines and her actions throughout the play, but there is a shift in the way others react in relation to her. In particular, Bassianus is given more reason or motivation for taking her captive, and thereby improperly usurping his brother’s seniority. In Shakespeare, Bassianus is quiet while arrangements are made between Titus and Saturninus for Lavinia’s future until he gives his simple and direct assertion of prior contract to ‘this maid is mine’. Ravenscroft’s Bassianus, by contrast, has an extended reaction. He is a heart-broken lover full of self-righteous emotion who is given more affecting reasons for stealing the new emperor’s bride: Bassianus.

23

Say Noble Marcus and you the valiant Brothers of that Lovely Maid, is’t not a Tyranny too great to bear? Shall he the Empire have? W hy let him, but let him leave Lavinia then: To be at once depriv’d of Power and Love Is more then Mortal sure can bear. ( I .iii, p. 8)

For a discussion of this strategy of Ravenscroft’s and the possible reasoning behind it, see John W. Velz, ‘Topoi in Edward Ravenscroft’s Indictment of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, Notes and Documents, 83 (1985), 45–50.

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This couple’s sundering is made so much more affecting that it moves the source of the tragic consequences of the play away from Titus. In Shakespeare, Titus has some of the flaws of Lear. He improperly rejects a power which he should retain and the gates of hell break open as a result. In Ravenscroft’s play the emphasis of blame swings over to a lecherous Saturninus who would part the two righteous lovers and corrupt Lavinia: Emperour.

Titus. Bassianus.

Titus. Emperour.

Come Lavinia, thou Trophee of the day, And utmost height of all our joys, for thee Altars shall be perfum’d with richest Gums, And Hymens Tapors there shall Blaze; Slowly you give your Hand, and Trembling Move, Art thou not fond of Empire or affraid of Love? So Virgins are allow’s their Modest Fears, They Even Changes for the Better Dread. See Friends what Longing Eyes she casts this way, And with her sad looks upbraids my Servile tameness, Empire I scarce thought truly worth my care W hen purchas’d with the hazard of your Lives, But if friends you are, now Ayd me in my Love. Love is the Nobler Cause — (Bassianus Seizes Lavinia from the Emperour) By your leave Emperor and yours Lord Titus, […] Treason, all that do love the Emperour Now follow me and soon I’le bring her back. (Titus Exit) Forbear — ’Till she deserves that care you undertake. (Exuent Emp. & c.) (I .iii, p. 9)

The emperor Saturninus is made to sound like a lascivious and venal corrupter even before we have a hint that he will turn to the lusty Tamora. He recognizes that Lavinia is ‘Trembling’ and that as a proper virgin she is ‘affraid of Love’. Shakespeare’s Lavinia is quite content to submit to her father’s direction to marry Saturninus; she is an obedient Roman maiden. This Lavinia shares with her fellow Restoration heroines a timidity and pathos not present in her original model. She is already being cast as one of the masochistic erotic dolls Howe argues inhabited the tragedies of the day. Bassianus’s new lines describe her as giving him the impetus to perform the theft of her person. She silently ‘upbraids’ him with ‘Longing Eyes’, spurring him

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on to fight for the ‘Nobler Cause’ of love. Even though Lavinia evinces the proper silence of a good maiden, this passive plea, introduced by Ravenscroft, in effect makes her partially culpable for their bloody fates. Her pleading makes Bassianus’s actions justifiable to the audience but it also means that she leads him into treason, as Eve led Adam. Even before Titus has completely left the stage in pursuit of the rebellious lovers Saturninus lays the same imputation on Lavinia’s character. She has done nothing to warrant such hasty disapprobation but Saturninus immediately defames her character, suggesting she does not ‘deserve that care’ they take. The woman he was quite happy to make his empress is now not worth the trouble of a fight. Apart from being silent and obedient, the other evidence we have of Lavinia’s character attests to its spotlessness: she is chaste. It is this that makes her so desirable to the barbaric Goths, Chiron and Demetrius, Queen Tamora’s sons. In both plays Lavinia is likened to Lucrece (or Lucretia), a Roman matron frequently depicted in Renaissance art who committed suicide by stabbing herself after being raped rather than live to disgrace her husband and family.24 Her self-sacrifice was thought of as pivotal to the founding of the Republic. Aaron deliberately uses this allusion to spur Tamora’s sons on to rape her:25 ‘Take this of me, Lucrece was not more chast, | Then this Lavinia, Bassianus Bride’ (II.i, p. 17). This much of Lavinia’s character does not change, but when she is faced with rape and mutilation her reactions are altered by Ravenscroft. Shakespeare’s Lavinia has the bud of a shrew’s tongue in her mouth before it is so violently removed. She is capable of making barbed remarks to Tamora about her assignation with Aaron and even threatens to report their infidelity to Saturninus. Ravenscroft’s Lavinia has no such qualities. When Lavinia and Bassianus happen upon Tamora and Aaron in the course of what has become a morning walk in a picturesque garden rather than Shakespeare’s ominous venture into the forest, the threatening behaviour offered to Tamora comes from Bassianus alone. The enfeeblement of Lavinia is reflected in the change of setting in which they meet; from a wild and dangerous natural wood in which a royal hunt is also underway, Ravenscroft’s characters are transported to a cultivated garden. This nullifies Shakespeare’s ‘dismal’, ‘barren and detested vale’ and the ‘abhorrèd pit’ that Tamora incants in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (II.iii.92–108). 24

See Muller and Noël for a detailed description of the popularity of Lucretia and other icons of feminine self-sacrifice in the Renaissance. 25

In fact the rape becomes his idea, but I will deal with this in detail below in looking at the character of Aaron as feminized Other.

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The hellmouth, fetid womb, and dangerous untamed nature redolent with supernatural associations that we saw in Chapter 3, clearly related to Vittoria Corombona’s murder-inducing dream landscape and so evocative of Remmelin’s iconography, is now rendered as ‘nice’ as Havers’s detheologized landscapes. Sympathetically, Lavinia, who in Shakespeare had the potential to bite, becomes a totally domesticated creature. She loses all her admonitory remarks and veiled threats to Tamora. She can only manage a weak ‘Ay my lord’ to confirm her husband’s observation that Aaron and Tamora kiss, and a request that she and Bassianus retreat when Tamora becomes heated: ‘Come, my Lord, she is angry, let us leave her | To enjoy her Raven colour’d Love’ (III.i, pp. 20–21). She loses the little shrewishness she had and she gains even more Lucretian qualities. Shortly after this exchange, when Bassianus is stabbed, Lavinia ‘catches up his sword & offers to kill her self [but] is prevented by D[emetrius]’ (III.i, p. 21). Ravenscroft has intensified the pathos of her character, made her more ineffectual, and heightened her passivity by rendering her unsuccessful in her attempts to thwart Tamora’s sons. She retains her pleading lines to Tamora which contain some slurs against the Goth’s character but because these are the last desperate attempts of a woman trying to avoid being raped, preceded by no other evidence of effective strength, these merely add to the pathos of her character. Marcus’s rather trite relation of his premonitory dream of her mutilated appearance further intensifies what Lavinia has now become: a silent, spectacular object. When Marcus returns Lavinia to her father, Ravenscroft introduces an eroticizing and specularizing stage device. The audience already knows what the mutilated Lavinia looks like but Titus does not. She is veiled like a bride, one whose beauty is supposed to be uncovered as she is symbolically claimed by her new lord and master; but she has already been brutally ‘unveiled’ by Chiron and Demetrius. When Lavinia is revealed to her father as the horrific sight that she has become, the audience takes part in his shock at the revelation. There is also a metaphoric parallel in the act of lifting this veil with the raising of the pall from the anatomical cadaver waiting to perform its pedagogic function in the anatomy theatre. However, Lavinia has to wait a little longer to be able ‘to teach man wherein he is imperfect’, by teaching her father who has mutilated her. When Marcus ‘pulls of her Veyl’ Lucius cries ‘Ye Gods, this object kills me’ (IV.i, p. 29). Lavinia has indeed lost her subjectivity as a ravished, bloodied sight. She is a gruesome, wandering spectre for the rest of the play. Lavinia gains pathos and loses what little strength of character she had in Shakespeare’s play. Further, like Peg and Biancha in Lacy’s Shrew, she loses the ability to possess intellectually acquired knowledge. When Lavinia chases

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after Junius to capture what is in his hands in an attempt to relate how she was molested, she is no longer chasing after Ovid’s account of the fate of Philomel. Junius is holding an arrow. Although it may seem a very minor point it is pertinent that this piece of evidence of Lavinia’s character shifts the emphasis away from her being classically literate, either to re-emphasizing her likeness to Lucrece in another attempt to kill herself with the arrow or by reducing her actions to a symptom of mental frenzy. This is ridiculous given that these characters are supposed to be in Rome — Latin would be Lavinia’s vulgar tongue — but the mores of contemporary London were uppermost for Ravenscroft in his adaptation so this seemingly minor change makes sense. It would be improper or at least highly unusual for a woman to be reading the classics, as even a small boy would. With a little coaching, however, she can write well enough with this martial implement to implicate her attackers. Once Lavinia reveals the facts her presence is only required twice more. First she is present to hold the basin that catches the blood of Chiron and Demetrius as Titus bleeds and guts them. As he prepares them Titus admonishes the Gothic brothers, making clear to them and to the audience just what they have destroyed and what is really important in a female: Titus.

[…] Both her sweet Hands, or Tongue, and that more dear Then Hands or Tongue, her spotless Chastity, Inhumane Traytors, you constrain’d and forc’d. ( V .i, p. 50)

Her hands and her tongue were useful, but the dearest possession that Lavinia had, and the most valuable to her father and her husband, was her ‘spotless Chastity’. Hands and tongues in a woman can be a two-edged sword. As items nominally under the control of the individual they can be used to be transgressive and disobedient, but if you ‘disarm’ her you have a near-perfect woman — silent and biddable. Chastity is ‘more dear’ because once lost it is gone forever. This much does not change between the two Lavinia’s and without that chastity the only logical and proper thing to do is to kill her. Lavinia is finally made to die a proper Roman/English death.

Tamora Lavinia’s foil, Tamora, also changes in Ravenscroft’s rewriting. If possible, she becomes even more pernicious. Tamora’s increased turpitude is partly a factor of Ravenscroft’s rewriting of the opening scenes in an attempt to recuperate the

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collective character of the Romans, thereby justifying their initial behaviour.26 In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus there is real moral ambiguity in the actions of the Romans in their execution of Alarbus. They are barely distinguishable from those of the barbarian Goths, for they perform a human sacrifice to appease the gods.27 That moral ambiguity no longer seems appropriate by the time Ravenscroft was writing. The attribution of a stable characterization was becoming the norm. However, Ravenscroft needed to retain the death of Alarbus to justify the vengeful behaviour in Tamora and her sons. Ravenscroft’s solution to this dilemma seems to have been to invent and insert an exchange between Titus, Lucius, and Tamora justifying their seemingly barbaric actions by appealing to a description of the way in which the Goth’s killed Titus’s eldest son: Lucius.

Titus.

Mart.

Deaf like the Gods when Thunder fills the Air, Were you to all our Suppliant Romans then; Unmov’d beheld him made a Sacrifice T’appease your Angry Gods; what Gods are they Are pleas’d with Humane Blood and Cruelty? Then did his sorrowful Brethren here, These other Sons of mine, from me Exact A Vow, This was the Tenor which it bore, ‘If any of the Cruel Tamora’s Race ‘Should fall in Roman hands, him I wou’d give ‘To their Revenging Piety. — To this Your Eldest Son is doom’d, and dye he must, Not to revenge their Bloods we now bring home, Or theirs who formerly were slain in Arms: For show me now those Valiant Fighting Goths, I’le kiss their Noble hands that gave the Wounds, ’Cause bravely they perform’d. This was no Cause But a Sons groaning Shadow to appease, By Priestly Butchers Murder’d on your Altars. Remembrance whetts our rage, away with him, On yond Erected Pile kindle a Fire, And on it strow his separated Limbs, To be Consum’d in the devouring Flames.

26

See Robert S. Miola, ‘Titus Andronicus: Rome and the Family’, in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. by Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 195–224, for a discussion of the importance of Rome as a setting. 27

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Learn Goths from hence, and after keep’t in mind that Cruelty is not the Worship of the Gods. Intention made it Piety in us: But in you this Act is Cruelty. ( I .ii, p. 4)

In a choice piece of rationalization Ravenscroft puts to us that Romans do not conduct human sacrifices in their culture, nor do they exact vindictive revenge. Rather, the bloody murder of Alarbus is the pious fulfilment of a vow to a gruesomely dying son and to treat the Goths as they treat others. The model for that savagery is the defining example of the mother of their ‘race’, Tamora. The Goths are constructed as savage ‘others’ and at the head of their state is the most venal of creatures, a savage and powerful female. This beautiful but exorbitant woman immediately attracts Saturninus’s lustful eye. The most obvious change in her character in Ravenscroft’s adaptation is that she is given more dialogue and more direct involvement in the plot. Logically, as we know from earlier discussions of talkative females, according extra lines to Tamora is not a positive step to take in developing her character. In Act II, Scene 1, when Lavinia has been claimed and carried away by Bassianus and Tamora has the opportunity to engage Saturninus’s affections, Ravenscroft inserts new lines for Tamora so that one of the first acts she performs is to proffer Aaron the Moor as Saturninus’s aide: Tamora.

Emperour. Tamora.

Emperour.

[…] But to my Emperour this one thing I commend In highest care and greatest Love ‘tis done, Receive this worthy Moor to your esteem. Dark is the Case, but thro’t a noble light There Shines. — First, be the place he holds in Trust and Confidence, His head in Counsell, and his hand in Warr W ill never fail to do you service. […] Your word’s a noble warrant. ( I .ii, pp. 10–11)

We learn shortly afterwards that this man is her lover. This amplifies the ability to deceive with words which Tamora’s character already had in Shakespeare’s play. Although she is given more lines at various points to achieve her ends, at one important juncture her lines are split with Aaron. In Shakespeare’s play, in the aside where Tamora suggests that Saturninus pretend to forgive Titus and work against him in secret, she is characterized

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as the machinating woman behind the Emperor. In Ravenscroft’s play these manipulative lines are divided between Tamora and Aaron, making them equally influential on the Emperor. As a unit, Tamora and Aaron become the driving force behind Saturninus’s reign and the mutual corrupters of the Roman state. Bassianus is given new interjections throughout this scene which make clear that he is aware that his brother is being manipulated, and which reinforce the perfidy of Tamora’s character: Bassianus. Bassianus.

Bassianus.

Bassianus.

Subtle Empress! Insinuating Goth ! […] Feign’d as I Live! Abstract of Woman and of Devil. […] Kneel, Kneel, Learn to dissemble all, You have a Woman for your Instructor. […] See the good Tribune Marcus too Has taken the Scent, and Bows amongst the crow’d. ( II .i, pp. 13–14)

What is pertinent in this exchange is that, although Tamora and Aaron are working together to persuade the Emperor in his actions, it is only Tamora who is reviled in Bassianus’s accusations. The one piece of abuse that could be read as referring to both Tamora and Aaron, ‘Abstract of Woman and of Devil’, still weighs more heavily on Tamora because Bassianus makes this remark in response to quite a long, uninterrupted aside from Tamora which ends with her insincerely welcoming Titus. The other way in which the Tamora’s character is demonized even further is in the intensification of her relationship with Aaron. She is slightly more detached in her responses to the scene where her sons attack Lavinia and Bassianus, but her greeting of Aaron just prior to this action is far more sensually and sexually intense than in Shakespeare’s play: Aaron.

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[…] W hen e’re thou dost appear to Eyes again, Sprout up a plentifull harvest of Ills, W ith Blood thou shalt be water’d, Humane blood Shall fatten the Soil, and men shall reap the crop In Penitence and Sorrow. (Enter Tamora)

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The Emporour with W ine and Luxury o’re come Is fallen asleep — in’s pendant-couch he’s Laid, That hangs in yonder Grotto rock’d by W inds, W hich rais’d by Art do give it gentle motion, And troops of Slaves stand round with Fans Perfum’d Made of the feathers pluck’d from Indian Birds, And cool him into golden Slumbers — This time I chose to come to thee my Moor. ( III .i, p. 19)

Tamora uses a description of how she has left Saturninus exhausted on his bed of luxury as foreplay to excite Aaron. He in turn has just finished lustily gloating over the prospect of feeding and watering the hidden gold with the blood of the unfortunate lovers. One displays an unholy lust for blood and wealth, the other for sexual gratification. Tamora is an unchaste sexually active and, therefore, voracious woman. All she can extract from Aaron at this point is a kiss; he is too distracted with the thought of the imminent rape and bloodletting, but in Act V we find out that their relationship has actually borne fruit. In Ravenscroft’s version the child brought onstage is still being wet-nursed but that does not mean he is an infant — he could be two or three years old. The cumulative effect of this adaptation is to make Tamora’s character appear more lascivious and even less chaste than Shakespeare made her.28 She is an arch deceiver and, as Titus says of her when she offers to intervene when his sons are being charged with Bassianus’s murder, ‘The Distance ‘twixt a womans tongue and heart | Is more then man can travell in a day’ (III.i, p. 26). Her venality is sealed with regard to her child in the closing action. Where Aaron attempts to save the child’s life, Tamora completes the act he refuses to perform. Like Medea, she bloodily kills the infant (V.i, p. 55). Even though infanticide was not an unusual occurrence in Roman society, we have seen that in early-modern London it was the focus of specific legislation and in Shakespeare’s play the infant survives. In Ravenscroft’s adaptation, Tamora becomes the most exorbitant of women. Not only does she posses the temerity to speak out in public, to manipulate the Roman state, and to exercise her sexuality freely in a miscegenous relationship, but she also

28

As Joyce Green MacDonald argues, ‘Ravenscroft’s changes enforce an unnatural separation between the sexual affair Tamora and Aaron continue after they are brought to Rome and its proper procreative end, thus morally condemning their sterile lust in a way absent from Shakespeare’ (‘“The Force of Imagination”: The Subject of Blackness in Shakespeare, Jonson and Ravenscroft’, Renaissance Papers (1991), 53–74 (p 69)).

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commits the crime the devilish Moor cannot, for which women in Restoration London were frequently tried: infanticide.29 Stabbed by Titus and dying, Tamora kills their child as she curses the tortured Aaron. The Queen of the Goths is unflinching. She has no confession or repentance to offer to inspire sympathy in her audience. However, she is not accorded the final indignity of Shakespeare’s Tamora. Lucius exclaims that ‘No Rights nor Funerall Ceremony’ (V.i, p. 56) will she be allowed, but unlike Shakespeare’s original ending she is not cast out at the limits of the town for the birds to feed upon her entrails. Tamora has become an unremittingly villainous character in Ravenscroft’s play and an unambiguously bad woman, but the enactment of the ultimate scarification of the flesh is left to Aaron, and it is conducted on his living, sentient but unrepentant body. As MacDonald argues, Writing in a period when blackness had become central to his country’s burgeoning colonial enterprise [through the slave trade] Ravenscroft works with far less restraint than Shakespeare in writing a black villain around whose personification of vengeance and malice he unifies his work.30

Like Lavinia and Tamora, certain seemingly minor changes have been made to Aaron’s lines which change his character to intensify his villainy,31 extending otherness to the highest ideal of (male) embodiment goes beyond the feminine. This play is rewritten to suit the tastes of the time. The kind of bloody and graphically horrific spectacle that Ravenscroft portrays, fetishizing the anatomized body in the final scenes when Aaron is tortured and dismembered, was extremely popular in Restoration tragedy. Nor was the sight of this kind of gallows spectacle uncommon to the general public. They were familiar with violent retribution from the public executions of convicted felons which took place at Tyburn, at the Tower, or at the sites where particularly horrific crimes had been committed.32 29

Tamora is doubly condemned because she introduces the possibility of corrupting the line of succession in the ultimate patriarchal state, Rome, with ‘Our Empress Shame, this Black and loathsome Child’ (V .i, p. 38). 30

MacDonald, p. 72.

31

MacDonald’s is one of the few articles which analyses both plays and does so specifically in relation to the issue of Aaron’s blackness and the intensification of the stereotypical evil of his character. 32

Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text, p. 42, claims that Aaron’s racking and burning were not imposed by ‘the contemporary judicial system’, but while racking was not a judicially imposed punishment anymore, as we have seen in earlier chapters pressing, drawing, and quartering (which could involve the burning of intestines or genitalia), and burning of women for petty treason was in practice.

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The retribution on those held responsible for the death of Charles I, both living and dead, was fresh enough in the public imagination and was reinforced by the bloody prosecutions of plots against the Crown. By the time Ravenscroft came to write the second adaptation we will look to, an audience would also have been becoming increasingly aware of the possibility of an anatomy being performed on those taken down from the gallows. Anyone attending a performance of The Anatomist would have been left in no doubt as to what might then be entailed.

The Anatomist Anatomical manuals and play-texts from the first half of the century were each used as templates from which to order new ideas. Old plays had new life and new concepts instilled in them. However, the compliment we have seen that Moxon paid Gwyn was not necessarily so courteously returned. Ravenscroft’s adaptation of Noël Lebreton de Hauteroche’s Crispin le Medecin (c. 1670)33 was far from flattering of anatomical practice. By 14 November 1696 when Ravenscroft staged his adaptation of this French farce as The Anatomist: or, The Sham Doctor34 the last of the Stuart Kings was gone and Cowper’s reuse of Bidloo’s graphic anatomical illustrations from ‘nature’ were in print, part of a new style of illustrated anatomical text. Though it is now considered a minor play, from the time of its first staging ‘it was one of three plays which, according to a contemporary, “kept up” the theater for “two or three years”’ and remained a regular piece in the repertory at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Drury Lane until 1736.35 It was a hit with contemporary audiences from the time it opened and as such was part of a far wider set of social and political effects than one would initially assume. There is every reason to believe that Tyburn and The Anatomist shared some portion of their audience; even if they were not habitués of the gallows, those who attended Ravenscroft’s play could not have failed to be aware of what happened to those found guilty of felony. This unremarkable and unambiguous sexual romp was rewritten to be staged along with Motteux’s dramatic opera on the Loves of Mars and Venus, which it was for nearly twenty years. After that it appeared in increasingly

33

Edward T. Norris, ‘The Original of Ravenscroft’s Anatomist and an Anecdote of Jemmy Spiller’, Modern Languages Notes, 46 (1931), 522–26 and Raymond E. Parshall, ‘The Source of Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist’, Review of English Studies, 12 (1936), 328–33.

