Though the title of these ten essays emphasizes the early modern theater, the collection is by no means a comprehensive consideration of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Shakespeare's plays are the focus of eight essays, and his poem The Rape of Lucrece is the subject of a ninth; Ben Jonson's Volpone and Sejanus are central to the other contribution. The collection, which had its inception in a Shakespeare Association of America seminar, seeks to show “the conjunction of theatrical and medical discourse” (xii). The editors contend in their introduction that during the early modern period “theater and medicine are mutually constitutive” (xi); the essays, in their words, explore the “interrelationships,” “representations,” and “resemblances.” Each of the pieces affirms the growing scholarly interest in medicine and literature; not all, however, support equally well the edition's premise of an integral relationship between the stage and contemporary medicine.
The collection's strength is its medical context. The authority of Galen and the humoral theory remained dominant throughout this period, but the essays also acknowledge the growing challenge of the Swiss physician Paracelsus and the implications of his radically different approach to diagnosis and cure. Carol Thomas Neely develops the ways in which the humoral complexion associated with lovesickness, when linked with prevailing notions of Mediterranean hot blood and “transgressive love,” reinforced an emerging sense of national differences that would, she concludes, “eventually become racialized” (66). Catherine Belling establishes the multiple significance of bloodletting commonly prescribed in Galenic practice for the imbalance of humors that creates plethora, or a harmful excess, and suggests how the humoral theory influenced social as well as medical discourse, providing writers with analogies that were not entirely “figurative.” The Paracelsan belief that illness came not from a humoral imbalance but from an outward cause, an invasive “seed,” led some early modern medical practitioners to reconsider the extent to which individuals could regulate their physical well-being, a concern that Jonathan Gil Harris finds especially relevant to the etiology of syphilis. While much of his essay concerns what he deems the pathology of national and international commerce, at issue medically is the extent to which the afflicted could have avoided disease that Galenists attribute to appetite and Paracelsans to external forces beyond control. Stephanie Moss believes that the Paracelsan shift to empirical diagnosis from the Galenic tendency to codify complements both in theory and in practice the invasive view of disease; fundamental to her exploration of the phenomenological implications of illness is the relationship between the body and the “material world.” Both she and Lynette Hunter are sensitive to contending Galenic and Paracelsan attitudes that govern physician-patient relationships and determine differing understandings of agency and subjectivity. Among the pharmacology available to both practices of medicine, Louise Noble singles out the healing properties of ingested mummy, or human remains, and its prescription for epilepsy, which figures prominently in her account of the period's interest in the therapeutic virtues of “fille vièrge,” the virginal female corpse. Other essays by Tanya Pollard and Barbara Howard Traister more generally consider the status of the medical practitioners reflected in the emerging role of the London College of Physicians and in early modern perceptions of the sometimes questionable distinction between doctor and quack. The profession of medicine is further tested in the contemporary controversy about the hysterical fits of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Glover, which, according to Kaara L. Peterson, raised pressing questions about the hysteria's medical or demonic origins. Less related, perhaps because it has little basis in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medicine, is Imtiaz Habib's attempt to offer a poststructuralist reading of an Elizabethan medical psychology.
When the essays’ authors turn from the context of medicine to the stage, the design of the collection falters as paradigms and tropes seem forced and the medical and literary relationships are not always illuminating. The opening sentence of Hunter's interpretation of Romeo and Juliet, for example, asserts the tragedy “is a play overtly about contesting models of medical discourse” (171), but her reading of the Galenic and Paracelsan implications is strained, the discourse less overt than the initial contention. Prince Escalus is above all the ruler of Verona and at best only remotely “like the Galenic doctor” (176), and it is difficult to see in Friar Laurence's characterization as a “ghostly Friar” and in his failure as a counselor either the “serious physician” or Paracelsan practitioner. Questionable, too, is Pollard's conclusion from two plays of Jonson that a “cultural anxiety” about medicine parallels a concern about the “seductive deceptions” of the theater (38). Volpone is without doubt preoccupied with intoxicating, deceptive acting, and Jonson exposes the mountebank's medical sham, but it does not follow that the most professional of playwrights intends any pejorative link between drama and medicine. Also debatable are the appropriateness and effectiveness of the Paracelsan relationship between inner and outer that offers Moss a way of considering the tragedy of Othello and that gives Harris a means to link syphilis and international commerce in The Comedy of Errors. At issue here and elsewhere is the extent to which interpretation depends on analogy rather than context. Thus Othello's tragic fall “can be investigated as a shift from a Paracelsan to a Galenic body, from a subject to an object” (153), though this basis is doubtful and the investigation itself yields no new insight into his tragedy. Symptomatic of a troubling tendency are Peterson's reading of The Winter's Tale and Habib's approach to The Tempest. Even if Shakespeare had in mind the debate surrounding Glover's hysteria, the play's complexly moving conclusion—the magic of the theatrical moment—is at odds with the contention that Paulina is mocking, satirical, and witty in an “elaborate send-up of the controversy” (20). And while seeing the relationship between physician and patient as “colonizer and colonized” gives political dimension to Habib's terms “analyst” and “analysands,” it seems a modern imposition rather than a reflection of Elizabethan psychology and does not add to the many colonial interpretations of the Prospero-Caliban conflict.
Ultimately the value of the collection lies less in the “conjunction” than in the separate discourses of medicine and theater; there are, however, exceptions. Noble's and Moss's different interpretations of Desdemona's handkerchief, when fraught with medical implications, illuminate the significances both Othello and the play invest in it. The altering attitude toward doctors and healers Traister traces in Shakespeare's plays and the distinctions Neely draws between the potentially racial in Shakespeare's and Thomas Middleton's depictions of the Mediterranean world are worthwhile, as are the implications of bloodletting that Belling reveals in her reading of the only nondramatic piece in the edition. And whether or not the link between commerce and syphilis does exist, Harris does call attention once again to the fact that the dramatic significance of this disease alters later in Shakespeare's career. There is certainly value in engaging the plays from other perspectives, questionable though they may be, but on the whole this collection leaves uncertain the relationship between Elizabethan and Jacobean medicine and theater.