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34

Edward Ravenscroft, The Anatomist: or, The Sham Doctor (London: R . Baldwin, 1697).

35

Hughes and Scouten, p. 88.

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truncated forms as an afterpiece into the nineteenth century.36 The opera was dropped but the subject matter of the farce was titillating enough to persist. The anatomist of this play is a physician, not a surgeon, who dissects privately at his home before his peers. Though these details are imported directly from the French, the London audience would immediately identify him as one of a range of English anatomists, the most prolific of whom were the Barber-Surgeons. This physician anatomist and the business that surrounds him in the play is a staged reflection of some of the major factors leading to unrest at Tyburn when the play was in its second decade of popularity. That unrest, which was so bound up with the contestation of the Barber-Surgeons’ rights, in turn led to the strengthening of the case of upwardly mobile surgeons who wanted to separate themselves from any taint of barbering. But this Doctor is even more highly placed; he is a scientific physician awaiting the delivery of a body that he has purchased from the gallows. A great part of the appeal of the play is in the aping of this physician’s authority and its subversion by his cunning maid (Beatrice) and an equally cunning manservant (Crispin). The Doctor is also the father of Angelica, the ingénue character, pursued by a father-and-son pair of suitors, Old Gerald and Young Gerald. Angelica and Young Gerald are already in love but the Doctor has agreed to Old Gerald’s request for her hand: Angelica.

No, ‘tis too true; he has askt me of my Father and my Mother, offers to settle a large Joynture on me, and Marry me without a Portion too. These are proposals few Parents will refuse. Y. Gerald. The Laws of Nature, tho not of Nations, forbid such unequal Matches. (I.ii, p. 10)

In this brief exchange before their attempts to bed and wed each other, and before Old Gerald secures parental consent, we see a modern frankness about the issues of inheritance, jointures, and portions. These are two young middle-class lovers and Young Gerald’s identification with the new sciences is formed in the capital letters of Newtonian Natural Laws, not the laws of a nation that has seen both an inglorious and a ‘Glorious’ revolution. Old Gerald on the other hand is (unsuccessfully) intent on keeping his son at university so he can have his way. The Doctor’s female servant, Beatrice, is more cunning than all of them, including Crispin, and she manages most of the action that smoothes the lovers’ path with some little help from the Doctor’s wife. 36

Ten English Farces, ed. by Leo Hughes and A. H. Scouten (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1948), introductory material to The Anatomist, pp. 87–93.

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In the interstices between stock sexual machinations and the dual usurpation of paternal authority that is as old as Roman comedy, Crispin and Old Gerald’s narrow escapes from vivisection reveal the particulars of the manner in which bodies were anatomized. As cited above, Young shows that there is ample evidence of the company pursuing physicians and surgeons for conducting private anatomies along with other infringers of their warranted rights, under the authority of the company’s by-laws: Beatrice.

Why do you choose this back Apartment at the end of the Garden? You us’d to do it in the Great Hall formerly.

Doctor.

My Wife will have it so, and that’s enough; the body may be brought in privately, at that back door, for so I order’d it: Besides, the wrangling disputations of self-conceited, obstinate Physicians, who come to see my operation, will at this distance less disturb the Neighbourhood: they will main their notions with more noise, than Betters in a Cock-pit. (II.i, p. 13)

The Great Hall referred to here is an apartment within the house. This passage is translated directly from Hauteroche but we can also infer that this was a relatively common practice with a local resonance from similar complaints about the mess left in the kitchen were noted in the records of the Barber-Surgeons for October 1631. We saw in Chapter 4 that it appears some of the kitchen’s implements had been employed in the dissections in the Hall. Such ‘annoyances’ are even more likely to have been a disturbance in a private home. We also know that the disputations at anatomical dissections were common practice and both reasons are sufficient for the Doctor’s Wife to prefer the removal of these ‘operations’ to a room at the bottom of the garden. Further, there is also an understanding that the bringing in of a body, not just the auditory concerns, is a matter of unease to their neighbours. In the way of a sex comedy, though, Crispin puts another construction on the privacy of the rooms, in which he is shown to be justified, for both the Doctor and Old Gerald make advances towards Beatrice when alone with her there. Crispin.

Say you so: Harkee, Gentlewoman, what made you here alone with Mr Doctor? This place is very private, at a convenient distance from the house too.

Beatrice.

One who was hang’d this morning is to be Dissected here: I must set every thing in order for it; the Body will be sent in presently. (II.i, p. 14)

What is more interesting than Crispin’s flirtatious allusions is that Beatrice is responsible for the receipt and ordering of the body in a way that is more involved than the receipt of other household goods—her understanding and actions are more like a steward at a public anatomy, a responsible and prestigious position. Stewards prepared the body beforehand and assisted in the dissection. By contrast

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anatomy makes the Doctor’s Wife ‘melancholy’ and leads her to take Angelica out, but Beatrice has no qualms about her duties and maintains a steady head when Crispin is trapped on the table impersonating an anatomical subject: Doctor.

[…] What’s that there?

Beatrice.

The Body from the Gallows Sir; the fellows that brought it would not carry it into the Vault.

Doctor.

How come they to send him with his Cloaths on?

Beatrice.

They’ll call fro ‘em to morrow,

Doctor.

‘Tis very well. Ha! The Body’s warm: I have a mind to make an experiment immediately. Go, Beatrice, Fetch me my Incision Knives, Amputation Knife, Dismembring Saw, with the Threads, Pins, and all the other Instruments I laid ready in my Closet. (II.i, pp. 15–16)

The information here is pragmatically accurate and at the same time salaciously titillating in the Doctor’s excitement at the supposed freshness of the corpse, who is the live and trembling Crispin. The Doctor is surprised that the clothes—the hangman’s perquisites—remain on the body. The instruments called for are as one sees in tables of instruments that appear amongst the illustrations of numerous anatomical texts and in the frontispiece to the printed play. The audience now knows much of what is likely to happen to Crispin if he remains where he lies: he will be incised, his limbs amputated and dismembered and his entrails pinned out on boards. Both Hauteroche and Ravenscroft know that tension in the audience, increasing both fear and laughter, is heightened by drawing out and poring over the details of what is threatened. And in this we gain a wealth of information that reflects common anatomical practices and current medical theories:

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Doctor.

Go, bring me only my Incision Knife; for while the natural heat remains, I shall more easily come at the Lacteal Veins, which convey the Chyle to the Heart, for Sanguification, or encrease of Blood.

Beatrice.

But, Sir, you won’t begin the Anatomy before the Doctors come.

Doctor.

Fetch, I say.

Beatrice.

Well Sir, since I must

Doctor.

He’s not ill shap’d, nor is he very ill featur’d; and yet his visage still retains much discontent and trouble. Well, all the Rules of Metoposcopy and Physiognomy are false, if this was not a Rogue that very well deserv’d hanging. This Incision pleases me extremely; I’ll open his Body from the Xiphoid Cartilage, quite along to the Os Pubis. I feel his Heart pant yet: If any of my fellow Physsicians were here now, especially those who doubt the Harveyan Doctrine, I’d let ‘em plainly see the Circulation of the Blood thro the Systole and Diastole. (II.i, p. 16)

(Exit Bea.)

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It is clear that the Doctor believes that Harvey’s work on circulation is still a matter of considerable dispute. And it gives the modern reader pause for thought that, in a character who claims to accept the theories of circulation, the fact that the heart continues to beat is not taken by him as a sign of life. Indeed, in our relatively recent past respirators shifted the criteria for death from cardiopulmonary circulation to brain death, and in this farcical moment we see evidence of a similar instability of diagnosis in the seventeenth century. Systole and diastole are only demonstrable with a beating heart, though to a proportion of the audience this would have been received simply as pompous banter. However, with such a different set of criteria for death, there is little wonder that hanged people did ‘resurrect’ on occasion as we saw in Chapter 5 Anne Greene had so infamously done in 1650. The audience may also have taken this as a sign of the imperfection of this physician’s art in such matters and another slight on his character. Physiognomy (the science of reading faces and outward appearances) and metoposcopy (the science of reading wrinkles) were more popular pursuits that further undercut the credibility of the Doctor and simultaneously provide sufficient ironic evidence of Crispin’s clearly roguish nature. The succeeding delay in Crispin’s fate also demarcates a firm line between the rights and authorities of Doctors and Surgeons. A Surgeon enters to ask for the Physician’s attendance on a patient in a case that goes beyond his bounds of expertise. The Doctor is so intent on his anatomy that he prevaricates in a way that asserts his absolute authority but confirms his ninny-hood. At this point Beatrice re-enters and sends the Doctor off on a ploy. He orders the ‘Body be carry’d into the Vault’, such as appears in the lower level of the Barber-Surgeons’ Anatomy Theatre (see Fig. 3), and once he is gone an indignant Crispin revivifies: Beatrice.

Whither in such haste?

Crispin.

Whither, with a vengeance! Let me out I say: you must fetch the Incision Knife, with a pox t’ye, and all the other damnable Instruments, to rip me up alive, and make minc’d meat of me! A curse on his Systol and Dyastole. (II.i, p. 17)

Hauteroche gave Crispin ample lines in which to rage at his near escape, increasing the audience’s mirth, but the following lines are Ravenscroft’s and not in the original:

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Beatrice.

Away you sot!

Crispin.

I had rather be a Sot than an Anatomy, I will not have my Flesh scrap’d from my Bones. I will not be hung up for a Skeleton in Barber-Surgeons-Hall. (II.i, p. 18)

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Ravenscroft knows his audience and is being perfectly clear that his adapted farce has direct connections with a current and increasing popular unease. We saw in Chapter 3 that two infamous anatomical figures, Canonbury Besse and Country Tom, were still on display in the Anatomy Theatre until at least 1666. Besse and Tom — retrieved, dissected, and mounted with no recorded dispute and considerable approbation for their fates — appear still to be popular reference points even by the time the company was fighting a losing battle against just such individual professionals as the Doctor of the play. There follows a great deal more by-play about being ripped up from the xiphoid process to the os pubis (a standard midline incision) and Crispin continues to comment on the systole and the diastole throughout the rest of the play. In the immediately succeeding action Crispin takes the Doctor’s robes and treats two patients, putting on the type of gown and cap worn by physicians of the period, for he would ‘rather act the Dr than the dead Body’ (p. 18). He is particularly defensive of his ‘Os Pubis.’ This charade of treatment involves a few original jokes about canine uroscopy and prescribing too many purgative and laxative pills — the consequences of which would have been immediately obvious to the audience and a source of anticipation for a resolution later in the plot. Ravenscroft amplifies this by inserting further lines of faux Latin for Crispin in his disputation with his second patient: ‘Olo Purgatum, Physicum, Vomit-um-guts-out-um’ (p. 22). The remainder of the plot repeats these themes as it works towards the inevitable proper romantic resolution in accord with the ‘Laws of Nature’, but Ravenscroft again amplifies the concerns of current events by inserting a second threatened dissection, which Beatrice, Crispin, and Young Gerald contrive to out-fox and humiliate Old Gerald. In the initial threatened dissection Crispin, who comes from the social demographic most likely to be seen in the dock at the Sessions, subverts medical authority by escaping the blades and saws. In Ravenscoft’s additional dissection Crispin operates in a world turned upside down, comically threatening his social superior in a way that had potential ramifications for the social and political realm outside the theatre. At the beginning of Act III Ravenscroft inserts dialogue between Beatrice and Old Gerald whereby she gulls him into bringing jewels for Angelica to the Anatomy Room, simultaneously setting him up for the same treatment Crispin received. Crispin at first resists Young Gerald’s entreaties to return to the Anatomy Room: Crispin.

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[…] No hazard! Call you it, I hazard my Legs, Arms, Veins, Arteries, and Muscles; and in the Doctor’s gibberish I hazard Incision, Dissection, Amputation, and Circulation, thro the Systole and Diastole. Why, Sir, in such a case, a Physitian cuts up a man with as little remorse, as a Hangman carves a Traytor. (p. 29)

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Crispin explicitly voices the kind of complaint against anatomists that eventually escalated into the riots. Young Gerald and Beatrice prevail and Young Gerald now helps Crispin into a gown to play the doctor and recommends him to use as much ‘Jargon’ as he can drag up out of his memory. The details of the cunning all happen offstage with Beatrice the main director of the action. When Crispin returns and gulls Old Gerald he plays a German Doctor. In preparation for his appearance Beatrice and Angelica persuade Old Gerald to strip and similarly act the corpse. Crispin repeats the Doctor’s examination of an anatomical specimen, similarly disparaging his victim’s visage: Crispin.

[…] here be de ver ill aspect — dis was one person of de fair Speech, but de fals Heart; covetous, designing, letcherous; a Robber, a Thief, a Cut-throat — Sacrament, hanging was too good for him, a Rogue, a Villain—ah vat pleasure will dis be to make de Dissection, de Incision, and de Amputation, upon dis Body, and rip open his Belly from de Cartilage Ziphode, quite along to his Os-pubis. (p. 35)

He too delights that the heart pants still and extends the suspense by threatening to cut Old Gerald’s throat with a ‘great Knife […] from Jugular to Jugular; as thus,’ from ear to ear. In this instance the threat is more imminent, for where earlier Beatrice had been at pains to hide the instruments from the Doctor they are now all onstage. This goes on for some lines, with further threats of cutting off ‘de head at one Chop’ with the ‘decolation Ax’, using a Wimble ‘to bore a hold in de Scull’ and ‘de dismembering Saw, to Saw off de Leg, or de Arm’, and finally the ‘Amputation Knife, to cut off de Leg or de Hand, just-a in de Joynt’ (35–36). Crispin relishes the prospect, increasing the tension as he torments his employer’s father, his social superior. Any such action in reality could lead to a charge of petty treason which if proved would end in the gallows. However, this is a farce and the outcome is predictable: Crispin. Beatrice.

[…] vat Strange Carcass have you in dis Country? Oh! Sir, I have seen whole Bodies, after they have lain here a day or two, get up, and run away.

O. Gerald. And so Will I: I’ll not stay to be butcher’d here. (He leaps off the Table) (p. 36)

The denouement is as it should be. The coffin containing Old Gerald’s clothes has been carried away by the Beadles, a known practice of the company, but they along with the jewels he has ‘given’ to Angelica are returned. The young lovers re-enter irreversibly trothed but not yet wed, married by conquest or custom. Before this happy ending, Ravenscroft allows one parting shot at anatomical practices and the workings of criminal justice:

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Why, Sir, As I was shewing Mr Doctor here the dead Body that was sent you from the Gallows, he felt his pulse, and laying his hand on his Breast, he found his Heart Panted; then he took his Incision Knife, and before he could touch his naked skin, up started the dead Body, and ran away, just as you saw —

Crispin.

All this is true, Sir, as I am a Member of the learned Faculty.

Doctor.

I am amaz’d.!

Wife.

Nay Husband, I have heard of such strange things: I warrant the poor man was hang’d wrongfully. (pp. 37–38)

We saw in Chapter 6 that in 1674, just five years before The Rape of Lavinia was staged, there was the first hint in the Barber-Surgeons’ accounts that difficulties were starting to be encountered in retrieving bodies. Up until this time the expenses incurred at the gallows are stable except for inflation. Yet in April that year on top of the usual ten shillings ‘for his expences about ye body then’ the Beadle, Peter Smith, was paid a pound (a tenth of his annual stipend) ‘ffor his paynes Extraordinary’ in relation to securing ‘ye body’, as were the Common Sergeant, the Common Cryer, and the ‘Serants of the Counter’ recompensed in an unnamed dispute.37 By 1711 the Barber-Surgeons’ actions were visible enough that Samuel Waters resolved that he would retrieve his friend John Addison’s body from Tyburn gallows when he ‘heard that the sd John Addison was to be Anatomised’. In doing so he warned the Barber-Surgeon’s Beadle, who had a legal warrant and the support of the Sheriff’s Officers, that ‘if they would not lett them carry it away quietly they would by force’.38 Those who later rioted against the surgeons and physicians retrieving bodies from Tyburn appear to have felt much the same way. It is impossible to say whether John Addison or his neighbours had attended one of the numerous performances that included this farce but by the time he and his neighbours’ expressed the desire to retrieve the body of the executed John Waters, The Anatomist had been a regular part of the repertory at Lincoln’s Inn and Drury Lane for fifteen years. It had both longevity and popularity. The small differences that Ravenscroft introduces into the original—the very specific reference to both the Hall and to local anatomical practices—appeal to the common knowledge of a London audience in the two decades following the 1690s and their anxious resistance to the greater visibility of anatomy on the streets of the capital. We saw that Crispin is given lines that explicitly voice the 37 38

Audit Book 1659–74.

Samuel Waters, October 1711, deposition in Anna Regina versus Webb et al., CLRO, Aldermanbury, London.

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kinds of concerns that motivated Samuel Waters to retrieve his friend John Addison’s body from the gallows, that the work of the anatomy theatres was carried out with ‘as little remorse, as a Hangman carves a Traytor’ (p. 29). Yet there is a flatness of composition in the characters that mirrors the twodimensional Sessions Papers narratives that were becoming longer and more numerous at the same time as this play was so popular. This play’s renown was undoubtedly related to its subject matter’s potential for physical comedy and farcical machinations, but it must also have been due in some part to it holding a particular fascination for a playhouse audience that was aware of bungled anatomies, and eventually the gallows riots. Indeed, the fact of the popularity of this play and the number of times it was staged leading up to and through the period when there was such civil unrest argues for it being an intensifying factor in that unrest. To have played out again and again the facts of anatomy involving bodies that will only revive if the process is averted would set in the minds of a good part of the population the possible ethical crises of anatomies conducted in an age of competition for corpses. The Doctor’s Wife, at least, has heard of people being hanged wrongfully and reviving, and every time she gave her lines, so too did several hundred more Londoners.

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R IDING THE T HREE-L EGGED M ARE

T

he slow and uneven movement in ontological expression that we saw coming out in the later anatomical illustrations and in the presentation of anatomical practices in Ravenscroft’s adaptation of a French farce also has its expression in legal transcripts and gallows narratives. We now turn back to the source of anatomical subjects, the Tyburn gallows, in the context of increasing unease with the practice of anatomical dissection that Linebaugh so accurately identified. Here we find admonitory tales of felonious ends that in combination with the records of St Olaves and the company lead directly back to the BarberSurgeons’ Anatomy Theatre. After 1660 these early court reportings become more and more popular, more numerous, and gradually more detailed. In earlier chapters we saw that it is necessary to exercise some caution with regard to the veracity of popular legal narratives. These are after all reports — an early form of journalism — not the writings of the people hanged. Even in autobiography objective codifiable truthfulness is never guaranteed. For whatever reason, they are undeniably ‘partial’.1 Those papers that record a felon expressing regret in a manner surprisingly similar to noble ‘good deaths’ may be a concrete expression of a widely held belief in the efficacy of confession for the soul and a hope of entry into an eternal life: but, they may also be being reported in a manner that the recorder believed the felon ought to be confessing to serve as a lesson to an unruly populace. J. A. Sharpe argues that these pamphlets were a powerful means of the promoting an idea of justice, ‘that these writers, named or anonymous, were producing what people were meant to want to hear’,2 and that dissenting or unrepentant voices 1 See Early Modern Autobiography: Theories, Genres, Practices, ed. by Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 2

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were either soundly condemned, or excised from the records. Whether the Sessions Papers were propaganda, piety, or penitence, they were undoubtedly popular and appealing publications for which there was a demand. We saw at the beginning of this book that in the early seventeenth century, in a time when the body was consciously appealed to as a metaphor for the state and society, the anatomized felon is most often recorded as an anonymous object. By the 1640s the clerk at St Olaves was wryly recording anonymous subjects. We have seen in Chapter 7 how symptoms of a further shift in the perception of subjectivity in the understanding of embodiment that appears in the anatomy manuals and the plays of the late seventeenth century. We return now to the Sessions House of this period with its superficial resemblance to the dramatic theatres of the Restoration period, at least in the covered area in which the juries sat and the judge presided. The prisoners were in a yard, open to the elements, similar to the space allotted to the groundlings in the round playhouses of the early seventeenth century.

Restoration Felons In Chapter 5 we began to draw out shifts in the understanding of subjectivity and the female body in criminal narrative with the discussion of Elizabeth Malson. We took a narrative that was most concerned with female reproduction, the one point at which the female body became worth studying for the anatomist, and now we will return to further narratives of named subjects to trace their development in the period after 1660 and through to the early eighteenth century. We will do so through an analysis of the record keeping of St Olaves, Silver Street, the workings of the Old Bailey, and the surviving Tyburn narratives. By combing through the variously named Proceedings for the Old Bailey for the years after 1660, it has been possible to trace the ‘true narratives’ of a scattering of the individual felons who were anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons and were afterwards buried along with the paupers and chrysoms at St Olaves, Silver Street.3 There are many extant Sessions Papers the dates of which tally with the burial of anonymous anatomies or in which felons are not named, but in each case there is no way of determining which of the executed felons is a public anatomy. The 3

When I conducted the initial research on which this chapter is based in 1996 I relied upon microfilm and microfiche records through Early English Books and Early British Trials. EEB is now online (EEBO) as are the London Sessions Papers, both of which have been invaluable resources. I give particular thanks to the ARC Network for Early-Modern and European Research for granting me access to EEBO.

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style and the content of these narratives have echoes of, but are in substance quite different from, Goodcole’s relation of the baseness of Besse and the fall and salvation of Tom. In keeping with a general vogue for a more prosodic style of linguistic and literary communication in the late seventeenth century, and with what Samuel Y. Edgerton has termed a ‘detheologized’ system of law, by the time these regular Sessions House narratives of the felons who went on to be anatomized appear a new rhetoric of the scaffold has come into play: The beheading of Charles I of England in 1649 was one of the last grand public executions of the medieval pageant tradition, and the first under a new system of temporal (parliamentary) law that ‘detheologized’ capital punishment and eventually led to its mechanization and dehumanization as practiced [sic] in the twentieth century. Charles’s decapitation was to the history of law and capital punishment somewhat as Galileo’s nearly contemporary observations of the solar system were to science: establishing that no man had divine right to the center of the universe and at the same time depriving mankind of a convenient human scale to measure cosmic things. Both also deprived man of his absolute confidence in an anthropomorphic God with a master plan of the universe wherein death, even by capital punishment, had not the finality it has today.4

The retreat of the centrality of God from many social systems including the law is an important factor in the abstraction of embodiment. We saw in the anatomical illustrations in the previous chapter the degree to which theology retreated from didactic sermonizing and become absorbed into the ‘scientific’ natural body. The way in which this detheologization first becomes apparent in the Sessions Papers is in the brevity, the prosody, and the secularity of these accounts. Unlike Henry Goodcole’s moralizing pamphlets of sensational cases and ‘good deaths’ at the gallows — and unlike the financially lucrative reporting of gallows confessions which were recorded, printed, and sold as a perquisite of office by the series of hypocrites who acted as spiritual ‘advisers’ to the condemned in the eighteenth century5 — the reporting in the early Sessions Papers is positively terse. They are not unlike the entries of the months’ crime statistics in the Police Gazette of the early twentieth century. The Sessions Papers give a brief account of the circumstances of the crimes for which people had been indicted, the prisoner’s conduct in court, and the sentence handed down upon him or her. As we saw in relation to Besse and Elizabeth Malson, the fact that felons were later anatomized 4 5

Samuel Y. Edgerton, ‘Maniera and Mannaia’, p. 67.

The Ordinary of Newgate, that is the minister charged with visiting the prison who if he was successful in gaining a confession then wrote it up and sold it as an early version of the ‘penny dreadful’. See Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate’.

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does not appear in these papers, only their name and a relation of their crimes. There is a similar terseness in the Sessions Rolls (court records), the Gaol Deliveries (gaol lists of internees), and the Depositions (witness statements) that survive. In Cressy’s brief discussion of wills across the century one also sees a move from detailed and personalized discursions to a simple relation of directions.6 This early brevity after the return of parliamentary monarchy is slowly replaced by an increasingly ‘plain language’ verbosity as the seventeenth century wanes. We are watching public discourse being learned anew. The earlier records of identifiable burials are sparse and only become meaningfully interpretable when they are compared across the Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, the Churchwarden’s Accounts, the Great Accompt Book, and the legal records. It is possible to determine when the public anatomy was performed from the Barber-Surgeons’ accounts to 1676 — they are regularly recorded as being performed in the Lenten term. However, it is clear from burial records that they were also held at the end of the other three terms, in concordance with the Sessions. By the 1670s it is possible by cross-correlation and backtracking from the burials to the Sessions Papers to identify executed felons as anatomical subjects. In a little more than forty clear instances between 1676 and 1732, the names of those buried as anatomies appear in the lists of felons sentenced to death in the Sessions Rolls in the weeks immediately prior. There are a very few unnamed burials or executions where the identity of a particular felon is almost certain. We saw in Chapter 5 that Elizabeth Malson, buried as a public anatomy, is a case in point: there was only one female executed at that Sessions. The burial records and burial accounts sometimes record either the fact of execution or identify the deceased by name, an anonymous body as an executed ‘person’, or as an ‘anatomy’ from ‘Barber Surgans Hall’.7 There is a variable delay between the dates on which the Sessions were held and the dates of burial in the register and the accounts of St Olaves, but it is regularly within two weeks. With the time lag between the interment of remains and the dates for sentencing, it is clear that felons sometimes waited in Newgate for a week to ten days, but at other times we can tell they were executed the next morning. As we know from the Barber-Surgeons’ records, and from Ravenscroft, they were then immediately subject to being retrieved by the Barber-Surgeons (or their competitors). Burial was arranged almost immediately after the three days’ lectures of the public anatomies had been completed.

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6

Cressy, pp. 444–49.

7

See the appendix, below.

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Langbein notes that the other great source of legal narratives for the period which is commonly appealed to for evidence of the conduct of the courts, State Trials, is devoted to ‘cases involving high politics’ and is therefore extraordinary in its cases and is highly class-specific.8 The most notable aspect of the criminals in these Sessions Papers who subsequently appear as anatomies in the burial records is that the majority of them are incredibly ordinary. Those famous enough to be recorded in State Trials were too famous to be anatomized, though those who were condemned for treason met no gentler end. The felons who went on to be anatomized were generally no more and no less extraordinary than other condemned felons. Those who can be identified as being at the Barber-Surgeons’ were convicted of burglary, theft, robbery, horse-theft, coining (high treason), infanticide, murder, and in two instances (one a notorious case in 1726 related by Linebaugh in The London Hanged ) for sodomy. There is no discernible preference for the bodies of murderers over and above other felons as one might be tempted to assume if thinking in terms of retributive justice. Given their purpose the Barber-Surgeons’ priorities should have led them to prioritize a well proportioned (preferably male) frame and physical health in a felon above the notoriety of the crime. Indeed, as we shall see by the end of this chapter, as competition grew and they encountered greater frustration in pursuing their rights, the subjects they were able to retrieve seem to have fallen short of the ‘perfect proportions’ we saw were so important.

Female Felons How then are felons reported in these narratives and in the documents recorded at trial, particularly the small group of identifiable females (Elizabeth Farrer (1677), Ann Gardiner (1705), Mary Ellinor (1708), and Mary Lovelock (1717/18)) who followed Elizabeth Malson in being executed and anatomized? ‘Elizabeth Farr, an Executed person, buried December the 22th’ 1677,9 like Elizabeth Malson is not named in the Sessions Paper but we can tell from the relevant Depositions and correlation of the dates that she was one of the three unnamed women recorded

8 9

Langbein, ‘Criminal Trial before the Lawyers’, pp. 265–67.

A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-house in the Old-Bayly at the Sessions there held On Wednesday the 17th of January 1676/7 (London: D. M., 1676/7), p. 6, and The Black Book of Newgate Or, An Exact Collection Of The Most material Proceedings At All the Sessions in the Old baily, for Eighteen months last past […] (London: D. M., 1677), p. 6.

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as having been sentenced to death at the Sessions of 12–15 December 1677. The anonymous facts of the Sessions Paper are related in a tone even cooler than we saw was the case in the discussion of Elizabeth Malson: ‘There were in all Five persons Condemned to die: Two men and two women (old notorious and incorrigible Thieves) to be Hang’d, and one woman to be Burnt [for coining].’10 One of these women was involved in a theft from an alehouse. In this brief account, there is no didactic moralization about this first woman’s crimes and her nature, although she is a ‘low’ character who travels with confederates to alehouses with the intention of stealing. However, the corruption inherent in women’s femininity is there — she is after all a woman who frequents taverns and inns, and a recidivist sinner — but it is absorbed into her nature. She and her sisters who are convicted are of a low genus of women, to whom crime is only to be expected of their ‘notorious’ and ‘incorrigible’ characters. From the Sessions Rolls it becomes clear that ‘Eliza: ffarrer’ is the second woman. She stole ‘out of the houe of Mofez [Moses] Murrato in Bury Street London one flowered Silk gowne of the value of 3^ or thereaboutes Dated the 28th of November 1677’, ‘which was taken about her’.11 Elizabeth Farrer, like Pepys’s sailor, is ‘lusty’, and was either convicted on the strength of only a part of what she stole — according to our narrator household goods and clothing to the value of fifty pounds — or the ‘true narrative’ has been embellished to increase the impact of her crimes. This would fit with the rest of the presentation of her in the printed record. Much is made of her cunning and deceit in presenting herself as a Quaker, a factor that had persuaded the people from whom she stole (her employers) to place greater trust in her. This is of course situated within a social-political context in which Quakers were known for activism and bearing witness in radically confronting ways: particularly contentious was the tendency of sisters to exceed the bounds of proper feminine behaviour by protesting publicly. The effect is therefore double-edged, not only condemning the ‘wench’ for her deceit but also casting into doubt the general trustworthiness of Quakers — they may be cunning canters. More extraordinarily, like her sisters on the stage in their breeches roles, she escaped with the booty in ‘man’s apparel’ and was ‘in her masculine habit carried to Newgate’, though by the trial she had returned to ‘a female dress’. There are echoes of Besse’s betrayal of her good parentage but it is muted, in 10

A True Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions-house in the Old-Bayly, December 12, 13, 14, 15. 1677 (London: D. M., 1677). 11

SF 262, ‘A true and perfect Kallendr of all Prisoners in Newgate for Felonies and Trespasses this 12 th day of December Anno Dom 1677’, Docket 34.

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keeping with the pragmatic relation of the facts and her fate. Like Besse she also claimed a confederate. She ‘accused one for taking the Goods by her Invitation’, an unnamed male who was believed when ‘he’ denied it and subsequently implicated a third party. The brevity is characteristic of most of the narratives from so shortly after the Great Fire and is little different in that manner from the contemporaneous tales of the male malefactors discussed below. By 1705 we find considerably more information in the Depositions surrounding Anne Gardiner. There are no surviving Sessions Papers for that year but ‘Ann Gardiner, that was executed at Tiborn’12 on 26 September is to be found in the Depositions for the August 1705 Sessions. She was found guilty of theft, ‘upon oath of Katherine ffell for stealing out of her house goods to the value 90s’13 on 17 July: The Informa’on of Katherine ffell in how she [ffetter …] widow taken before S r Owen Buckingham K t Lord Mayor of the City of London This 17 th of July. Who saith that at Eight a Clock this Morning she this Informant Coming out of the Cellar of her house, into her parlour did there find a woman (who owns to her name to be Anne Gardiner) — with some Linnen and other Goods in her hands, and supposed her to be a thiefe, askt her what she did there, upon which she lett fall the Goods, and would have gon out, But this — Informant thrusting her backward out thierto [?], upon which her neighbours ran in and took this said Anne Gardiner and found she had taken some wearing Linnen, and other wearing apparrell in order to carry off the Same, and that [She had] conveyed away to an other woman in the street A Gown and three petty coates black hoods and an pair of Black stays, all which goods are of a Value of fforty shillings and upwards. And this Informant Saith that the Street door was open when the said Anne Gardiner came in But the parlour door was latched and by her opened as this Informant undoubtedly believes Kath ffell14

In 1677 the place, the property, and the wronged are noted in the court records, and what little of the surrounding story that is thought worth inclusion appears in the Sessions Paper. By 1705 the court records are giving all the available action, plotted out, with inference on the part of her accuser as well as a righteous claim that she and her neighbours caught and searched the intended thief. What Anne Gardiner may have had to say for herself, we do not know.

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12

Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials.

13

SF 492.

14

SP 27, 29 August 1705.

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Mary Ellinor, like Elizabeth Malson thirty years before her, was found guilty of infanticide. Mary appears in the burial records as having been ‘executed for murdering her child November 9 1708’.15 She was apparently a ‘gentleman’s servant debauched by an apprentice coach-maker’,16 sentenced to be hanged at the Sessions of 27 October. By deeply unhappy coincidence St Olaves, Silver Street, bore the costs of indicting and prosecuting Mary, and for burying the infant.17 There were considerable pains taken by the church as one can see from the various expenses in the parish accounts. In this she is significant. She was a resident within the Parish of St Olaves and there is no doubt her crime had its basis in a moral matter. More damningly it was the church’s ‘house of Easement’ (privy) into which she was found guilty of ‘flinging’ her ‘Male Bastard Infant’ on ‘the 25th Day of September Instant’, thereby making a direct connection between the crime and the parish church. It is hard in this instance not to feel that the Barber-Surgeons chose her for her crimes and their relationship with the church. Again we have a case of sexual transgression with moral disapprobation being expressed against the offending woman; but in Mary’s case, so unlike Besse’s, it took the concerted effort of God’s ministers using secular means to have God’s commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ upheld in the secular court. The costs incurred in this prosecution appear in St Olaves’ accounts: Sept 25: Spent att Severall times w th M r Chadwick & M r Peeke about the Woman flinging ye Child into ye house of Office — 1s Sep: 27 Paid the Coroner — L1-5s To the two Beadles — 7s 8 d Sep: 28 Paid for a Coach to Carry her to Newgate — 1s Sep: 30 Spent w th M r Chadwick & M r Peake ye receiving of ye mony of M rs Field for Charges of the Bastard Child that was Murther’d Gave Cooper & Gilbert for burying ye Bastard — 7 d Gave Gilbert for washing Faulkners shirts & c — 5d Spent the Woman in Newgate — 1s Oct: 13 Spent att the old Bayley w th ye 6 winesss — 9 d Oct 14 Swearing the witnesses — 1s 4 d Oct 16 For Coach hire for M rs Higgins & other witnesses — 5s 6 d 18

15

The timing of her death would seem to make her an ideal candidate for the Michaelmas public anatomy, originally funded by Dr Arris.

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16

Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 148.

17

Churchwarden’s Accounts, for 1708–09.

18

Churchwarden’s Accounts, for 1708–09.

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The officers of St Olaves made sure the commandment was enforced so well that Mary made a complete circuit from the church, to the court, to Tyburn, to the Barber-Surgeons, and back to the churchyard again. She and her infant would almost undoubtedly have been interred in the same common burial plot, she as an anatomy and he as a ‘chrysom’, though the child seems not to have warranted the usual burial fee of 1s. We can also tell from the dates of her trial that she was imprisoned at Newgate for almost twice as long as most of her fellows, having been carried there by coach at the expense of the parish on 28 September, tried between 11 and 13 October, sentenced on 27 October and buried on 9 November. Having been ‘Indicted upon the Coroner’s Inquest’ Mary supposedly attempted to conceal her labour by claiming to her mistress she had rheumatic pain in her arm and when the birth was discovered she then claimed ‘it was a Miscarriage’. In the face of opinions, probably sought from a Jury of Matrons (midwives), that she was of ‘full time’ and having ‘nothing in her Defence’ her case swiftly reached the same conclusion as Malson’s: ‘the Jury found her Guilty of the Indictment.’19 The deposition has much the same tenor:20 London [Iprimus] An Inquisition [and C] taken the Parish of St Olave Sliver Street in the Ward of ffarringdon within London the 27th Day of September Anno Dom 1708 before Geo: River CoronR of the Sayd City on View of the body of a Certaine Male Infant then and there lying dead by the Oathes of Robert Darke [??] John Joseph Thomas Hayes Ralph Parke Glover Johnson William Darke Ffrancis Stanly Thom: Dormoor Will: Marsh Edw d:: Brookby Obedience Robbins John [?] John Millington Joshua [Satter?]waite Phillip Waine Benjamine Jennings Thom: George Jo: Bretherton They finde that Mary Ellenor Late of London […] after being Great with Childe of the sayd Male Infant afterward this is to say the 25 th Day of September Instant at the Parrish of St Olave Silver Street in the Ward of ffarringdon within London the sayd Male Infant from her own body by the providence of God did bring forth alive which Male Infant by the Lawes of England was a Bastard and that she the sayd Mary Ellenor not having the ffear of God and [c] so soon as [the sayd] Male Bastard Infant was born in and upon [the sayd] Male Bastard being alive and [in the Peace] and c ffeloniously, Willfully and [c] did make an [assault] and did afterwards throw the said Male Bastard Infant: alive into a house of [Easement] filled with Piss dung and other ffilthy matter wherein the sayd Male Infant did then and there Instantly become Choaked Suffocated and Strangled. They fynde her Guilty of the Murder of the Sayd Male Bastard Infant but fynde no Goods Chattells and c. Bill of Murder for the Same.

19

The Proceedings on the Queen’s Commission of the Peace […] On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, being the 13th, 14th 15th, and 16th Days of October (London: [n. pub.], 1708). 20

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Chapter 8 The Witnesses Names:

Anne wife of Thomas Hayes Mary Shellnock Widd Thomas Hayes W m Manning Mary Wife of Henry Hudson

We have seen that the criminal act of disposing of an infant in the ‘Jaques’ was specifically enjoined against in the midwife’s oath. Like the intensification of Tamora’s evil, the detailing of the fetid conditions of where the child was thrown damns her further. In the brevity of the account in the Sessions Paper we are able to glean further morally framing information. Mary’s mistress believed her claims of illness and attempted to treat ‘the Distemper’, raising sympathy for the employer who subsequently — for which read justifiably — bears witness against her. Again, there is no sense of her subjectivity beyond the details that are related second- and third-hand, for Mary remains silent, ‘alledging nothing in her Defence’. There is a similar deposition for another defendant, written almost on a template of this and taken before Coroner George River. Agatha Ashbrook, widow, was also found guilty, of strangling her infant ‘ffemale Bastard’ with a twine of woollen lisle. There are sixteen men bearing witness to the inquest and half a dozen witnesses to press the case, all women and most probably a Jury of Matrons to determine as required the physical evidence of pregnancy and childbirth from these women’s bodies. The cases of Mary Ellinor and Elizabeth Malson are not unusual. As we saw in Chapter 5, James I’s statute to address the social anxiety over bastardy was if anything gaining in currency in the late seventeenth century. There are repeated instances of women being prosecuted for infanticide throughout these Sessions Papers as Agatha Ashbrook attests. As a servant or a widow with a bastard-child and in a period which we have seen was characterized by an influx of people looking for work for decreasing wages, women like Mary would have been unemployable and faced with poverty, prostitution, or starvation in order to raise a child. We saw that it is unclear how long before her delivery Elizabeth Malson was widowed but we also saw that if she had no husband to support her and six other children, she would already have been in a state of some financial distress. And the career path Elizabeth Farrer had embarked upon was also, undoubtedly, at least in part a function of poverty. Each of these women is characterized as ‘low’, and their crimes are sexualized, but the impetus to crime in each is no longer attributed directly to grandmother Eve. The inherent nature of their ‘lowness’ and femaleness is linked to their criminality in a more detached, yet internalized, manner. Overt religious moralization is no longer necessary to the reporting of

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these cases, just as the banderols in Remmelin’s anatomy have become redundant in late-seventeenth-century editions. Want and social deprivation are at the heart of their criminality, and the dispassionate tone of the reporting discourages any level of sympathy for their plights.21 Our final female felon is Mary Lovelock (1718). Like Anne Gardiner she was found guilty of breaking and entering the ‘Dwelling-house of John Williams in the Day-time, and stealing thence a Silk Damask Gown and Petticoat, and other Goods to the value of 8 l. the 1st July last’. The delay between the crime and the prosecution was the result of it taking that long for a neighbour, Mary Dickson, who had also been robbed, to accuse Gardiner. At first Anne confessed but ‘upon her Tryal she denied the Fact’. However, ‘the Jury found her Guilty’.22 Mary’s mark is recorded on her examination and confession before Sir Thomas Abney, Knight.23 If she could not write it is possible but by no means certain that she could read, so the mark on the confession and her protestation at trial need not be contradictory, but her desperation was clear enough once the reality of her situation sank in. Like many before and after her, she pled benefit of belly. Falling pregnant in gaol was far from a rarity and three other women were successful in their pleas. But along with Ann Smith, sentenced to death for the theft of thirteen guineas and jewellery from her master, Mary Lovelock was found ‘not with Quick Child [sic]’ and hanged. The outer layer of the Sessions Roll clearly marks her as ‘Exd ’ amongst a group of names who had been ‘Rep d ’. These women were illequipped to present and represent themselves in public spaces and had insufficient expertise in the legal field of play to keep themselves from the ultimate abstraction before the anatomical texts of Havers, Browne and Cowper. Within the arena of the courts and the anatomy theatres they display behaviour that is to be expected in the course of feminine immorality. Their chief means of attempting to avoid the gallows is again through their potential to be pregnant and their own ability to militate that embodied capacity. Sometimes their bodies saved them. Sometimes 21 This does not mean that women found guilty were reported unsympathetically in all cases. There is an instance where an entire pamphlet is devoted to the penitent end of a famous female felon, and one-time actress, Mary Carleton, née Moders. According to the pamphlet she died with all the grace and dignity her audience could wish for, but in such penitence that she comes to represent that other stereotype of femininity, the repentant and godly woman. See The Deportment and Carriage of the German Princess, immediately before her Execution and her last Speech at Tyburn: Being Wednesday the 22th of January 1672[/73] (London: Nath. Brooke, 1672). 22 The Proceedings of the King’s Commission of the Peace […] Thursday and Friday, being the 27th and 28th of February (London: [n. pub.], 1717). 23

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they did not. In any case they defined them and their crimes. Just as Gowing noted with respect to the policing of the childbed, it was frequently women who condemned them, whether in an official capacity as midwives who searched their bodies for signs of pregnancy or birth, or simply as witnesses to their guilt. In the early seventeenth century Besse was allowed to shrewishly rail even as she was framed by her narrator. These women have far more in common with Lavinia: they are either enfeebled or totally silenced in the construction of their narratives. They are no longer vilified as fallen Eves; it is their natural female recidivism that has condemned them to a final capacity to teach medical apprentices how to frame them and their living sisters — upright or corrupt. To reiterate, where an earlier religiously inspired chronicler like Henry Goodcole would have used the occasion of writing these narratives as the basis for a diatribe against the wages of sin and the corrupting nature of women, these accounts relate — in seemingly dispassionate detail — the alleged sequence of events of a crime, a report of any confession, the facts of imprisonment, and the reality of the sentence. The Sessions Papers are examples of a new style of writing that favoured plain language and a new form of publication aimed at communicating ‘news’ to ‘citizens’. Not only are epistemologies in the process of shifting, the technologies by which those perceptions are communicated are taking on new forms that have their own effects on how that knowledge is conveyed. The Sessions Papers collect together multiple narratives presented in short, pithy detail. Moral lessons become absorbed into the story as much as gendered traits, just as we saw the moral epithets of anatomical illustrations become absorbed into the body of the protagonists. The kind of moral disapprobation that was iconographically displayed and graphically repeated in print narratives is no longer necessary. Female embodied subjectivity as reported here has undergone a parallel process of abstraction to that seen on the stage and in the anatomy theatres. Here, feminine criminality is objectified (lifted away) from the lived reality of the accused; rationalized as normative in a changed register of moral understanding; and resolidified as natural traits in the body of the female felon.

Male Felons If female subjectivity is re-characterized in this way, what has happened to the martyred saint of the anatomy illustrations and the potential for good in all men turned bad? As with the female felons discussed, poverty is certainly a factor in the crimes for which these men were convicted. Virtually no information about the

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individuals appends to the crimes of Arthur Minors (1676),24 Mathew Gammond (1677),25 or David Hackley (1677) apart from their names. Only with Hackley do we gain the added information that he and his fellows were ‘all notorious Offenders, and formerly burnt in the hand, now convicted of several Felonies’.26 All three of these men anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons were burglars who were dealt with expeditiously. We are not even given the bare information of what they stole, unlike the case against Elizabeth Malson which appears in the same Black Book. The record for John Dukes (1678)27 is even less enlightening. As we saw was the case with the parish records, according individuality is a slow process and the earliest surviving Sessions Papers frequently give the brief details of a crime but do not name the individual felon. The court records are similarly patchy and frequently terse. More detail attaches to the slightly later stories of the convicted burglars and house-breakers William Johnston (1678),28 John Neal (1680),29 John Snowden (1681),30 Peter Matthew (1683),31 and John Thompson (1688),32 ‘an executed person from Surgans Hall’. Brief accounts of the circumstances of their crimes are given and the value and character of the goods they stole are enumerated. Neal was a ‘young Fellow’ who as one of a gang of a dozen ‘violently entring into a Countrey-house, and binding the people, took away Goods of great value, and Nineteen pound in ready Money’. Snowden was found in possession of the goods he was accused of burgling and on further prosecution for a second indictment 24

Black Book of Newgate, p. 6.

25

Black Book of Newgate, pp. 6–7.

26

Black Book of Newgate, p. 7.

27

SF 260, ‘John Dukes–Theft’.

28

SF 264, Outer Roll — ‘Committed for felony’, The Confession and Execution of the Seven Prisoners that suffered at Tyburn On Wednesday the 6th of March 1677/8 (London: printed for D. M., 1678). 29

The Narrative Of the Proceedings At The Sessions-house For London and Middlesex: Giving an Account Of the Tryals of divers Traitors, Clippers, Coyners, Highway-men, and other Notorious Offenders [14 October] (London: T. Davies, 1680). 30

The Tryals Of several Notorious Malefactors: Together With the other most Remarkable Proceedings At The Quarter-Sessions […] Which began on Munday, October 17, 1681 and ended on Wednesday the Nineteenth of the same instant (London: n. pub.], 1681). 31

The True Proceedings Of The Sessions, Begun at the Old-Bayly, On Wednesday the 18th. of April, 1683 […] (London: [n. pub.], 1683). 32

The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] the 25th. 26th. and 27th. days of April, 1688 (London: [n. pub.], 1688).

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‘breaking open the home of Edward White at St Paul’s Shadwell, to which he obstinately refusing to Plead, was ordered to the Press’; that is, peine forte et dure: Peter Mathew was tryed for Robing Richard Brome on the 21 past of 4 Silver Tankards, 3 Rings 5 Silver Spoones a set of Silver buttons, a Silver salt, 16 pounds in mony and other things […] which being sworn in Court against the prisoner was found Guilty both of the burglary and fellony.

John Thompson was found guilty, though his accomplice George Wood was not, ‘for breaking open the house of Edward Mullins on the 9th of April in the Night, and stealing hence 1 Silver Salt value 40s: [?] Silver Spoones and 40 l in mony numbred besides other goods’. And William Johnston, who had already pled benefit of clergy five years before, initially denied but eventually confessed to breaking into a house ‘in Prayer-time in the afternoon, he and another, not het to be found, knockt at the Goldsmiths house in Cheapside, where there was no body at home but a young Gentlewoman; and pretending some fair Errand from her Father, perswaded her to unlock the door’. They bound and gagged her and stole what they could. Johnston ‘could not be brought to discover the other person that was with him, nor where the Plate was, though great endeavours were used by the Ordinary and some others to perswade him thereunto’. Whether that was by prayer or by peine is not mentioned. Given the brevity of the narrative the details that have been included are telling. He is a recidivist who has been in Newgate many times but more damningly he chooses to commit this crime when upright citizens are about their prayers. There is no longer any need for the recorder to expand upon this though; the implicit summation of the criminal nature is clear enough to any reader. Thus far the male felons are unremarkable. Some believe in honour among thieves, some show the correct kind of repentance at the gallows but their crimes and their fates do not involve lengthy rumination. These were less-serious crimes though and only when a theft is noteworthy is greater effort given to discussing the road to ruin for breaking the eighth commandment. Of the remaining male felons we can judge to have been anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons John Dell (1679), William Harsey (1691),33 John Richardson (1684), John Wise (1684), Samuel Howard (1695), Thomas Sharp (1704),34 and John Chappel (1731) were 33

The Proceedings on the King and Queens Commisions of the Peace […] On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, being the 9th, 10th and 11th of December, 1691 (London: [n. pub.], 1691). 34

An account of the behaviour, confession, and last dying words of Thomas Sharp, who was executed in Drury-Lane, on Friday the 22d of September 1704, for the murther of Thomas Thompkins a watchman (London: printed for A. Mallot, 1704).

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convicted of murder; Charles Smith (1678), Thomas Castle (1690),35 and Robert Young (1700)36 were found guilty of clipping and coining (high treason); George Skelthorp (1709) and Gabriel Lawrence (1726) were convicted of sodomy; and the remainder were found guilty of a variety of theft and burglary crimes ranging from shoplifting to highway robbery with violence.37 In short, they are a fairly representative sample of those who rode the Three-Legged Mare with some notable exceptions — and shifts in population — as the Barber-Surgeons found it increasingly difficult to secure their rights to that ‘perfect example’ of embodiment into the early eighteenth century. The stories appended to more serious felonies both enable and warrant more lengthy comment on the way these narratives have been constructed. However, for the sake of our argument it is only necessary to do so with a representative selection of these unhappy tales. Charles Smith and his accomplice, Thomas Cox, are not named in the Sessions Papers but their demise is presented as ‘the most considerable Transactions of this day’ and is specifically included in the title of the ‘Narrative’: [T ]wo most notorious Coiners and Clippers of Money; who upon full and plain Evidence, and their own Confession at Bar, were found guilty of two Indictments of HighTreason apiece; and indeed, 'tis believed, they have not equals in that wicked Mistery in England. They stampt Groats, Nine-pences, Six-pences, Shillings, Half-Crowns, and Fiveshilling pieces; no sort came amiss to them; and they had an Art to make a Nine-pence or Groat just new made, look as if it had been Coined these hundred years. Two Witnesses swore directly against each of them, that they had severally seen them at work, both Coining and Clipping , and produced great variety of the individual pieces, which they had seen pass through their skill and handling. Their Instruments likewise, mixt Mettals, and other Utensils taken in their respective Lodgings were publickly shown. They were both of a Gang, and confessed they had for some years been concerned in such practises. The Witnesses had been acquainted with them, and designing a discovery, seemed to comply with them, and furnish them with large Money, which first they would Clip, and with those Clippings and baser Mettals, Coin new Money, and then Clip that too to

35

The Proceedings on the Kings and Queens Commissions of the Peace […] On Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday being the 15th, 16th and 18th Days of October, 1690 (London: Langley Curtis, 1690). 36

Cited in Marks, p. 221: ‘1700: March 16. Three prisoners were this week taken in the very act of coining in Newgate. April 20. Yesterday, one Larkin, alias Young, with another were executed at Tyburn; the former for coyning in Newgate (Luttrell, iv. 624, 636).’ Robert Young, alias Larkin, was buried as an anatomy on 23 April 1700. 37

Isaac Davis (1684), David Antholick (1685), William Charley (1685), John Thompson (1688), George Dallicoates (1689), Valentine Knight (1692), William Smith (1692), William Pennard (1695), George Maxfield (1699), Charles Moore (1707), Stephen Bunch (1707), Richard Oxley (1722), Thomas Neaves (1729), and Patrick Knowland (1731).

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Chapter 8 make it pass with less suspition. Four Five-shilling pieces they will afford for twenty shillings good Money, and twenty shillings in Groats of their own Manufacture, for fifteen shillings Sterling; and one of them offered to teach one of the Witnesses such his Trade for six pound, and to make and sell rare stamps for Coining, at Ten pound a pair. The matter was so evident, that they had nothing to say for themselves, and so could not but be both found guilty by the Jury, of the several Crimes of Treason, wherewith they stood charged, and were accordingly condemn’d to be Drawn and Hang’d.38

I have given the whole printed narrative for the amount of detail, the tenor of the commentary, and the comparison it offers with the trials of the contemporaries already mentioned. High treason was a crime likely to incite fervent interest in the Restoration whether it involved a direct attack on the person of the King or an attack on what was the King by extension: the coin of the realm bore the head of the monarch, Charles II, and attacking a symbol of the King’s person was a touchy subject. A comparison with the Depositions brings out a slightly different tale from that presented in the Sessions Paper. In their initial sworn statements before the court recorder, George Jeffries, Smith, and Cox denied the charges. Smith claimed to be a button-maker who was using the metals on consignment from Captain Dawson (one of his accusers) for a set of regimental buttons. Cox admits to possessing clipped money but denies any knowledge of how he came to receive it, and supports Smith’s version of events. In contrast to the depositions taken in the women’s cases, George Jeffries appears to have written down more or less what he heard in court, for there is a distinct shift in voice between the ‘examinations’ of the two defendants and the two witnesses’ statements against them. Smith’s testimony is recorded in the third person — ‘Who sayth that the money that was now taken from him and sealed up in a Brown parcel he received from one Capt Dawson who he hath not been acquainted with above a month’39 — as is Cox’s, ‘Who being examd did acknowledge that the moneys contained in a piece of brown paper sealed up in his house was his money hee says that hee knows not when hee recd’. However, the three giving evidence against them — Captain Dawson, Richard Wright, and Thomas Taylor — do so in a manner not unlike police witness statements of today and they are all recorded in the first person:

38

The Narrative Of The Sessions, February 26 1678/9, With A particular Account of the Tryal of the Notorious Coiners, That received Sentence for Treason […] (London: printed for L. C., 1678/79). 39

LSP/1728/2, February Sessions (26 and 28 Feb.), 1 Item, JH, 16/5/2001, Box 19; LSP: GD & Peace 1726–30, LSP.1726.1-LSP/1730/9.

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The truth of what I know concerning Charles Smyth, his Clipping & fileing his Majios Coynes & making, or coyning new. […] Munday Y r: 17 th instant ye sd Charles delivered to me in M e Richard Wrights – 12 s — 6 os of his new made money (that day as hee said) — Thursday yee 20 th instant the sd Charles told me Thomas Cocks & he had been busy since 12 — aclock that day in casting about 40 s or there abouts. Friday ye 21 stinstant: the sd Charles Smyth clipped 20 8 in his own Chamber & therof, and, 3 ffarthings, & some of his own mixt mettel, he cast. 4 halfcrowns, the Clippings weighed near 4 8 , Saturday 22 th Charles Smyth told me in the ______ , hee would make me all the new money he could against Munday night att. 7 a clock. Joseph Dawson What I can say concerning Thomas Cocks his making or casting new money Sunday ye 23 rd day of ffeb. 1678 ___ Thomas Cocks told me as he was came from Hide park that he had showed Capt. Dawson yesterday the way of melting & making of money. And that none in England could make better & would venture his life upon it. & asked me if Capt. Dawson had not told me, and show’d me some already, and he promised me to make me some against Saturday next, and show me how to make it. Richard Wright

The writer of the ‘Narrative’ contradicts himself in reporting the defendants’ submission before the law, claiming both that the accused confessed ‘before the Bar’ and that when the witnesses’ depositions were read that ‘they had nothing to say for themselves’. This also leaves open the possibility that some of the women already discussed did speak out but that in a similar manner were recorded as having ‘nothing to say for themselves’ in a further strategy of enfeeblement. There is nothing in George Jeffries’s recordings that suggests the accused confessed. Further, it is possible that the witnesses were part of the ‘gang’ and had turned King’s evidence to save their own lives. But it is also entirely possible that Smith and Cox spoke out from the Bar once they knew there was no hope of avoiding the gallows. It is a small but crucial point that even though there is a record of their evidence it remains mediated by Jeffries speaking for them, consciously putting their evidence into the third person, and the writer of the ‘Narrative’ follows suit. The witnesses are recorded in the first person, speaking for themselves: Smith and Cox do not warrant the subjectivity of ‘I’. They were sentenced not to hanging but to drawing and quartering, the appropriate punishment for a crime of high treason. Clearly Charles Smith’s sentence was at some point commuted to hanging, for we know that anatomy was not thought of as a legal adjunct at this time. The

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realities of his body being retrieved by the Barber-Surgeons was only barely less public and in a practical sense little different, but it did ensure burial. At least in the minds of the reporter, the judge, and the juries who tried him, John Dell (1679) was guilty of at least three murders but there was insufficient evidence to convict him. Along with a confederate, Richard Dean, he was accused and tried for the murder of his wife and his elderly father-in-law, and he was suspected of the murder of his brother-in-law. All the evidence against Dell and Dean in these cases was considered circumstantial and they were therefore acquitted: But now comes an Indictment against the same two Companions for stealing a Mare: The owner swore she was stoln such a time from him in Hartfordshire, a man and his wife swore, and proved by a Copy of the Toll-Book, that soon after they bought the same Mare of Dean at such a Fair for twenty six shillings, and that afterwards Dean being questioned, his great friend Mr Dell owned and declared that it was his Mare, and that he imployed him to sell her, and therefore appearing they were such bad people, and Confederates, they were both on this found guilty, God ordering it, that however they brazened out other Crimes, yet they should not at last escape Divine Vengeance.[…] John Dell, and Richard Dean to be Hang’d for Felony, for stealing a Mare of twenty six shillings price. These were they that were likwise Tryed for several horrid Murders as aforesaid.40

God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. In this narrative one sees the tension between the secular working of a court, which nearly freed these men, and divine justice. In this early Sessions Paper narrative, that slips between straightforward relation of events and ‘God ordering it’, we see the kind of unevenness in the giving way in dominance of traditional to modern understandings for which we have been arguing. God is not yet quite distant enough for this recorder to work at one remove through the judge, jury, and the court; his direct intervention is still required to ensure justice. The judicial system was seemingly unable to convict Dell unaided, but through the provision of the witnesses and sufficient material evidence, God ensures Dell is convicted of a lesser but equally capital crime. Similarly John Wise had all but succeeded in evading justice for the murder of ‘Elizabeth Fairbank, Widdow, who lived in a Cellar at Pickadilly’, and the theft of her silver. It is only the overhearing of the deathbed confession of one of his accomplices that brings him to justice: ‘Charles Tooley dying, upon his Death-bed, in the hearing of his Wife, confess’d to his Priest, that he, together with Jones and Wise, did commit the Murder and Robbery aforesaid; the Wife of Tooley swearing the same in Court.’41 40

The Narrative of the Proceedings at the Sessions for London and Middlesex, Begun at the Oldbailey on Wednesday the 10th of December, 1679 (London: [n. pub.], 1679). 41

The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] The 8th. 9th Days of October, 1684 (London: [n. pub.], 1684).

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Charles Smith was not the only felon for whom the last resting place was the ‘anatomy ground’ and whose legal fate was initially different. Thomas Castle (1690) ‘alias Cassey’,42 also tried for coining, was similarly originally sentenced to be drawn and quartered but from our comparative documents we know that this sentence was not carried out as planned and that he was anatomized. Though he was found guilty of ‘making 50 Pieces of King James I Shillings’ his crime is no longer worth including in the title. Like Smith and Cox he is found with the tools of the trade, the coins, and he denies the fact but his ‘several Evasions’ are to no avail. There are no corresponding Depositions but there is also far less detail in the Sessions Paper, suggesting that though still high treason there was less avid concern over the matter for the public. Perhaps we can also begin to see a direct and odious connection being made between the judgement of the court and the practices of the Barber-Surgeons. There may have been some in the ‘mob’ who made the link between the sentence of drawing and quartering not being carried out and the carrying away of Castle by the Barber-Surgeons’ emissaries. To anyone who did make the connection between the differing fates of these felons, anatomy must have begun to look like a scientifically justified form of the most heinous punishment that could be inflicted on a malefactor. George Dallicoates (1689)43 and Samuel Howard (1695)44 had the opposite experience. They were each supposed to have been ‘burnt in the hand’ after pleading benefit of clergy but clearly either did not succeed in reciting the ‘neck verse’, were found to have previously thus plead, or their judges had a change of heart. Dallicoates, ‘Charged upon oath for ffeloniously ftealing a Silver Tankard and of y house of Jeremy Dodd’, 45 may have had his sentence reviewed on the basis of the value of the tankard. A revaluation of the property would have brought him into the range of capital punishment. Samuel Howard was found ‘part Guilty’ of killing, that is manslaughter, and sentenced to branding on 3 July, but the damning conclusions reached in the record of the coroner’s inquest signed by seventeen witnesses who gave oath eventually weighed against him.46 A few years earlier, John Richardson (1684), ‘about 50 or upwards’, brutally beat his 42

The Proceedings on the Kings and Queens Commissions of the Peace […] October, 1690.

43

The Proceedings On The King & Queen’s Commissions Of The Peace […] Began on Thursday the 16th of May, 1689, And in the First Year of Their Majesties Reign (London: [n. pub.], 1689). 44

The Proceedings Of The King’s Commission on the Peace […] On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, being the 3d, 4th, 5th and 6th Days of July, 1695 (London: [n. pub.], 1695).

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45

SF 362.

46

LSP/1695/5, LS Paper 1695, July Sessions (1 and 3 July).

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wife Martha, ‘a Young Woman, not above 25’ on 22 July and she ‘Languishing died on the 6th of August following’.47 Her family and neighbours supported the charge and in the period between the beating and her death she maintained his guilt. The Ordinary pores over the details of the bodily evidence in the relation of this crime: where she was struck, to what degree, and the bleeding that issued as a result. He dismisses what in other similar cases was regularly taken as a mitigating circumstance — that Richardson claimed Martha was drunk — and affirms the witness statements that Richardson had publicly beaten her and, worse, had not tended to her after the fact. It is further recorded that he is ‘supposed’ to have murdered his ‘former Wife’, sealing his fate: ‘The Fellow had a very ill Look and Character; by all that appeared against him upon the whole Evidence; which was Plain.’ Physiognomy and Metoposcopy, the criminally defining factors the Doctor in The Anatomist is so fond of expounding, seem in the mind of the recorder to be proof positive of a criminal. Like the proposed marriage between Old Gerald and Angelica, this couple was mismatched against the laws of Nature if not of the nation, and a sorry end has ensued. William Harsey or Horsey, on the other hand, provided no such problem for the court in the narrative of the Sessions Paper. He was so inebriated he had no idea whom he had murdered. He had been arrested after being found passed out with a bloody knife in his hand. He was first indicted before the Middlesex jury for the murder of William Sillock, whom he claimed had attacked him after they had been drinking together in an alehouse. In the process Harsey wounded his friend John Smith, whom he mistook in the dark and who died the next day. Another friend, Thomas Kates, survived to act as a witness against him: The Prisoner urged that he knew not what he did being in drink; and that the deceased Sillock struck him first; but none could prove that, and it was lookt upon to be no less than a base and wilful Murther, so he was found guilty of the same.[…] William Harsey was a second time indicted, on London side, for the Murther of John Smith, his friend mention’d in his former Tryal; It was deposed, that Smith and the Prisoner were drinking till Twelve a Clock, at the end of the Minories, as also Thomas Kates; and he stobb’d him in the Belly four Inches deep; The Prisoner pleaded that he was in drink, and could not remember any thing that he had done as he said before, he had very little to say, so in the end he was found guilty of willful Murther.48

Harsey was tried in the same Sessions by each of the two juries present and received the same sentence from each of them. The murders took place on the same 47 The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] The 3d. 4th. and 5th. Days of September, 1684 (London: [n. pub.], 1684). 48

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night and as a result of the same fight, but their juries differed because ‘William Sallicke a Gunsmith’ appears to have died outside Aldgate (the city wall) and John Smith just within it. The gate watchman, Edward Clement, is one of the witnesses. The detail of the reporting of both Dell and Harsey’s murder cases is remarkable in comparison with the brevity of the reporting of lesser crimes. There are no doubt issues of sensationalism to take into account in Dell’s case, as there was with Elizabeth Malson and Charles Smith, and in Harsey’s case there is no small measure of pathos. The particulars make a compelling narrative to please the reader. But even in Dell’s case, in which it is made clear that he is to be seen as a malevolent man who is devoid of a conscience, the detailed recounting of the ‘facts’ is notable in being comparatively dispassionate. Like the case against Smith and Cox in 1678, the five Deposition Papers against Harsey give a different aspect from the document that was sold to the public. However, in this instance all the depositions are in the third person, including the watchman, and all make much of Harsey being a soldier, which is glossed over in the Sessions Paper. The deposition of Mary Berkley, a friend of Smith who spoke to him before he died of his wounds, attempts to reduce what by the second trial would have been an inevitable final result, attesting that the ‘decd did declare yt he believed the Soldier did it against his will & that he forgave him’.49 In her testimony, Harsey was reacting to a blow from the carpenter, Thomas Kates. Kates claims that he had been drinking ‘wth his Brother Blackall’ and that Smith had been similarly drinking with Harsey. In fact, Kates implicates Blackall as the wielder of the fatal blow. Blackhall’s deposition gives more reason for the fight starting, that Harsey had provoked him with the taunt ‘tis yoe time now bit it will bee ours another time’. However, it does not tally with the watchman’s evidence, Edward Clement’s, or the son-in-law’s, William Slegg, who claims ‘he saw a knife in the hands of one Mr Groome wth this Informt hath heard was taken away with the Sd Soldiers’. He also ‘believes’ Harsey is responsible for the Gunsmith’s wound. In reading the Depositions one begins to get the sense that Harsey’s inability to remember condemned him more than the solid evidence against him and that perhaps Brother Blackhall was exceedingly grateful for the fact. Harsey is unprepared for the expert knowledge of the courts and has little understanding of the rules of this ‘field of play’. All the wealth of conflicted detail afforded by these depositions is excluded from the narrative of the Sessions Paper. There is a conscious silencing in place of the vociferous condemnation of an earlier time.

49

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The burglars and thieves whose tales intersperse these more salacious crimes died for far less. Isaac Davis was a former servant who on the evidence of the former ‘Master of the House and his Son’ that the hat found at the crime scene was his, was convicted though there is no mention of anything being successfully stolen.50 David Antholick was a highway robber found guilty on the evidence of three silver buttons and an unnamed accomplice’s deposition.51 William Charley52 was found guilty of the theft of £122 worth of cloth, more than enough to earn the gallows, and as he was already burnt in the hand he had no other recourse. Valentine Knight, burglar, was convicted on the deposition of a fellow prisoner and former acquaintance, Edward Dimpley, in a voluminous list of the items afterwards sold off in an alehouse of which the ‘plate’, diverse articles of clothing, and a brace of pistols are considered the least.53 William Pennard54 was convicted of stealing cloth though none was found on him. George Maxfield broke into a house and stole good of ‘great value’.55 In 1722 Richard Oxley did the same,56 and Thomas Neeves was a shoplifter and street thief who was caught red-handed, though he seems to have been convicted more for the fact that he had helped others to the gallows as a ‘thief-taker’ and had been branded for his own crimes than for the theft of the coat in question.57 By the early eighteenth century we see far more detailed narratives begin to appear. Stephen Bunch, convicted in 1707, was definitely in the mould of Gay’s ‘Poor Brother Tom’. Defoe would have been happy to have owned the reporting of his narrative:58 50

The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] The 27th and. 28th Days of February, 1684 (London: [n. pub.], 1684). 51

The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] On The 29th and. 30th Days of April, and also 1 May 1685 (London: [n. pub.], 1685). 52

The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] The 26th and. 27th Days of August, 1685 (London: [n. pub.], 1685). 53

LSP 1692, February Sessions, 22 and 24 Feb.; LSP/1692/2, 217E, 1691/2, Feb. 17.

54

SF 412 202E , The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] On The 28th, 29th, 30th, 31st Days of August, and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the 3d, 4th and 5th Days of September, 1695 (London: [n. pub.], 1695). 55

SF 440 — March 1699.

56

LSP 1722/8, LSP: GD & Peace, 1722–23, LSP/1722/1-LSP/1723/10.

57

The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] On Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday, being the 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th, and 21st of January, 1728–9 (London: [n. pub.], 1729). 58

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John Hall , Richard Low and Stephen Bunch , were all three Indicted for breaking open the dwelling House of Captain John Guyon of the Parish of Stepney, between the Hours of one and two at Night, on the 25th November last, and taking from thence a blue Cloth Wastcoat, a pair of Cloth Breeches, 3 Suits of Lac’d Head-cloaths, four Yards of yellow Ribbon, four Yards of green Ribbon, two Silver Spoons, and a Dram Cup, the Goods of the said John Guyon. The first Witness was Madam Guyon, who depos’d, That on the 25th of November, about one or two a Clock at Night, she heard a noise of Thieves in the House, and got up and alarm'd the Neighbours; that on a sudden three Men rush’d into the Room, two Men came up to her, and said, Damn you, deliver your Mony; and gave her a blow on the Face, and bid her go to Bed, That she repl’d, that she had no Mony there, but what she had was in the next Room; upon their going to which Room she lockd the Door upon them, Being ask’d, whether she knew any of them? Reply’d, That the Person that struck her was a tall Man, much of the Stature of Low, but she could not swear to any of their Faces; she viewing them by no light than that of the Moon. The Maid’s Evidence was much the same with her Mistress, except in this particular, That Hall holding a Pistol at her Breast, and a Candle in his Hand, gave her the perfect knowledge of his Countenance, so that she swore positively against Hall.

This continues in the same vein for another lengthy paragraph. The Ordinary, with the deceptive grace of plain language and rational argumentation, interprets and shapes the depositions for us with literary flair. We have the important particulars of the goods stolen, the names of the witnesses, and their testimony but more importantly we are introduced to the necessity of sound evidence. The Mistress does not attempt to claim what she cannot be sure of, having only poor light, but not only does the Maid recognize the defendant, she also has rational grounds for supporting her claims. We have plot. We have structure. We have a story. And like Gay’s rogues in The Beggar’s Opera Stephen Bunch went for ‘an Otamy’ at Surgeons Hall. Like Goodcole’s sermonizing tale, this narrative goes beyond the reporting of facts, but unlike the traditional character types of the early seventeenth century, the subjectivity conveyed here is far more recognizable within the range of modern literary characterization. The narratives of our two ‘sodomites’ are further evidence of a shift in subjectivity from the traditional to the modern as it is played out in male embodiment. As we saw in Chapter 6 in the discussion of Browne’s adaptation of the illustration of Casserio’s Ganymede figure, in an increasingly crowded and anxious metropolis ‘Mollies’ were a visible ‘aberration’ and a focus of social anxiety, like the Irish and Sailors. There are a notable number of prosecutions against men engaging in sexual acts with men in the last decade of the seventeenth century and into the first few decades of the eighteenth century. Establishments like the Molly-houses of the late seventeenth century had existed earlier, but those who frequented them did not draw the kind of attention or marginalizing

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categorization which Mollies attracted by the early eighteenth century. There were moralists’ societies which specifically militated against and sought the punishment of men perceived to be Mollies.59 Sodomy had long been a capital crime but in the early seventeenth century prosecutions against it were motivated more by the fear of sedition than sexual practices. There is ample and untroubled allusion to ‘ingles’ and ‘catamites’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, a space that by its nature had boys in drag playing to older male love interests. In a world where women played women there was little room left for lightheartedness about sexual ambiguity. Same-sex relationships and physical encounters were in the process of taking on a new meaning within the understanding of male embodied subjectivity in the shift from the traditional to the modern. George Skelthorp, or Skulthorpe (1709),60 was a soldier who was apprehended in the company of a group of ‘sodomites’ in St James’s Park.61 Lawrence (1726)62 was a milkman who admitted to regularly drinking in a Molly-house, but who steadfastly denied both knowing that it was a Molly-house and the accusation that he had sodomized a male prostitute there. Skelthorp confessed his crimes and even gave indications of where other such offenders might be run to ground, but Lawrence maintained his innocence to the death. Skelthorp appears in the burial records as ‘executed at Tiborne and buried April 4 1709’. Gabriel Lawrence appears as ‘John Lawrence, executed, upper ground May 20 1726’ in St Olaves burial records, though there is little doubt Gabriel and John are one and the same. According to the London Journal, 14 May 1726, the executed Gabriel Lawrence was anatomized on 10 May, and according to the burial payments John Lawrence’s was paid for ‘13 May for anatomy’, agreeing with the standard lapse of time for the performance of an anatomy. Separated by nearly twenty years, both men were convicted at least in part because they were believed to be Mollies.63

59

See Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700– 1830 (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992), chaps 3 and 4, passim. 60

The Proceedings On The Queen’s Commissions Of the Peace […] On Wednesday and Thursday, being the 2d and 3d, and Thursday the 10th Days of March, 1708/9 (London: [n. pub.], 1708/09). 61 I have relied on Rictor Norton’s transcription of some of the particulars of these cases from A Full and True Account of the Discovery and Apprehending A Notorious Gang of Sodomites in St James’s (London: [n. pub.], 1709), pp. 51–52 and 59–64. 62

The Proceedings On The King’s Commissions Of the Peace […] On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, being the 20th, 21st, 22d, and 23d, of April, 1726 (London: [n. pub.], 1726). 63

See Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1988), chap. 4, and Norton, ‘Introduction’.

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I say ‘at least in part’ because the reporting of Skelthorp’s trial, while expressing undisguised disgust at his confessed preference for sodomy, it is also concerned to make clear that Skelthorp is a violent highway robber. The manner of his thefts would have been enough to convict him without the addition of his sexual approaches on his accusers. First he violently assaulted William Hills in a highway robbery in which goods to the value of 4s. 6d. were taken. Hills claimed he had asked for directions near the Strand, was led astray and then accosted with a ‘Bionet’ ‘at his Breast’. The assault was heard and passersby intervened. Skelthorp defended himself by reversing the claim: The Prisoner in his Defence pretended the Prosecutor would have committed Sodomy with him, and that what he did to him was by way of Satisfaction for the Affront, in tempting him to the Commission of so foul a Crime. But he giving no Proof of these Assertions, nor producing any to his Reputation, the Jury found him guilty of the Indictment.

Clearly Hills had no greater proof of his assertions but Skelthorp had also been indicted for a second crime committed a few days before on James Booker ‘on the 27th of Feb. last’ in the same place, robbing him of property, ‘part of which were afterwards found upon him; and he saying little for himself, the Jury found him guilty of the Indictment.’ Sodomy was clearly a concern; Hills seems to have found himself near a well-known beat for soldiers, and the jury was no doubt influenced by the sexual threat to condemn rather than recommending branding, but it is constructed as of equivalent importance to the violent theft. Gabriel Lawrence (1726) on the other hand was convicted solely on the charge of the sexual crime, ‘indicted for feloniously committing with Thomas Newton, aged 30 Years, the heinous and detestable Sin of Sodomy’. Newton gave evidence against him: At the End of last June, one Peter Bavidge (who is not yet taken) and — Eccleston (who dy’d last Week in Newgate) carry’d me to the House of Margaret Clap (who is now in the Compter) and there I first became acquainted with the Prisoner. Mrs. Clap’s House was next to the Bunch of Grapes in Field-lane, Holbourn. It bore the publick Character of a Place of Entertainment for Sodomites, and for the better Conveniency of her Customers, she had provided Beds in every Room in her House. She usually had 30 or 40 of such Persons there every Night, but more especially on a Sunday. I was conducted up one pair of Stairs, and by the Perswasions of Bavidge (who was present all the Time) I suffer’d the Prisoner to commit the said Crime. He has attempted the same since that Time, but I never would permit him any more. When Mrs. Clap was taken up, in February last, I went to put in Bail for her; at which Time, Mr. Williams, and Mr. Willis told me, they believ’d I could give Information, which I promis’d to do, and I went next Day, and gave Information accordingly. — Samuel Stephens thus depos’d. Mrs. Clap’s House was notorious for being a Molly-House. — In order to detect some that frequented it, I have

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Chapter 8 been there several Times, and seen 20 or 30 of ’em together, making Love, as they call’d it, in a very indecent Manner. Then they used to go out by Pairs, into another Room, and at their return, they would tell what they had been doing together, which they call'd marrying. The Prisoner acknowledg’d, that he had been several Times at Clap’s House, but never knew that it was a Rendesvouz for such Persons. — He call’d several to his Character. Henry Hoxan thus depos’d. I have kept the Prisoner Company, and served him with Milk these 18 Years, for he is a Milk Man, and I am a Cow-Keeper, I have been with him at the Oxfordshire Feast, and there we have both got drink, and come Home together in a Coach, and yet he never offer’d any such thing to me. Thomas Fuller thus depos’d. The Prisoner married my Daughter, 18 Years ago; She has been dead these 7 Years, and he has a Girl by her, that is 13 Years old. — Several others deposd, that he was a very sober Man, and that they had often been in his Company when he was drunk; but never found him inclinable to such Practices. Guilty. Death. He was a 2d. Time indicted, for committing Sodomy with Mark Partridge, Nov. 10. But being Convicted of the Former, he was not Try’d for this.

In this narrative we have again the kind of detailed, literary storytelling that we saw in the case of Stephen Bunch in 1707. What sets this narrative apart and the reason for quoting it in full is that the witnesses, both for and against, are recorded in the first person. Though there is no doubt that the Ordinary is constructing an engaging tale for his reader, here we find a modern subjectivity that is allowed to speak of itself. The particulars of the charges are shaky, his neighbours clearly did not believe or did not care if he was a sodomite, and he protested his innocence to the last: and he has a subjectivity to express it. That subjectivity is bound in a body that was taken to the Barber-Surgeons in their last years as a united company to be the public anatomy. By the time Patrick Knowland (1731) 64 met his fate, this was the standard means of representing the felons’ narratives. Witness statements appear under each person’s name in the same manner in which they were earlier recorded in court documents and each voice is in the first person. In the case of those deposing against Knowland they appear to have known him as a neighbour or fellow ‘rogue’, for they name him. He is not ‘the prisoner’ or ‘the defendant’ or even ‘Knowland’; he is ‘Patrick’ in nearly every instance. Even though Knowland’s trial appears well into the eighteenth century, he is worthy of inclusion for several reasons. He was a fairly harmless burglar and his narrative appears only four years before the evidence of anatomies being buried at St Olaves ceases. His tale is therefore pertinent for that timing but also because he is a malefactor — along with 64

Cited in Linebaugh, The London Hanged, p. 244. The Proceedings At The Sessions of the Peace […] On Wednesday the 8th, Thursday the 9th, Friday the 10th, Saturday the 11th, and Monday the 13th of December 1731 (London: J. Roberts, 1731).

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Lawrence, Skelthorp, Bunch, and Richardson — whom one would not expect to find in the anatomy theatre of the Barber-Surgeons, and the circumstances of his apprehension make this so much more obvious. Lawrence and Skelthorp are not examples of God’s perfect handiwork if their status as sodomites is taken into account. Skelthorp may have been young and well proportioned — we don’t know — but the sexual slur against him allies him with John Browne’s adaptation of Casserio’s Ganymede. Patrick Knowland, ‘executed’ Dublin tailor, who had been sentenced on 13 December along with his son Robert for stealing linen and clothing,65 appears in the burial register of St Olaves for 25 December. What he has in common with Lawrence, Bunch, and Richardson is that they are all ‘old’ men. Several elements immediately strike one about the anatomization of Patrick Knowland. Firstly, he was fifty-five years old, quite an advanced age for his time and his origins. Secondly, he was anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons, and his son Robert, who was convicted on a separate crime and whom one assumes would have been much ‘lustier’ young man, was not. We have seen that from the time of Vesalius a young healthy male body was considered the ideal anatomical subject. With two such bodies to hand, the Barber-Surgeons anatomize the ‘elderly’ father. This is when the Barber-Surgeons were in the final stages of their battle to retain their ‘rights and dignities’. The fact that they anatomized a less than ideal body suggests they no longer had the means to secure their earlier rights, and in fact had little choice. The aged state of the earlier felons and the sudden preponderance of female subjects in the period when anatomies first became highly contested by the public as well as by professional rivals is evidence of the gradual slippage of their power to command anatomy as a discipline. The two were intimately connected. The further intriguing point about Patrick Knowland is the date of his interment. He had been sentenced by the end of the Sessions on 13 December. Going by the date of his interment the latest he could have been hanged would have been 21 December, in keeping with the usual delays between sentencing and execution. It also means that if the anatomy performed upon his remains took the usual three days, it would only have been completed on the afternoon of 24 December. His recorded interment on Christmas Day is logical enough but, one would have thought, highly unusual. Other anatomies appear to have been buried very close to Christmas, but no other appears to have been buried on the actual day. Perhaps this is a factor of one of the tensions Linebaugh identifies, the 65

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strength of the opposition that was encountered at the gallows, particularly from Irish immigrants. It could be a final indignity meted out upon a (presumably) Catholic felon; that is, burying him on a holy day in the pauper’s trench in a Protestant burial ground. Whatever the reason may have been, it is certain that Knowland had no close relatives left to fight for the decent treatment of his remains. His wife and daughter were in prison. His son was probably on his way from a private anatomist’s lodgings to a swift burial.66 It would not be long before bodies of felons like Knowland would not necessarily stray far from the place of their imprisonment. After the dissolution of the company in 1745 the new Surgeon’s Hall within the precincts of the Old Bailey became the official site of the public anatomy, which after 1752 became the legally required punishment of an executed murderer. Public anatomy finally became truly public.67 The final convicted felon who is identifiable from the records as having been anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons, John Chappel (1731),68 is a sadly fitting subject for that purpose. The Sessions Papers give only the bare details of his conviction: John Chappel, of St. Leonard Shoreditch, was indicted for the Murder of Martin, to which Indictment he pleaded guilty, desiring the favour of the Court that he might not be hang’d in Chains; before Sentence was pass’d, being ask’d by the Court, What he had to say why Judgement should not be pass’d upon him according to Laws made no reply, but after it had been pass’d, said, The Lord have Mercy upon his Soul.

Little more appears of the details in the court papers, except for the information that the murder was subject to an inquest and that Chappel was convicted on the deposition of one ‘Cheetham for the murder of Sarah Marten’.69 His piety may have been informed by his particular apprehension at his potential fate. John Chappel was a London Barber and therefore almost undoubtedly had been bound through the company. Whether or not he had ever attended the public anatomy

66

Richardson, p. 39.

67

John Laurence’s History of Capital Punishment is one book that reproduces the engraving of a public anatomy in ‘Surgeons’ Hall in the Old Bailey’, p. 188. The ‘Hall’ or theatre bears a resemblance to the Inigo Jones theatre, and this illustration has sometimes been mistaken for it, but it is the Surgeons and their new theatre (and Vesalius’s frontispiece) that Hogarth appears to be parodying in his Fourth Stage of Cruelty (1751). 68 The Proceedings At The Sessions of the Peace […] On Wednesday the 24th, and Thursday the 25th of February 1731 (London: T. Payne, 1731). 69

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SF 696 and SF 687.

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lessons, he would surely have been more aware than most of his companions in Newgate of the practicalities of Inigo Jones’s anatomy theatre. From the Gentleman’s Magazine we get far more information about his crimes: John Chapel, aged 41, born in London, after a common Education, was put Apprentice to a Barber, afterwards marry’d, but his Wife being of crazy Conftitution, occafion’d him much Trouble and Charge. She dy’d, as reported, by Poyfson which he gave her; but this, with the Story of his ravifhing a Girl of 6 or 7 years old, and of his forcing a near Relation of his against her Will, he abfolutely deny’d. As the Crime for which he fuffer’d, he gave the following Account, viz. That coming acquainted with Sarah Martin, a Wafher woman, he often committed Uncleannefs with her, and being with Child by him, fhe continually teaz’d him to marry her, which he could not comply with, because his Place in the Workhoufe requir’d his being a fingle Perfon, and fhe lov’d drinking, and was of a bafe wicked Temper, and therefore resolv’d to leave her, but could not, fhe taunting him continually. This he faid, was the occafion of his concerning a Defign of her Murder, which he thus accomplifh’d. They made an Appointment to take a Walk one Evening. Going towards Hoxton, they call’d at a Publick-houfe and drank together When they came thence, Chapel defir’d her to return to Town and leave him, for he would never bear her Company. But fhe curfing and threatening him in an outrageous manner, he, with an Oaken-fticke knock’d her down fuddenly, and repeated his Blows with violence. She cry’d out, O ! John, John, have Mercy, fave my Life, but he redoubled his Strokes, and took out his two Knives, and gave her feveral Wounds and ftuck one of the Knives in her Scull. Whe fhe was quite dead, he left her and his murdering Tools, and return’d to Town’ but he was foon apprehended: _____ he fonfef’d the Fact, pleaded guilty at the Old Baily, and had fuch ftrong impreffions of his Guilt, that he form’d a Prayer for his own ufe, and very penitent to the Moment of his death.70

We suggested above that the earliest accounts in the Sessions Papers hold the seeds of the journalism that was to follow. Here we have an example of the genre in full bloom reported in a magazine that reaches beyond the concerns of the gallows. Public reporting truly meets popular image in this narrative. It could have been written as accompanying text for Hogarth’s ‘Idle Apprentice’ in his final stages. They are intertwined narrative imaginaries that have a very real basis in the lives and deaths of the poor of London. However, the irony of Hogarth’s etchings takes on a more sinister cast in the face of the lives and deaths of those social beings who we know were taken to Barber-Surgeons’ Hall. In a direct parallel to the shifting depiction of female embodied subjectivity across the seventeenth century, the representation of male embodied subjectivity using the symbolism or iconography of saints and sinners and its graphic repetition in print narratives is no longer necessary. Male embodied subjectivity in these narratives, like the detail 70

‘An Account of the Malefactors executed at Tyburn, March 1731’, in Gentleman’s Magazine, 16 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998), I, 127–28.

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accorded the masculine body in anatomical manuals, is more detailed, has more content, and is given a voice in these narratives. That voice more subtly conveys the associations with the martyrs and reprobates of an earlier time as it gradually shifts from the third person to the first person in these narratives. Like our female felons but with vastly different consequences, here, masculine criminality is objectified (lifted away) from the lived reality of the accused; rationalized as normative in a changed register of moral understanding; and resolidified as natural traits in the body of the male felon.

Last Words At the beginning of this chapter we were careful to reinforce that these reports in the Sessions Papers are not the writings of the accused; they are constructed narratives that serve a social and political function. Those instances when a felon expresses regret, in a manner surprisingly similar to noble ‘good deaths’, may be an expression of a widely held belief in the efficacy of confession for the soul and a hope of entry into an eternal life, but they may also be being reported in a manner which the reporter thought the felon ought to be confessing.71 They were nonetheless popular publications. J. A. Sharpe argues that these pamphlets were a powerful means of the promoting an idea of justice, ‘that these writers, named or anonymous, were producing what people were meant to want to hear’,72 and that dissenting voices or unrepentant voices were either soundly condemned, or excised from the records. There are even instances where ‘condemned criminals professed themselves innocent to the last of the crime for which they had been condemned, but were happy enough to accept their fate as the just deserts of more general wickedness’.73 The records we have relied upon to trace the felons from the late seventeenth century do not reflect the kind of gallows confession that became the standard fare of the much later Ordinary of Newgate’s Calendar.74 They are a product for a market in which the publisher hopes to make a profit. They give us some hint of the lives of those souls who were anatomized in the anatomy theatre of the

71

Sharpe, ‘Last Dying Speeches’, p. 164.

72

Sharpe, ‘Last Dying Speeches’, p. 148.

73

Sharpe, ‘Last Dying Speeches’, p. 155.

74

See Linebaugh, The London Hanged; Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate’; and Sharpe, ‘Last Dying Speeches’, for the general tone, veracity, or reliability of these pamphlets.

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Barber-Surgeons, and also some evidence of the increasing importance of the subjectivity of the individual in society, even though that subjectivity comes into play just as the individual is removed from society. In the early seventeenth century, at a time when the body was widely appealed to as a metaphor for the state and society, the anatomized felon is recorded, both at St Olaves and at the BarberSurgeons’, as an anonymous object. The only time an individual becomes visible is in the recording of the aberrant form of Canonbury Besse. By the late seventeenth century, the names of felons, the marker by which individuality is signified, is sedulously noted at both St Olaves and in the Sessions Papers: In this shift from the body treated metaphorically within a language of the social body to a concern for the fate of the individual body we have access to another dimension of the transformation from the gallows to the prison. [In the eighteenth century …] the image of the body politic anchored the gallows in a particular moral universe, while the new valuation of the individual proposed by the reformers produced a demand for different punishments, in part because the inflictions the body suffered seemed so disturbing and negative.75

McGowan is writing of the push for penal reform which grew in strength over the eighteenth century. I think we can see in the shift from anonymity within these narratives to a personalized subjectivity, as evidenced by these records, the preconditions for the ‘mob’ rejecting the perceived collusion of the courts and the anatomists and, much later, the desire for reform of the gallows. The irony is that they are all part of the same process, that modernity is the cause of the problems with which it grapples. They are all part of a much wider matrix of interleaving fields that are part of the construction of a modern social formation. The observable shift in the perception of subjectivity which influenced the record keeping of the church and the workings of the courts was also implicated in a shift in the understanding of bodily difference that played out with equal force in our two other theatres. We saw in earlier chapters how symptoms of this shift appear in the anatomy manuals of the late seventeenth century, texts which influenced a new population of apprentices in their understanding of the human body. They appear in slightly different forms within the playhouses. The unevenness of the processes that bring a system of meaning to dominance has been followed through each of these three ontologically rich spaces in the ways in which embodied subjectivity is presented and re-presented across each field and across time. 75 Randall McGowan, ‘The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Modern History, 59 (1987), 651–79 (p. 655). See also his ‘Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 257–82.

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The workings of the anatomy theatre revolved around the bodies of executed criminals that were objectified and then slowly subjectified within the BarberSurgeons’ theatre. We have seen that there were individual cases, such as Thomas Castle or Besse, where anatomization seems to show signs of being a forerunner of post-mortem punishment, but the circumstances that led to the codification of anatomical dissection as a legal sentence had yet to be consolidated even by the latest of our records. The vast majority of malefactors who were anatomized were not criminals of great note whose anatomization rewarded the invidiousness of their person. Those like Besse who were notorious, however, were popularly reminded not only in the visibility of the journeys taken to Tyburn but also through these popular pamphlets that they ran the danger of being made into permanent exhibits. The state of anatomy in late-seventeenth-century London had not quite reached the pass of being a full-blown ‘trade’ in corpses, but the increasing commodification of the corpse is clear. By 1728 difficulties were so great that the law court was moved to support their rights, but this time it was increasingly clear that the pressing of their rights was a rather sad matter of form: This Court doth therefore order that y-the said sheriff of middc & officers of the two bee at Execution performed Do take especial care to prevent any such disturbances & Insults and That they assist sd officer of the sd Comp@ of Barbers e Surgeury in Carrying away the dead body to their Hall and soe if any person or persons do in any manner oppose or hinder of Carrying away any such body That the said officer do _______ apprehend such pson or psons & carry him or them before a magistrate to be dealt with according to Law.76

The Barber-Surgeons were a traditional incorporation, members of which were fighting a losing battle not only over this right but their very existence. Their medical successors, the College of Surgeons, are a part of the professional selfconstruction that is characteristic of modernity. In the decades leading up to the company separating, Edward Ravenscroft’s adaptation, The Anatomist, gave an indication of the kinds of professional tensions already alive and in its repeated production must have had a bearing not only on the riots at Tyburn but in reinforcing those tensions within the Barber-Surgeons that were in turn fuelled by their further rivalry with the Physicians. We began by outlining the structural processes through which shifts in the medical abstraction of embodiment can be tracked: codifying the body, anatomizing the body, and imaging the body. As was stated in the introduction, this

76

LSP 1728 February Sessions (26 and 28 Feb.) Item, JH, 16/5/2001 LSP/1728/2 Box 19 LSP: GD & Peace 1726–30.

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book is situated on the cusp of early modernity when those processes of codification, anatomy, and imagery are taking shape across legal, anatomical, and theatrical practice in interconnected and mutually supporting ways. Our concern was to track how modernity began to take hold within and across three fields of expertise (medical, legal, and dramatic) from which the gradual rewriting of the human body through the co-option and mutation of traditional ontologies could be discerned. But there is a very real sense in which this book can have no definitive conclusion. Those differing processes of abstraction exist side by side, in tension, in different social formations in the present, and continue to be the points at which conflagrations as great as the Tyburn riots, and far greater, can be sparked. Our hope is that by looking back to the seeds of modernity we can learn something of the respect owed to the dead, no matter who they are, and to avoid repeatedly setting the flame.

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I

n this table I have treated entries such as ‘executed person’, ‘anatomy’, ‘body from the Hall’, ‘a body from Tyburn’ as synonymous. I think a comparison of the two records supports that these designations are in fact used as interchangeable terms. I have also chosen to give only the calendar years in this table rather than the contemporary March to March of the records — so, for example, John Russell anatomized on 14 March 1600/01 in the original records appears in the table as 1601. There is no corresponding churchwarden’s account book prior to 1630. If one compares the names, the dates of burial, and the dates of payment for burial ground, it is clear that there are occasions when the burials of more bodies identified as anatomized or executed were being paid for than appear as burials, and other occasions when more felons were buried than payment appears for. Further, this table only cover the years when anatomized bodies are identified. The Barber-Surgeons’ accounts confirm that anatomies continued throughout the century, with payments related to the performance of anatomies being made in many years when no mention of a burial appears at St Olaves. One can only conclude that these records probably still under-represent the actual number of bodies that were anatomized by the Barber-Surgeons, and which were then buried at St Olaves, over the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth century. After 1735/36, no anatomies or executed persons are named, and there are no more named anatomies up to or after the dissolution of the company in 1745 in this particular register, which continues until 1771. However, it should be noted that the total number of burials in this register decreases after 1735, the burial ground seemingly having filled to capacity. A comparison of the register and the accounts of the churchwarden show that burials eventually stopped taking place in the anatomers ground, and started to be confined to the upper ground and

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Appendix

churchyard, until these also gradually ceased to be used. It is possible that burials continued elsewhere, in another ground in the parish, or even in the ground of St Giles, the parish church with which the Worshipful Company of Barber’s currently have close ties. Register of Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1561–1770, Parish of St Olaves Silver Street, Guildhall MSS 6534 and 6534A [UV photos] Burial Fees Levied from the Churchwarden’s Accounts, Parish of St Olaves Silver Street, 1630– 1756, Guildhall MSS 1257/1, /2, /3

A Comparison of the Anatomized and/or Executed Felons in the Parish Records of St Olaves, Silver Street, 1600–1735 Year

Parish Burial Records

1600 8 Mar. 17 June oedem

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Henry Stanly, Anthomized by the Chirurions William Dalton, anatomized by the Chirurgeons Katerine[Hackter], anatomized by Dr Wallm[er]

1601 14 Mar.

[John] Russell, anatomized by the Chirurgeons

1602 6 Mar.

John [Wood], anatomized

1603 5 Mar.

Thomas Smith, anatomized

1606 26 Feb.

John Longe, anatomized

1607 28 Feb.

Margrett Da[ke]s her body anatomised another anatomized publickly

24 Mar.

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

1608– 1630

none named

none named

1631

n. n.

Recd for buriall of Anatomy for the grounds 1s

1632

n. n.

29 Mar. Ground for Anotomy 29th of March 1s

1633

n. n.

Rd for the buriall of Anotomy for ground 1s

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305

THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

1634

n. n.

ffor the buryall of an Anotamy in the Churchyard 1s

1635

n. n.

ffor ground for an Anatomy 1s

1636

n. n.

1637

n. n.

1638

n. n.

1639

n. n.

Recd for the buriall of a bodie Anatomized 1s Recd for buriall of ye Anottomie 1s

1640

n. n.

Reced for the buriall of an Anotomy 1s Recd for an Anotamy 1s

1641

n. n.

Reced for the buriall of an Anathomy 1s Reced for the buriall of an Anathomy 1s Reced for the buriall of an Anathomy 1s

1642

n. n.

Recd for an Anatomie for ground 1s Recd for an Anatomie for ground 1s Recd for an Anatomie for ground 1s

1643

n. n.

1644

n. n.

1645 13 M ar. An Athomye buried buried

15 Mar. Recd for Anne Anthony buried March 15 for ground 1s

14 July

for an Athomy Buried July 14th for ground 1s

Received for the buriall of Ann Athomy 1s

[illegible] An Athomye buried 1646 24 [ Dec. 4 /5 or Jan.] 10 Sept. 16 Oct. 18 Dec.

An Athomy

Received for An Nothime 1s

An Athomy buried An Athomy buried An Athomy buried

Received for An Nothime 1s Received for An Nothime 1s

1647 24 Jan. 4 Mar.

An [Athomy] buried An Athomy buried

Recd for an Anatomy for ground 1s Recd for more Anatomyes being 4 for ground 4s

[?] Oct.

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An Athomy buried

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Year

Appendix

Parish Burial Records 18 Dec.

An A[thomy buried]

1648 26 Jan. [4] Mar. [?] 9 Sept. 16 Oct.

An Ath[omy] buried An Athomy buried An Ath[omy] An Ath[omy] buried An Athomy buried

A Notomie, buryed 1s A Nothomie buried 1s A Nothomy Buried 1s A Nothomy Buried 1s

1649 25 Jan. 10 Mar. 13 Sept. 3 Nov.

An Athomy buried An Athomy buried Ann Athomy buried William Sheppard Parishe Clarke buried

Receavd for the buryall of Anothame 3s Receavd for the buryall of Anothami 3s Receavd for the buryall of a Anothamie 1s

1650

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Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

Received for Anatomy 1s Received for Anatomy 1s Received for A Natomie 1s Received for A Natomie 1s

1651 12 Apr. 26 May [2] July

Buried A Notomy Buried A Notomy Buried A notomey

1652

[illegible]

Receavd for the beuriall of 5 Nothimies 5s

1653

[illegible]

Imprimis Receiued for ye buriall of anatomy 1s Receiued for Anatomys Burialls 1s Receiued for the Buriall of Anathomy 1s Received for the buriall of Anatomy 1s Receaued for the Buriall of Anatomy 1s

1654

[illegible]

Imprimis received for an Anotomy 1s Item receiued for an Anotymy 1s Item received for the Buriall of an Anotimy 1s Item reciued for an Anotimy 1s

1655

[illegible]

Rd for an Anathomy 1s Recd for an Anatomy 1s Recd for the buriall of an Anatomye 1s

1656

[illegible]

ffor the buriall of an Anathomye 1s ffor the buriall of an Anathomye 1s

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THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts ffor the buriall of an Anathomye 1s ffor the buriall of an Anathomye 1s ffor the buriall of an Anothomye 1s

Page 323

1657

[illegible]

ffor the buriall of an Anathomy 1s ffor the buriall of an Anathomy 1s ffor the buriall of an Anathomy 1s ffor the buriall of an Anathomy 1s

1658

n. n.

Recd for an Anthomize 1s Recd for an An~thomise 1s Recd for an An~thomize 1s Recd for an An~thomize 1s Recd for an An~thomize 1s

1659

n. n.

Recd for an Anothomize in the Churchyard 1s Recd for an Anothomize in the Churchyard 1s Recd for an Anothomize in the Churchyard 1s

1660

n. n.

1661

n. n.

Recd for the buriall of 3 Anatomies – 3s

1662

n. n.

Received for an Anatomy 1s Received for an Anatomy 1s

1663

n. n.

Recd for an Anathomy 1s Recd for an Anathomy 1s Recd for an Anathomy 1s Recd for an Anathomy 1s Recd for an Anathomy 1s

1664

n. n.

Recd for the ground of an Anatomy 1s Recd for the ground of an Anatomy 1s Recd for the ground of an Anatomy 1s

1665 25 Jan. 1 Mar. 5 Apr.

An Anatomie buried An Anatomie buried An Anatomie buried Apr

Recd for an Anothomy 1s Recd for an Anothomy 1s Recd for an Anotomy 1s Recd for an Anotomy 1s

Order 2090142 v1

308

Year

Appendix

Parish Burial Records

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

1666

n. n.

For a Nathomy 1s

1667– 1670

n. n.

no records

1671

n. n.

14 Sept. Sept 14 ’71 Receued for an Anothomise 1s 21 Oct. Oct 21 ’71 Recd for an Anothomise 1s

1672

n. n.

13 July July 13 ’72 Recd for an Anothamie 2s 28 Dec. Dec 28 ’72 Recd for an Anothamie 2s

1673

n. n.

27 Jan. Jan 27 ’72 Recd ffor an Anothamie 2s. 21 Apr. Apr 21 ’73 Recd for the Buriall of an Anothamie 2s 24 Sept. September 24th Recd for An Anatomi Anatomi 2s

1674

n. n.

1 Feb. ffeb 1th Recd for An Anatomi 2s 16 Sept. Sep 16 Recd for the of Anothamie 2s Recd for the buriall of Anothamie 2s 17 Dec. Dec 17 Recd for the buriall of Anothamie 2s Recd for the buriall of Anothamie 2s

1675

n. n.

25 Apr. Apr 25 Recd for the buriall of Anothamie 2s

1676

10 Aug. Aug 10 Recd for annotomie 2s. 2[5]Oct. Arthur Minor An Executed person ye 25th of October 76 and was buried the 2[?] of October 1676

1677 24 Jan.

Elizabeth Malson An Executed person: buried January 24th 1676/7

7 Oct.

Oct 7 Red for the ground for annotomie 2s.

6 Feb.

ffeb 6 Red for the ground for annotomie 2s. Red for the ground for annotomie 2s.

6 Feb. 20 Mar.

Page 324

Mathew Gannon an Executed person buried March the 20th 1676/7

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309

THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records 7 May

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

David H[?] an Executed person buried the 7th off May 1677 27 Sept. Sept 27 Receiued for the buriall of anotimee 2s. 27 Sept. Receiued for the buriall of Anothamy 2s.

22 Dec.

Elizabeth Farr[er] an Executed person buried December the 22th

1678

29 Jan. [?] Mar.

7 Sept. 26 Oct.

1679 11 Mar.

23 Dec.

Page 325

William Johnson an Executed 4 Mar. person buried March the [?] 1677/8 24 Apr. John Johnson A Executed person buried the 7th of September 1678 [John D__es] an executed person was buried ye 26th of October 1678 Charles Smith an executed n.d. person buryed March the 11th 1678/9 [79] John Dell an Executed person buried ye 23th of December 1679

Janey 29 Receiued for the buriall of Anotimy 2s. Mar 4 Receiued for the buriall of Anotomy 2s. April 24 Receiued for the buriall of 3 executed 6s

ffor an Anatomy 2s.

1680 2 Nov.

John [Neal] An Executed person buried ye seacond of November 1680

27 Oct. Oct 27 ffor an Executed pson from ye Barbr-Surgeons 2s.

1681 17 Dec.

John Snowden An Executed person buried December ye 17th 1681

n.d.

1682 20 Oct.

Jacob Guddall: An Executed 28 Oct. Octobr 28 Recd for one who was person buried October ye 20th Executed 2s. 1682

1683 2 May

Peter Mathewes An Executed person buried ye seacond of May 1683

In Snowden an executed pson 2s.

Order 2090142 v1

310

Appendix

Year

Parish Burial Records

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts [1?]Aug. August [1?] Recd for ye Buriall of one Executed 2s.

27 Oct.

[?] An Executed person buried October the 27th 1683

1684

6 Feb.

Februry 6 Recd for the Buriall of an Executed pson 2s.

11 Mar.

[? Davis?] An Executed person 12 Mar. March 12 Recd for the Buriall of an buried March ye 11th 1683/4 Executed pson 2s. 20 Sept. John Richardson an Executed person buryed the 20th of September 1684 21 Oct. John Wise: an executed person buryed ye 21th of October 1684 1685 24 Jan.

[?] May 7 Sept.

Abrah[am] Biggs An Executed person buryed January 24th 1684/5 1685/861 David A[?] an executed person buryed by Mr Phillips May [1]th 1685 Wllm Willm [Charley] an Executed person September ye 7th 1685 28 Oct. Octobr 28 For one Anatomised 2s.

1686 23 Jan.

John V[?] an Executed person 23 Jan. buryed Januarye 23th 1685/6

28 Oct.

Michael [Naseland?] an executed person buryed ye 28th of October 1686

[Sept.?]

[September] 1687: Weire buryed Phillip Staines an executed parson from Surgans Hall in Silver street Churchyard

1687

1

Page 326

Jannry 23 Anotomized 2s.

9 Mar.

March 9 For one Anotomised 2s.

4 Jan.

Janury 4th [87] For an Anotimy 2s.

There are many illegible entries for this year and for several years to follow.

Order 2090142 v1

311

THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records 20 Dec.

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

December ye 20th 1687 Weire buryed Joh prichard: Aleas Green An Executed parson from Surgans Hall. Churchyard

1688 8 May

May ye 8th 1688 Weire buyred John Thompson an Executed parson from Surgans, Hall Churchyard 10 Sept. September ye 10 1688 Weire buyred Charles Brian An Executed parson from Barber Surgans Hall

1689 3 May

26 [?]

May ye 3 1689 Weire buryed Charles Lee an Executed parson from Surgans Hall in Monkwell Street

A lump sum for all burial payments is recorded for this year.

4 June

June 4 Recd For the Ground For one Anatomised 2s. 30 Oct. Octobr 30 Recd for the ground for an [?] 26 1689 Weire buryed Executed pson 2s. Will alyas George Delacote an Executed parson from Surgans hall

1690 7 [Feb. [Feb or March] 7 1689 Weire 7 Mar. March 7 Recd for the ground for an or Mar.] buryed William Harvey alias Executed pson 2s. Mason a nothamy from Barber Surians Hall 13 May May 13 Recd for the Ground for one Anotomised 2s. 13 July July 13 1690 Buried William [?llumn] an Executed Person from Barber surions Hall 28 Oct. October ye 28th 1690: Buryed 29 Oct. Octobr 29 Recd for the Ground for one Anotomised 2s. Thomas Castle an Executed parson from Barbersurians Hall 1691 28 Jan.

3 Mar.

Page 327

January ye 28 1690/1 [91] 28 Jan. Buryed ffrances Lichfield an Executed parson from Barber Surians Hall 3 Mar. March ye 3 1690 Buryed James Cox an Executed parson from Barber Surians Hall

Janury 28 Recd for one Anotomised 2s.

March 3 Recd for one Anotomised 2s.

Order 2090142 v1

312

Appendix

Year

Parish Burial Records

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

25 Apr. April 25 Recd for one Anotomised 2s. [11]May May ye [11th] 1691 buried [Robert Winn] an Executed parson from Barber Surgians Hall 2 [?]ber […ber] ye 2[?]th 1691 Buryed 21 Sept. Septembr 21 Recd for the Buriall of one Executed in the Churchyard 2s. Thomas Brukhillan an Executed parson from Barber surians Hall 22 Dec. Decembr 22 Recd for the Buriall of 22 [December] the 22 1691 one Anatomized in the Churchyard 2s. [Dec.?] William Horsey an Executed parson from Barber suriogans Hall 16922 6 Mar.

March ye 6 1691/2 Buryed Valentine Knight an Executed parson from Barber surgions Hall 19 Apr. April ye 19 1692 Buryed William Smith an Executed parson from Barber suriogans Hall 12 Sept. September ye 12 1692 Buryed John Harris an Executed parson from Barber suriyans 24 Dec. December ye 24 1692 Buryed Robert Marshall an Executed parson

1693 3[1?] Jan.

2

Page 328

January ye 3[1] 1692/3 [93] Buryed James [P]hillips an Executed parson from Surgians Hall

6 Mar.

March 6 Recd for the Buriall of one Anatomised in the Churchyard 2s.

19 Apr. April 19 Reced for the Buriall of one Anatomised one Anotimised 12 Sept. Septem 12 For the Buriall of one Anotimised in the Churchyard 2s. 24 Dec. Decemb 24 For the Buriall of an Anotimie 2s.

31 Jan.

Jannry 31 For the Buriall of one Anotimised in the Churchyard 2s.

11 Mar. March 11 For the Buriall of one Anotimised 2s. 12 May May 12 For the Buriall of one Anotimised one Anotimised 2s. 22 Sept. Sepr 22 Rec’d for the Ground for one Anotimised 2s. 26 Oct. Octobr 26 Rec’d for the Ground for one Anotimised 2s. 24 Dec. Decem 24 Rec’d for the Ground for one Anotimised 2s.

In this year all the executions are ticked, apparently in the same ink in which they are entered.

Order 2090142 v1

313

THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records

1694

1695

n. n.

3 Mar.

March 3 Rec’d for the Ground for one Anotimised 2s. 19 July July 19 Recd for an Annotimy 2s. 14 Sept. Sept 14 Recd for the Ground for an Anotimy 2s. 20 Oct. Octob 20 Rec’d for the Ground for an Annotimy 2s. 17 Dec. Decemb 17 Rec’d for the Ground for an Annotimy 2s.

March 1st Rec’d for the Ground for an Annotimy 2s. 20 Apr. April 20 Rec’d for the Ground for an Annotimy 2s. 28 May May ye 28 Rec’d for the Ground for an Anatomie 2s. 21 Sept. Septemb 21 Rec’d for the Ground for 6 Sept. September 6 1695 William Pennant that was Executed an Anatomie 2s. 9 Nov. Novemb 9 Rec’d for the Ground for an 9 [Nov./ [November or December] 9 Dec.?] 1695 Buryed Samuell [?]ford Anatomie 2s. that was Executed 1 Mar.

1696

n. n.

1697 24 Mar.

[I] Sannd Buryed who was Executed [?] ye 24th of March 1696/7 Walter Arden Buryed who was Executed ye 24th of April 1697

24 Apr.

8 Nov.

Page 329

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

Henry Allen who was Executed Buryed the 8 of November 1697

23 Mar. March 23 Rec’d for the Ground for an 7 May Anatomie 2s. May 7 Rec’d for the Ground for an Anatomie one Executed 2s. 29 Sept. Sept 29 Recd for Buriall of one Executed 2s.

4 May

May 4 Recd for Buriall of a Person Executed 2s. 4 May May 4 Recd for Buriall of a Person Executed 2s. 18 Sept. Sept 18 Rec’d for the Buriall of Ino [Durvin?] Executed 2s.

Order 2090142 v1

314

Appendix

Year

Parish Burial Records

1698

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts 26 Feb.

Feb 26 Rec’d for ye Buriall of a Person Executed 2s.

14 Mar.

Mary [Huggen] who was Executed and Buryed – ye 14 of March 1697/8 21 May May 21 1698 Peter 21 May May 21 Rec’d for the Buriall of Peter [Mackdonniell?] who was Mackdoniall who was exected 2s. Executed at Tiborne 24 June June 24th 1698 Edward Audley who was Executed at Tiborne 28 Sept. Sept 28 Rec’d for the Buriall of a Person 28 Sept. [September?] 28 1698 John Executed 2s. Smith who was Executed at Tiborne Buryed 31 Oct. Oct 31 Rec’d for Dan.ll Scanlan 31 Oct. [October?] 31 1698 Daniell [Scanlon] who was executed at Executed 2s. Tiborne 1699 11 May

May 11 George Ma[?]field n.d. buryed who was Executed at Tiborne 25 Sept. September 25 [James Phillips?] n.d. who was Executed at Tiborne 1 Nov. November 1 1699 Henry Jackson who was executed at Tiborne buryed

1700 7 Mar.

23 Apr.

24 July

March 7 1699/700 Henry n.d. Andrews who was executed at Tiborne April 23 Robert Young Alias 23 Apr. Larkin who was Executed at Tiborne 24 July July 24 Jonathan Lane who was executed at Tiborne 9 Nov.

1701

14 Feb.

[?] Apr.

Page 330

Rec’d for Buriall of George Maxfield Executed 2s. Rec’d for the Buriall of an Anatomy 2s.

Rec’d for the Buriall of Heñ Andrews Eexecuted 2s. Apr 23 Rec’d for Buriall of Robt Young als Larkin excutd 2s. July 24 Rec’d for Buriall of Jonathan Lane executed 2s. Nov 9 Rec’d for Buriall of InoS laughter excecuted 2s.

Feb 14 Rec’d for Buriall of Tho~ Giding excecuted 2s. April [?] 1701 Mary [Coake] 12 Apr. Apr~ 12 Recd for Buriall of Mary who was Executed at Tiburne Cooke (executed) 2s. Buryed 26 May May 26 Rec’d for the Buriall of Ino Seers who was Executed 2s.

Order 2090142 v1

315

THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

1702 7 Jan.

January 7 1701 James [Nibett] 7 Jan. Jan 7 Rec’d for ye Buriall of a Person who was executed at Tiburne executed 2s. [8] Feb. February 8 1701 Beniamen [3] Feb. Feb 3 Rec’d for ye Buriall of BenoJ ones [__] who was Executed at executed 2s. Tiburne 30 Sept. September [30] 1702 Buryed 30 Sept. Sept 30 Recd for one Executed 2s. James Wadsworth who was Executed

1703 [5] Jan.

15 Mar.

January 5 John Goff, Alias [15] Jan. White, Alias Goffrey, Executed March 15 John Eastwick, alias 15 Mar. Howard Executed at Tiburne

1704 March 25 1704 William Williams, Executed at Tiborn Aprill 5 Andrew ffusland beadle of the Barber Surgeons Comp 13 May May 13 William ffox, who was executed at Tiborn 26 June June 26 Sebastian Reis who was executed at Tiborn 29 Sept. September 29 Thomas Sharp who was Executed at Toborn

Jan 15 Rec’d for the Buriall of Ino Goffe executed 2s. Mar 15 Recd for the Buriall of on Executed 2s.

29 Jan.

January 29 [04] Reced for the Buriall of one Executed 2s.

5 Apr.

April 5 Reced for the Buriall of one Executed 2s.

25 Mar.

13 May May 13 For Wm Fox executed 2s. 26 June June 26 For Sebastian Reis exed 2s. 29 Sept. Sept 29 For Thos Sharp execd 2s.

1705 20 Feb.

ffebruary 20 John Norton that [10]Feb. Feb 10 for John Norton execd 2s. was Executed at Tiborn 22 Mar. March 22 William Paulman, 22 Mar. March 22 For Wm Pullman 2s. alias Norwich, Executed at Tiborn 26 Sept. September 26 Ann Gardiner, that was executed at Tiborn

1706 21 Dec.

1707 [8] Feb.

December 21 Thomas 21 Dec. Dec 21 For Tho Arnold Executed 2s. [Arnold], that was Executed at Tiborn

ffebruary 8 James [Coke], [whenas] Executed at Tiborn [8?]May May [8?] John [Goodman] who was Executed at Tiburn

Page 331

28 Feb.

Feb 28 For James Coates Executed 2s.

Order 2090142 v1

316

Appendix

Year

Parish Burial Records

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

19 Sept. September 19 Charles Moore, Executed at Tiborne 9 Dec. December 9 a body from Barbar Surgeons hall, not known buried 24 Dec. December 24 Stephen Bunch, Executed at Tiborne 1708 9 Nov.

Mary Ellinor Executed for Murdering her childe November 9 1708

1709 4 Apr.

George Skulthorp, Executed at Tiborne and buried Aprill 4 1709 26 May Mark Harris Executed at Tiborne Buried May 26 1709 21 Sept. Richard Norcott, Executed at Tiborne and Buried September 21 24 Dec. Aaron Jones Executed at Tiborn and Buried December 24 17093

A lump sum for all burial payments is recorded for this year. Lump sum payment

1710 1 Feb.

Mary, alias, Ann, Ayers, Executed at Tiborn ffebruary 1 1710

Lump sum payment

1711 30 Apr.

Edward Payne, Executed at Tiborn, Aprill 30, 1711

lump sum payment

1712

n. n.

lump sum payment

1713 30 Oct.

Thomas Loyd, Executed at Tiborne October 30 1713 Buried Samuell Hicks, Executed at Tiborne December 29 1713

Lump sum payment

29 Dec. 1714 27 Apr. 1 Nov.

3

George [Geynes], Executed at 27 Apr. Apr ye 27th George Geyns Executed 2s. Tiborn Aprill 27 1714 John Hodgkins, Executed at 1 Nov. Nov y 1 John Hoskins Ex 2s. Tiborn November 1 1714

There is a brief change in recording at this point, to calendar year, but it then reverts to the earlier dating system and seems to lose April 1710 to March 1711 in the process.

Page 332

Order 2090142 v1

317

THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records

1715 2[7]Sept. Roger Walker, Executed, Buried September 27 1715 [7] Nov. Daniell Blunt, Alias Rider, Executed Buried November the 7 1715

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts 14 May [May] 14 a Man Executed 2s. 2[5]Sept. [Sept] 25 Roger Walker Executed 2s. [7] Nov. Novemb the 7 Daniell Blunt Executed 2s.

1716

none named

29 Sept. Sep 29 a Body from Barber Surgeons Hall

1717 25 May

Thomas Price, Executed, Buried May 25 1717 William Smith, Executed at Tiborn Buried October ye 8 1717

25 May May 25 Reced for the Buriall of Thomas Price Executed 2s. 8 Oct. Octobr 8th Reced for the Buriall of Wm Smith Executed 2s.

8 Oct.

1718 22 Mar.

30 May 5 Nov.

Mary Lovelock executed, Buried March 22 1717 William Haynes, executed buried May 30th 1718 John Brown, alias Cole, executed, buried Nov 5 1718

26 Dec. Decemb 26th Reced for the Buriall of one Executed

28 Apr. April 28 Elizabeth Moss 4s 31 May May ye 31st William Haynes Executed 2s. 5 Nov. Nov 5 Mr John Brown 2s.

1719 17 Feb.

Ralph Emery, executed, buried 17 Feb. Febry 17 A Body from the Hall 2s. Febr 17 1718 28 Mar. Isaack Smith, executed, buried 28 Mar. March 28 Isaac Smith Executed 2s. March 28 1719 13 Nov. a [blonde? bond? blind?] man, 13 Nov. [November] the 13th Reced For a Body Executed, Buried Nov 13 From the Hall 2s. 1719

1720 18 Apr.

Hunphrey Makins, executed, buried April 18 1720 23 Sept. James [Norwich] executed, buried Sept 23 1720

1721

n. n.

18 Apr. [April] the 18 Reced For a Body From the Hall 2s. 23 Sept. Sept 23th James Norwich, executed 2s. 24 Sept. Sept 24 For a person executed 2s.

1722 12 Sept. Richd Oxley, Executed, upper 28 Sept. Septr 28 A Corps from the Hall 2s. ground Sept 12 1722 1723

Page 333

4 Jan. 7 Dec.

Jan 4th A Corps from the Hall 2s. 7 Dec Rd for and Executed Person 2s.

Order 2090142 v1

318

Appendix

Year

Parish Burial Records 29 Dec.

1724 4 May

1725 29 Dec.

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts

John Harrington, executed, upper ground Dec 29 1723

29 Dec. 29 Dec Rd for an Executed pson 2s.

One executed, whose name was not taken, upper ground May 4 1724

4 May

May 4 Rd for an executed person 2s.

3 Nov.

Nov 3d Rd for Lewis Huzar Ex 2s.

An executed person, upper ground Dec 29 1725

29 Dec. 29 Dec Rd for the ground for ffoster Executed 2s.

1726 20 May

[?] Mar. March [n.d. 26?] Rd for a person Executed 2s. 13 May May 13 [recd] for anatomy 2s.

John Lawrence, Executed, upper ground May 20 1726 17 Sept. Willm Allison, an executed 18 Sept. Sep 18 [recd] for Anatomy 2s. person, Upper ground Sept 17 1726 1727 25 Nov. Richard Lynn, Anatomised, upper ground Nov 25 1727 1728

[?] Nov. March 25 [recd] for An Anatomy 2s. Novr [n.d.] A Body from Surgeons Hall 2s.

[28?] Feb. 1 Apr. Margaret Wally, anatomiz’d, [28?] upper ground Apr 1 1728 Apr. 14 Sept. Elizabeth Ready, Anatomized, 14 Sept. upper ground Sept: 14 1728

1729 12 Feb.

Thomas Neeves, executed, upper ground Feb 12 1728 28 Mar. Peter Kelley, Executed, upper ground March 28 1729 25 Nov. Daniel Boulton, Anatomized, Upper ground Nov 25 1729 28 Dec. A person, Anatomized, upper ground Dec: 28 1729

1730

12 Feb.

Feb 12 An Anatomy 2s.

23 Mar. March 23 An Anatomy 2s. 25 Nov. Nov 25 A Body from ye Hall 2s. 29 Dec. Decr 29 A Body from ye Hall 2s. 26 Jan.

A person, Anatomised, upper ground Apr 3 1730 12 Oct. Hitchin alias Polson, Executed, upper ground Octobr 12 1730 21 Nov. Robert Johnson, executed, upper ground Nov: 21 1730

Feb [n.d.] A Body from Surgeons Hall 2s. April [n.d.] A Body from Surgeons Hall 2s. Sepr 14 An Anatomy 2s.

Jan 26 A Body from ye Hall 2s.

3 Apr.

Page 334

19 Oct. Octo 19 a Body from the Hall 2s.

Order 2090142 v1

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THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

Year

Parish Burial Records

1731 16 Mar. 18 May 4 Oct. 25 Dec. 1732 22 Feb. 17 Oct. 1733 7 Feb. 13 Mar. 5 May 13 Oct. 24 Dec. 1734 21 Feb. 10 Oct.

Page 335

John Chappel, executed, upper ground March 16 1731 Ambrose Newport, executed, upper ground May 18 1731 Willm Traced, executed, upper ground Octobr 4 1731 Patrick Knowland, executed, upper ground Dec: 25 1731

Churchwarden’s Burial Accounts 6 Feb. ffeby 6 a Body from ye Hall 2s. 16 Mar. Mar 16 a Body from ye Hall 2s. 18 May a Body from ye Hall 23 Oct. October ye 23 For William Tracy Anotomy Ground 2s. 25 Dec. December ye 25th For Patrick Knowland Anotomy 2s.

George Scroggs, Anatomised, upper ground Feb: 22 1731 [____], executed, upper ground Octobr 17 1732

22 Feb.

Febbry 22d For George Scraggs Anotamy 2s. 20 Oct. Octr 20 two persons Executed 4s

Samuel Thomas, Executed, upper ground Feb: 7 1732 Edward Delay, Executed, upper ground March 13 1732 Willm Kemp, Executed, upper ground May 5 1733 Richd Lamb, executed, upper ground Octobr 13 1733 Francis Ogilby, Executed, upper ground Dec: 24 1733

7 Feb.

Febry 7 Saml Thomas Executed n B [no bell] 2s. 13 Mar. March 13 Edward Delay Executed 2s. 5 May

May 5 William Keys Executed 2s.

13 Oct. Octor 13 Richd Lamb Executed 2s. 24 Dec. Decr 24 Francis Ogelby Executed 2s.

James Mackdowell, Executed, 21 Feb. Feb 21 James Macdowal Executed 2s. upper ground Feb: 21 1733 Thomas Colston, executed, 10 Oct. Octo 10 Thomas Folston Executed 2s. upper ground Octobr 10 1734

1735 13 Jan.

John Butler, Executed, upper ground Jan: 13 1734

1736

n. n.

13 Jan.

Jan 13 John Butler Executed 2s. Accounts cease until 1740 – and thereafter n.n.

Order 2090142 v1

Page 336

Order 2090142 v1

KATERN 12

B IBLIOGRAPHY

Archival Sources Aldermanbury, London, Guildhall Library, MSS 1257/1–3, Churchwarden’s Accounts, Parish of St Olaves Silver Street, 1630–1756 Aldermanbury, London, Guildhall Library, MSS 6534 and 6534A, Register of Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, Parish of St Olaves, Silver Street, 1561–1770 Aldermanbury, London, City of London Records Office, ‘Deposition in Anna Regina versus Webb et al, by Samuel Waters’ October 1711 Glasgow, University of Glasgow Library, Hunterian Collection, MS Hunter 364, ‘Master John Banister’s Anatomical Tables’ Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MS 5266/1, Apprentice Bindings 1657–1672 Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MS 5266/2, Apprentice Bindings 1672–1707 Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MS D/2/2, Audit Book 1659–1674 Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MSS 5257/1–7, Court Minutes, 1551–1721 Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MS 5265/1, Register of Freedom of Admission, 1522–1666 Monkwell Square, London, Barber-Surgeons’ Hall, MS D/2/1, The Wardens Great Accompt Book, 1603–1659

Publications before 1750 An Account of the Proceedings at the Sessions of Oyer and Terminer, and the Gaol-Delivery of Newgate; Which Began at the Sessions-house in the Old-Bayly, for the City of London and County of Middlesex, the 10 of October 1683 and ended the 13th of the same Instant (London: Langley Curtis, 1683)

Page 337

Order 2090142 v1

322

Bibliography

An Account of the Whole Proceedings at the Sessions Holden in the Sessions-House in the Old Baily for the City of London, County of Middlesex, & C. Which Began on the Twelfth of This Instant July, and Ended the 16th of the Same (London: Lang. Curtis, 1683) An account of the behaviour, confession, and last dying words of Thomas Sharp, who was executed in Drury-Lane, on Friday the 22d of September 1704, for the murther of Thomas Thompkins a watchman (London: printed for A. Mallot, 1704) Allestree, Richard, The ladies calling: in two parts (Oxford: Printed at the Theatre, 1673) Anon., The proceedings of the High Court of Iustice with Charls Stuart, late King of England, in Westminster Hall, begun January 20. ended Ianuary 27, 1648 (London: printed for VV.B., 1655) Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo, Mikrokosmographia; or, A Description of the Body of Man Being a Practical Anatomy (London: Livewell Chapman, 1664) Bidloo, Govard, Anatomia humani corporis (Amsterdam: J. a Someren, J. a Dyk & T. Boom,1685) A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers & Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, ed. by Philip Highfill, Jr, Kalman A. Burnim, and Edward A. Langhans, 16 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973–93) The Black Book of Newgate; or, An Exact Collection of the Most material Proceedings At All the Sessions in the Old baily, for Eighteen months last past (London: D. M., 1677) The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England (London: Collins, n.d.) Browne, John, A Compleat Treatise of the Muscles As They Appear in the Humane Body […] (London: Tho, Newcombe, 1681) —— , Myographia Nova […] (London: 1697) Casserio, Giulio, Julii Casserii Placentini Tabulae anatomicae LXXIIX […] (Venice: [n. pub.], 1627) Charles I, King Charls His Speech made upon the Scaffold at Whitehall-Gate (London: printed for Peter Cole, 1649) Colombus, Realdus, De re anatomica (Venice: Beuilacquae,1559) The Confession and Execution of the Seven Prisoners that suffered at Tyburn On Wednesday the 6th of March 1677/8 (London: printed for D. M., 1678) Cowper, William, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (Leiden: J. A. Langerak,1737) —— , The Anatomy of Humane Bodies with Figures Drawn After the Life by Some of a the Best Masters in Europe (London: Sam. Smith & Benj. Walford, 1698) Crooke, Helkiah, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615) —— , Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: Thomas and Richard Cotes, 1631) de Bils, Tonker Loedwijk, The Coppy of a Certain Large Act (Obligatory) […] Touching the Skill of a better way of Anatomy of Mans Body, trans. by John Pell (London: [n. pub.], 1659) de Ketham, Johannes, Fasciculus medicinae (Venice: Joannem et Gregorium de Gregoriis Fratres, 1491) The Deportment and Carriage of the German Princess, immediately before her Execution […] Being Wednesday the 22th of January, 1672[/73] (London: Nath. Brooke, 1672) Estienne, Charles, and Éstienne de la Riviére, De dissectione partium corporis humani […] (Paris: S. Colinaeus, 1545)

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations abstraction, 1–7, 25–27, 58, 196–97 of embodiment, 26–27, 33, 197–98 medical, 300 actors. See boy actors in female parts actresses, 26, 191, 220–25 Adam, 119–220, 123, 157 Adam and Eve, 69, 71, 74, 82–83, 115, 126–27, 232, 238 See also Eve Addison, John, 266–67 Alberti, Leon Battista, 74–75 Albinus, Bernhard, 77–78n Amsterdam anatomy theatre, 45 anatomical atlas, 8–9, 217, 236 anatomical dissections, 5, 6, 13, 19 as pedagogical displays, 53, 55–57, 74, 247, 252 See also anatomies anatomical illustrations, 17–18, 22, 58, 67, 76–78, 97–98, 147, 187, 227 examples, 94, 207, 209, 213, 215 religious influences, 76 anatomical manuals, 17–18 See also dissection manuals

Page 355

embodiment in, 59–100 anatomical mapping, 6, 16, 25, 144, 158 anatomies, 13–14 commoners’ bodies, 6, 159 felons’ bodies, 11–15, 24, 47, 136, 270– 73 private, 51–52, 161, 195 public, 12–15, 19, 51–53, 147–48, 160–61 anatomists, 66, 75, 143, 260 anatomization, 107, 300 anatomy theatres, 31–33, 41–42, 44–51, 66, 138–40, 142, 203 apprentices, 13–15, 17–18, 50, 57–58, 61–64 costume, 52–54, 56 illustrations, 48, 49, 55 masters, 13–14, 17, 21–22, 51–52, 62 performance, 52–57 readers, 14–15, 53–56, 60–65, 119, 125–26, 239–41 scaffolding, 45–47 stewards, 14, 50–51, 262 treatment of bodies in, 31

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See also College of Physicians; Jones, Inigo; Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons androgeny, 123, 197–98 Anne of Denmark, Queen, 172n Antholick, David, 290 apprentices, 13–15, 17–18, 50, 57–58, 61–64 ‘Armada’ portrait (Elizabeth I), 22 Arris, Dr Edward, 106–07n, 145, 146, 147, 154–58 Arundel, Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl, 163–64 Ashbrook, Agatha, 278 Assizes, 39, 147–48, 168–69 Astell, Mary, 221 Astraea, 8 astrology, 106, 140 Axton, Marie, 8 back muscles, 206, 207, 208, 209, 241 Baker, George, 11, 21 Banister, John, 9, 10, 15–16, 19–22, 24, 147–48 Barber Surgeons. See Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons Barker, Francis, 33, 131, 165–67 bastardy, 180–83, 278 Bavidge, Peter, 293 Beattie, John M., 169 Benedetti, Alexander, 45–46 ‘benefit of belly’, 37, 186, 279 Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo, 46, 76, 241 Berkley, Mary, 289 Betterton, William, 224 Bidloo, Govard, 202, 229, 239, 246, 259 Blackall, Brother, 289 Blackfriars Theatre, 42, 44, 50, 108

Page 356

Index bodies decomposition, 99 laying out, 21 proportions, 75, 77–78, 99–100, 248, 273 unclothed, 78–79 See also female body; male body body adornment, 81 body as metaphor, 270, 299 body-natural, 9, 26, 152 Charles I, 144, 148, 152–53 Elizabeth I, 5–8, 12, 15, 24–26, 145 Oliver Cromwell, 144 body politic, 7–8, 16, 23–26, 151–53 Bologna anatomy theatre, 46, 66, 139 Book of Common Prayer, 145 Boone, Henry, 103, 105–06n Bourdieu, Pierre, 31, 72 Bovey, William, 21 boy actors in female parts, 109, 198, 220, 224n, 228, 292 Bracegirdle, Anne, 222 branding, 36, 287, 291 Brockbank, William, 45 Browne, John, 201–05, 210–11, 216, 227, 246, 291, 295 A Compleat treatise of the muscles, 207, 209, 213, 215 Bryson, Anna, 80 Buc, Philippe, 3 Bunch, Stephen, 290–91, 294–95, 316 burials, 136, 160, 170–72, 272 Burke, Peter, 79–80 Caius, John, 143 Canonbury Besse, 102–07, 140, 179, 264, 271, 274–76, 299–300

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THE THEATRE OF THE BODY

capital crimes, 32–35 capital punishment, 271, 287 death rate, 168–69 Carlton, Charles, 40 cartography, 9, 15–19, 24 Casserio, Giulio, 61, 62, 195–96, 201–05, 210–11, 240, 291, 293 Tabulae Anatomicae, 195, 203, 206, 208, 212, 214 Castle, Thomas (‘Cassey’), 283, 287 Cecil, Robert, 1st Earl of Salisbury, 10 Cennini, Cennino, 77, 248 Chamberlain, John, 39n, 163–64 Chamberlen family, 185–86 Chappel, John, 282–83, 296 Charles I, King, 149–50 body-natural, 144, 148, 152–53 burial, 145, 148 execution, 144–45, 148, 193, 271 Charles II, King, 25–26, 173, 202–03, 218 Charley, William, 290 Chirurgians Theatre, 48 Civil War, English, 136, 148 Clap, Mrs Margaret, 293–94 Clapham, John, 11 Clark, Alice, 201n, 221 class distinctions, 80–81 classicism, 4 Clement, Edward, 289 clipping, 283–85 Cockburn, James S., 36n, 168 Cocks, Thomas. See Cox, Thomas codification, 80–81, 197, 300–01 coining, 273–74, 283–84 College of Physicians, 61 Anatomy Theatre, 45 Colombo, Realdo, 19–20, 46, 65, 75 commodification, 2, 300

Page 357

commoners’ bodies, 6, 159 confession, 40, 104–05, 177, 269, 271, 279– 86, 298 constructions of embodiment, 3, 218, 247 corpses. See bodies corrupt femininity, 102, 106, 114, 118–20, 125–26, 131–32, 238 corrupt masculinity, 119 corruptibility of female body, 25, 71, 130, 187 costume in anatomy theatres, 52–54, 56 Country Tom, 102– 04, 105–06n, 137–38, 163, 264 courts, 36–42, 216–18, 271–72, 275–77, 286–89, 296, 299–300 ecclesiastical, 37–38 Cowper, William, 202, 217, 239 The anatomy of humane bodies, 229, 239–40, 242, 243, 244, 246, 259 Cox, Thomas, 283–85 Cressy, David, 145, 272 crimes, 32–35, 271–72, 280–84, 289–90 capital, 32–35 confessions, 40, 104–05, 177, 269, 271, 279–86, 298 pleas, 35–37 by women, 32, 35–36, 168, 273–80 criminal femininity, 106, 114, 118–20, 125– 26, 131–32 criminals. See felons Cromwell, Oliver, 149–51, 158–59 body-natural, 144 burial, 148n Crooke, Helkiah, 20n, 83 Microcosmographia, 55, 59, 62, 87 Dallicoates, George, 287 Daston, Lorraine, 239–40

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Davis, Isaac, 289 Dawson, Captain Joseph, 284–85 Dean, Richard, 286 Deane, John, 52–53n death rates, 167–68 capital punishment, 168–69 decomposition of bodies, 99 Dell, John, 282–83, 286, 289 deportment, 69, 71, 82 See also gestures; posture depositions, 272–78, 284–91 desirability of female body, 78–79, 251 dissection manuals, 66 dissections. See anatomical dissections ‘Ditchley’ portrait (Elizabeth I), 9, 16, 23, 145, 148, 151 Dolan, Frances E., 32 ecclesiastical courts, 37–38 Edgerton, Samuel Y., 89, 98, 271 effeminacy, 210 effigies, 5–8, 21, 25, 144, 148–49 See also wax figures Elizabeth I, Queen, 4–11, 15–26 ‘Armada’ portrait, 22 body-natural, 5–8, 12, 15, 24–26, 145 as body politic, 6, 9, 15–16, 25 death, 4, 9–10 dissection of body, 5–6, 9, 11–12 ‘Ditchley’ portrait, 9, 16, 23, 145, 148, 151 effigy, 7n embalming, 11–13, 16, 24–25, 148 interment, 4–6 portraits, 7, 9, 19, 23–24 sexuality, 24 ‘Sieve’ portrait, 16 Elizabethan Sessions House, 38, 47

Page 358

Index Ellinor, Mary, 276, 278 embalming, 11–13, 16, 24–25, 148 embodiment, 1–3, 26–27, 32–33, 227–28, 245–48, 270–71, 299–300 abstraction of, 26–27, 33, 197–98 in anatomical manuals, 59–100 constructions of, 3, 218, 247 definition, 1 female, 279–80, 297 gender in, 167, 186–88 male, 258, 291–92, 297–98 post-modern, 59 and science, 196–201 epistemic shifts, 3 Estienne, Charles, 65–66, 211 Evans, Elizabeth. See Canonbury Besse Eve, 85, 103, 105, 109, 125–26, 232, 278 See also Adam and Eve executions, 166–69 Farrer, Elizabeth, 274, 278 felons anatomized, 11–15, 24, 47, 136, 270–73 female, 168, 273–80 male, 168, 280–98 female body, 70, 78–82, 112–14, 125–28, 136–37, 167–71, 178–87 corruptibility, 25, 71–72, 130, 187 desirability of, 78–79, 251 genitalia, 85, 92, 113–14, 126, 232, 245 pregnant, 84, 85, 86, 94, 113, 244 female character, 101–02, 108–09, 122–23 female embodiment, 279–80, 297 female felons, 168, 273–80 femininity, 108, 113–14, 125–28, 197, 220 corrupt, 106, 114, 118–20, 125–26, 131–32, 238

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feminization, 178, 196 Ferrari, Giovanna, 46, 51, 139 ffarrer, Eliza. See Farrer, Elizabeth flaying, 51, 77, 89, 90, 91, 97 Foucault, Michel, 3 funeral dress, 154 funerals, 7–9, 15, 21 Galen, 74 gallows, 32, 51, 104–05, 159–71, 192–94, 258–60, 297–300 Tyburn, 12–14, 34–35, 136, 138, 149, 194, 266–67 See also hanging Ganymede, 195, 210n, 211, 214, 215, 291, 295 Gaol Deliveries, 272 Gardiner, Ann, 273, 275, 279 Gaukroger, Stephen, 196–97 Gay, John, 138, 290–92 Geminus, Thomas, 17, 63, 64n, 68–69, 74, 82–83, 203 Compendiosa totius anatomie delineatio, 67, 70, 71, 85, 89, 92 gender, 2, 77–78, 98–99, 178–79, 197–200, 238, 245–46 in embodiment, 167, 186–88 genitalia, 245 female, 85, 92, 113–14, 126, 232, 245 male, 119–20, 211, 215, 216, 245 geographical mapping, 16 gestures, 69, 80–83, 238 See also deportment; posture gifting , 2n, 204 Gittings, Clare, 21 Globe Theatre, 41–43, 50, 108 God, 68–69, 271, 286 Gondouin, Jacque, 229

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Goodcole, Henry (H. G.), 103–08, 112, 271, 280 Heavens Speedie Hue and Cry, 32, 101 Goodenough, Mary, 183 Gooderus, William, 11 Great Fire of London (1666), 38, 141n, 192 Greenbury, Robert, 146, 147, 153–54, 157, 158, 175 Greene, Anne, 176, 179, 181 Gurr, Andrew, 41n Guyon, Captain John, 291 Gwyn, Nell, 232, 247, 259 Hackley, David, 281 Hall, John, 291 hanging, 131, 174, 176, 193, 285 of women, 167–71 See also gallows Harcourt, Glenn, 76 Harsey, William, 288–89 Harvey, William, 142–43, 172n, 238, 263 Havers, Dr Clopton, 229–31, 235, 236, 237, 246 Henry VIII, King, 13, 67, 72, 107n, 148, 154, 193n Herbert, Sir Thomas, 193 hermaphrodites, 178–79n high treason, 34–35, 273, 283–85, 287 Hills, William, 293 Hobbes, Thomas, 145, 147–48, 151–53, 158 Hoffer, Peter C., 180, 184 Hoffmann, Caspar, 142–43 Hogarth, William, 164, 229, 296n, 297 Hollander, Anne, 78–79 homoeroticism, 211, 216, 223–24 homosexuality. See Mollies Horsey, William. See Harsey, William

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Howard, Lady Frances, 39 Howard, Samuel, 287 Howe, Elizabeth, 222–23, 249, 250 Hume, Robert D., 249 Hunter, William, 217, 246 illustrations, anatomical. See anatomical illustrations imaging, 2–3 infanticide, 35, 176, 179–88, 257–58, 276– 78 death rate, 168 Ireton, John, 230–31 Jaggard, William, 88, 93 James I, King, 7, 8n, 12n, 159, 166–67 James, Paul, 1n, 3, 4n, 6n Jeaffreson, John Cordy, 103, 166–67, 170, 173 Jeffries, George, 284–85 Jenkins, Philip, 169 Johnston, William, 282 Jolly, Dr, 174, 176 Jones, Inigo, 141n, 218 anatomy theatre, 45–47, 49, 57, 106, 138–39, 157, 297 Chirurgians Theatre, 48 Jonson, Ben, 12, 36n, 40n Epicoene, 224 Jordan, Constance, 197–98 Jury of Matrons, 277–78 Juxon, Bishop of London, 149–50 Kates, Thomas, 288–89 Kellet, William, 143 Kerr, Sir Robert, 39 Killigrew, Thomas, 218, 223–24 Knight, Valentine, 290

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Index Knowland, Patrick, 294–96 Kynaston, Edward, 224–25 Lacy, John, 227n, 248, 252 Lairesse, Gerard de, 239, 241 Langbein, John H., 39n, 40n, 104n, 273 Laqueur, Thomas, 65, 66n, 78n, 92, 198 Larkin, Robert. See Young, Robert Laurentius, Andreas, 85, 86 Lawrence, Gabriel ( John), 216, 283, 292– 93, 295 laying out of bodies, 21 Lee, Henry, 23 Leiden anatomy theatre, 45, 66, 140, 142 Leonardo da Vinci, 74n, 75, 81, 82, 98, 127, 238 Linebaugh, Peter, 103, 107, 161 The London Hanged, 38n, 40, 173n, 192n ‘Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons’, 13n, 57n, 192–95 London, 1 Great Fire (1666), 38, 141n, 192 Lovelock, Mary, 279 Low, Richard, 291 McGowan, Randall, 299 Maclean, Ian, 62n, 21, 199 Makin, Bathsua, 221 Malcolm, Noel, 151–53 male body, 243 genitalia, 119–20, 211, 215, 216, 245 male embodiment, 258, 291–92, 297–98 male felons, 168, 280–98 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2 Malson, Elizabeth, 179, 181, 183, 187, 191, 271–78, 281 man-midwives, 186

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mapping, 5–6, 16, 18–19 anatomy, 6, 16, 25, 144, 158 geographical, 16 See also cartography Marsyas, 89n, 97 masculinity, 132, 179, 197, 238 corrupt, 119 masters, 13–14, 17, 21–22, 51–52, 62 Matthew, Peter, 281, 282 Mauss, Marcel, 2 Maxfield, George, 290 medical abstraction, 300 medievalism, 4 Medusa, 113–14, 231–32, 238 Merchant, Carolyn, 198 Meverell, Dr, 61, 196, 203 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 46n, 75, 77, 89 Middlesex County Records (Jeaffreson), 103, 166–67, 170, 173 Middleton, Thomas, 8, 137 The Changeling, 118n Women Beware Women, 238 midwives, 37, 63, 180–81, 184–86, 280 See also Jury of Matrons; man-midwives modernity, 2–4, 194, 196, 299–301 Molins, William, 202 Mollies, 216, 291–92 Molly-houses, 216, 291–93 moral turpitude, 98, 138, 180 Morus, Horatius, 61 Moxon, Joseph, 222, 233, 234, 235, 247, 259 murder, 33–36, 102–05, 111, 273, 286–89, 296–97 See also infanticide ‘Murder Act’ (1752), 13, 107 muscles, 130, 204–05, 210, 212, 213, 241 See also back muscles

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Neal, John, 281 Neeves, Thomas, 290 neoclassicism, 4, 46 Newgate Prison, 37, 107, 136 Newton, Thomas, 293 Niceron, Jean-François, 152 Nokes, James, 224 objectification, 2, 18, 23–24, 74, 280, 298 Old Bailey, 26, 32–33, 167, 270, 296–97 Sessions House, 31, 37, 39, 172–73, 181 ontology, 2–3, 5, 27, 66, 72 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 39, 101, 117 Oxley, Richard, 290 Padua anatomy theatre, 45, 66, 138, 142– 43, 203 Pargiter, Susan, 200–01 Park, Katharine, 76, 97–99, 129, 149 pedagogical displays of anatomical dissections, 53, 55–57, 74, 247, 252 peine forte et dure (pressing), 166–67, 282 Pennard, William, 290 Pepys, Samuel, 164, 173–79, 183, 191, 211, 224–25, 229–31 Pett, Commissioner, 174–75 petty treason, 34–35, 265 Pile, Richard, 149–50 playhouses, 26–27, 31–33, 41–46, 101, 106, 140–42, 191–92 closure of (1642–60), 135–36, 138, 217 reopening of, 217–22 See also theatres plea of benefit of clergy, 36–37, 282, 287 pleas, 35–37 Poor Laws, 180

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post-modern embodiment, 59 post-mortem examinations, 8–9, 15, 76, 160–61, 172 posture, 79–80, 82, 119, 126, 204–05, 211 See also deportment; gestures pregnant body, 84, 85, 86, 94, 113, 172, 244 pressing (peine forte et dure), 166–67, 282 private anatomies, 51–52, 161, 195 Prokhovnik, Raia, 151–52 proportions of bodies, 75, 77–78, 99–100, 248, 273 Protestantism, 117, 199 Psalms, 36, 115, 119, 231 public anatomies, 12–15, 19, 51–53, 147– 48, 160–61 Quakers, 274 Radzinowicz, Sir Leon, 35–37 rationalization, 2, 74, 196, 198, 298 Ravenscroft, Edward, 227–67 The Anatomist, 228, 259; ‘Angelica’, 260, 262, 264–65; ‘Beatrice’, 260– 66; ‘Crispin’, 260–67; ‘The Doctor’, 260–63; ‘Doctor’s Wife’, 261–62, 267; ‘Old Gerald’, 260–61, 264– 65; ‘Young Gerald’, 260, 264–65 Titus Andronicus, 228, 248–49; ‘Aaron’, 251–52, 255–58; ‘Alarbus’, 130, 254–55; ‘Goths’, 254–55; ‘Lavinia’, 248–53, 255–56; ‘Tamora’, 250–58 Read, Alexander, 64n, 156, 229 The Manuall of the Anatomy or dissection of the body of Man, 53, 60, 72, 73 Somatographia anthropine, 60–66, 91, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97

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Index readers, 14–15, 53–56, 60–65, 119, 125–26, 239–41 Red Bull Theatre, 42, 102, 107–08 Remmelin, Johannes, 72n, 112n, 228–32, 246, 252 Catoptrum microcosmicum, 72n, 110, 111–12, 113, 121, 124, 222 Visio prima, 110, 113, 130, 233, 234, 235 Visio secunda, 119, 121, 236 Visio tertia, 124, 125, 127, 237 Restoration theatre, 191, 195–96, 200, 210– 11, 219–20, 228, 247 audiences, 219–20 revenge, 107–08, 128–29, 255 Richardson, John, 287–88, 295 River, George, 277–78 Royal College of Surgeons, 195, 300 Royal Society, 199 Russell, Kenneth F., 111–12, 112n, 204, 232n St Olaves, Silver Street, 148, 276–77 burial records, 103, 136, 159–60, 171, 260–70, 294–95 St Sepulchres, 147, 156 Sallicke, William. See Sillock, William Sawday, Jonathan, 46, 58, 89, 92, 114, 171, 188, 198 Saxton, John, 16–17, 19, 23 scaffold anatomy theatres, 45–47 Scarborough, Dr Charles, 145–47, 146, 153– 57, 174–76, 202–03, 241 Schultz, Bernard, 46, 74–75 Schupbach, William, 68 science and embodiment, 196–201 scientific revolution, 199

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Sergeant-Surgeons, 11, 16 Sessions House (Old Bailey), 31, 37, 39, 172–73, 181 Sessions Papers, 32, 182, 187, 267, 270–75, 278–89, 296–99 Shakespeare, W illiam, 202, 220, 227–28, 249–58 Hamlet, 31–32, 109 Macbeth, 75n, 92–93 Othello, 222; ‘Desdemona’, 118, 222 Titus Andronicus, 111, 122, 130–31, 248–49, 251, 254; ‘Alarbus’ 130, 139, 254–55; ‘Bassianus’, 122, 249– 52, 255–57; ‘Lavinia’, 122, 250; ‘Tamora’, 111, 251, 258 The Winter’s Tale, 218 Sharp, Thomas, 282 Sharpe, J. A., 167 Crime in Seventeenth Century England, 168 ‘Last Dying Speeches’, 104n, 269, 298 Sheppard, William, 136–37, 170 Sherwood, Thomas. See Country Tom ‘Sieve’ portrait (Elizabeth I), 16 Sillock, William, 288–89 Skelthorp, George, 216, 283, 292–93, 295 Smith, Ann, 279 Smith, Charles, 283, 285, 287, 289 Smith, John, 148, 288–89 Smith, Peter, 266 Smith, Thomas, 12, 144, 284–85, 289 Smyth, Charles. See Smith, Charles Snowden, John, 281 sodomy, 273, 283, 292–94 Southwell, Lady, 10n, 11 Spencer, Mary, 40 stewards, 14, 50–51, 262 Strong, Roy, 16, 19, 23

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subjectification, 26, 300 surveying, 17 Swan Theatre, 42–43 Tearne, Dr, 54, 174–75 Tetragrammaton, 115, 158, 231 theatres, 41–45, 50–57, 135, 138, 142, 191– 92, 217–23 See also anatomy theatres; playhouses thieves, 284, 290–91 Thompson, John, 281–82 three-legged mare. See gallows Titian, 71, 74 Tooley, Charles, 286 Trapham, Thomas, 145, 149–51 treason, 145, 273 high, 34–35, 273, 283–85, 287 petty, 34–35, 265 treatment of bodies in anatomy theatres, 31 trials, 32–33, 39 Tyburn gallows, 12–14, 34–35, 136, 138, 149, 194, 266–67 Tyburn riots, 13n, 57n, 103, 192, 265–67, 300–01 unclothed bodies, 78–79 United Company of Barbers and Surgeons, 12, 20, 294 vagina as penis thesis, 78n, 198 Valverde de Hamusco, Juan, 77n, 83n Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano, 84, 85, 88–89, 90 Vavasour, Anne, 23 Vesalius, Andreas, 68–75, 78, 83, 85, 98– 99n, 203, 241 De humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome (Epitome), 67

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De humani corporis libri septum (Fabrica), 67, 92, 142–43 Vicary, Thomas, 20n, 64n, 67–68 Vitruvius, 75 The Wardens Great Accompt Book, 148, 161, 194, 200 Ware, Isaac, 49, 140 Waters, Samuel, 266–67 Watt, Francis, 36 wax figures, 7, 130n Webster, John, 102, 106–08, 115–20, 122– 31, 228 The Duchess of Malfi, 106–08, 120, 122– 23, 132, 229, 238; ‘Antonio’, 120, 122–23, 125, 128–30; ‘Bosola’, 123, 125, 129, 131; ‘Cariola’, 122, 128–29 The White Devil, 71, 102, 106–08, 111, 130, 132, 228; ‘Cardinal Monticelso’, 71, 102, 106, 113, 116, 122, 128–29; ‘Ferdinand’ 122, 127–31; ‘Flamineo’, 109, 118–19, 128; ‘Vittoria Corombona’, 71, 102, 106, 108–09, 111–13, 116–19, 123 Whiston, John, 61n whores, 71, 102, 106, 116–18, 132 Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester, 216 Wise, John, 286 witness statements. See depositions

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Index women ‘benefit of belly’, 37, 186, 279 crimes, 32, 35–36, 168, 273–80 dependence on men, 220–22 hanging, 167–71 pleas by, 274, 278–80 portrayal by boys, 109, 198, 220, 224n, 228, 292 pregnant, 84, 85, 86, 94, 113, 172, 244 property rights, 78 sexuality, 92, 97–98, 109, 114, 117, 181–82, 198 as surgeons, 200–01 See also female body Wood, Anthony, 149 Wood, George, 282 Woodward, Jennifer, 7 Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons, 8, 11, 19–20, 25, 194–95, 247 Anatomy Theatre, 26, 45, 49, 58, 135– 36 Audit Books, 194 Library, 60–65 Wright, Richard, 285 Yates, Frances, 19 yew tree as symbol of eternal life, 111 Young, James, 202–03 Young, Robert, 283

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A BOUT THE A UTHOR

Kate Cregan is a Fellow of the Department of English Literary Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Since finishing her PhD in 1999 she has completed two postdoctoral fellowships: first, an institutional fellowship at Monash University, and second, an Australian Research Council Discovery Postdoctoral Fellowship at the RMIT University. She is the author of The Sociology of the Body: Mapping the Abstraction of Embodiment (London: Sage, 2006) and Key Concepts in Body and Society (London: Sage, forthcoming), and in addition to the current work has written on matters as diverse as the globalization of understandings of medical embodiment, the commemoration of non-combatants in times of violent conflict, the implementation of community development initiatives in Papua New Guinea, and issues surrounding inter-country adoption.

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L ATE M EDIEVAL AND E ARLY M ODERN S TUDIES

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in Series Contextualizing the Renaissance: Returns to History, ed. by Albert H. Tricomi (1999) Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and Its Afterlife; Essays in Honor of John Freccero, ed. by Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish (2000) Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (2001) Ian Robertson, Tyranny under the Mantle of St Peter: Pope Paul II and Bologna (2002) Stephen Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (2005) Rituals, Images, and Words: Varieties of Cultural Expression in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by F. W. Kent and Charles Zika (2006) Camilla Russell, Giulia Gonzaga and the Religious Controversies of Sixteenth-Century Italy (2006) Stefan Bauer, The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s ‘Lives of the Popes’ in the Sixteenth Century (2006) Practices of Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Megan Cassidy-Welch and Peter Sherlock (2008) Andrew James Johnston, Performing the Middle Ages from ‘Beowulf’ to ‘Othello’ (2008)

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In Preparation Gunnar W. Knutsen, Servants of Satan and Masters of Demons

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