Drugs, medicine, and the early modern stage.

Garner, Stanton B., Jr.

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England, by Tanya Pollard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. X + 211. Cloth $74.00.

Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama, by William Kerwin. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Pp. x + 290. Cloth $34.95.

IN 1996 Keir Elam remarked on "the corporeal turn" in Renaissance studies. (1) Ten years later we can appreciate how often this turn has been directed toward the relationship between theater and medical discourse and practice. The last two years alone have seen the publication of seven books in this area offering new perspectives on mercantilism and disease, pharmaceutical culture, diagnosis and cure, mental illness, and early modern anatomy. (2) That theater serves as the medium for these studies is no surprise. From the medical underpinnings of Aristotle's theory of katharsis through the anatomy theaters of Andreas Vesalius and the influence of humoral medicine on Elizabethan and Jacobean characterization, the two disciplines demonstrated a shared preoccupation with questions of embodiment, observation, and somatic representation. If theater is etymologically a "seeing place," then the modes of attention and diagnosis it engages are inescapably entwined with medicine's "theaters" of the body.

Tanya Pollard's Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England and William Kerwin's Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama examine the impact on English Renaissance drama of a changing medical profession and its often contending regimes of treatment. Pollard's book explores the representations of drugs in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama by foregrounding the medical and cultural debates within and surrounding early modern pharmacology. Kerwin's book covers some of the same ground, but in its treatment of medical practitioners and treatments, it raises broader historical and methodological questions of how one studies the medical in history and culture. In the end, both authors carry their concern with medical developments and controversies into the nature of theater itself.

Pollard approaches the theater in terms of a series of radical shifts in the pharmaceutical field of early modern medicine. The number and uses of medical remedies expanded in the late sixteenth century as New World explorers introduced Europe to medicinal herbs, including Guiacum sanctum, a tropical plant used to treat syphilis (which they also brought with them). In direct challenge to the humoral therapeutics of Galenism, Paracelsus and his followers introduced new, often toxic, chemicals into medical use. This crisis of professional authority contributed to a deepening ambivalence about drugs and other preparations. Remedial medicines could turn out to be poisonous, poisons could also have curative effects, and the same substance could work both ways depending on its prescription and use.

As Pollard suggests, the ambiguous, often dangerous, effects of drugs engaged a range of issues for playwrights, including the integrity of borders, bodily and otherwise; the relationship between the somatic and the mental; the unreliability of appearances; and the points of convergence between "the imagination and the body, the literary and the scientific, the magical and the rational" (22). In addition, the controversies surrounding drugs and their effects provided a discursive context for sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century debates about the operations of theater on its spectators. "A chorus of voices--from both attackers and defenders of the theater, as well as from playwrights themselves--saw the theater not only as a vehicle for representing drugs and poisons, but as a kind of drug or poison itself" (9). Pollard's book explores this pharmacological conception of the audience-stage relationship by discussing a range of drugs, remedies, and applications in relation to specific dramatic texts.

Chapter 1 considers drugs, poisons, and duplicitous doctors in John Webster's The White Devil and Ben Jonson's Sejanus and Volpone. Because these subjects have been treated by earlier scholars, the readings in the chapter have a familiar ring to them: Vittoria Corombona is presented as "a powerful but volatile medicine, intimately invasive, with dangerous side-effects" (37); the medical parody in Volpone's mountebank performance "identifies the dangers of medical charlatanism with the pleasures and perils of the theater itself" (45); while the notion of corrosive medicine serves as a figure for Jonson's moral and satiric aims. Chapter 2 offers a more unexpected and nuanced reading of sleeping potions in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. The fact that such potions operate in both remedial and harmful ways suggests that plays, for Shakespeare, are "misleadingly soothing potions that lull spectators into dream-like escapes, with uncertain consequences" (55). The proximity between sleep and death in Romeo and Juliet suggests the uncertain boundaries between the two states, and this reflects the phenomenological indistinguishability of the two in audience perception (it is hard to tell a "sleeping" character from a "dead" one). Through a provocative extension, Pollard links this indeterminacy with the ambiguous generic status of Shakespeare's love tragedies, which mix elements of comedy into their overall tragic structure.

Chapter 3 offers a fascinating discussion of cosmetics, which were closely allied to medical remedies in early modern thought. Because cosmetics were often linked with poisons (most cosmetics were made of mercury sublimate and ceruse, or white lead) and their operations were usually invisible, they created "a crisis of permeability, penetration and contagion" (83). Inevitably, face-painting was linked by moralists to other forms of contamination, concealment, and problematic interpretation: "concealing true faces behind false, they undermined the trustworthiness of bodily signs, leading to a broader crisis of semiotic reliability" (88). The extension to theater was a natural one, and cosmetics came to embody for antitheatricalists and playwrights together the dangerous seduction of dramatic performance. Chapter 4 explores the operations of this seduction in several plays that feature poisonous female corpses: Massinger's The Second Maiden's Tragedy and The Duke of Milan, as well as The Revenger's Tragedy. In all three plays the theatricality inherent in adornment is associated with the theater's own idolatrous appeal, as spectators are given a vision of the consequence of spectatorship.

Chapter 5 concludes Pollard's investigation of the body's vulnerable boundaries with an analysis of poison, language, and the ear in Hamlet. Pollard's reading of the ear in Shakespeare's play, in conjunction with Renaissance writings on the ear, links "early modern concerns about the integrity of bodily boundaries" (129) with the period's often physical conception of language's power over subjects and bodies. Here, too, the link with theater is crucial, and if Pollard is not the first to note the connection between poison's invasive operations and the effect of Hamlet's "Mousetrap" on Claudius--or the implications of this for the operation of Shakespeare's own dramatic creation--her analysis achieves its own originality through the pharmaceutical contexts she foregrounds.

It is not uncommon for books that turn a play's thematic preoccupations into reflections on the medium itself to overstate such connections, and Pollard's book does not avoid this temptation. The claims about theater feel strained at times, especially in chapter 4 ("If the Duke [in The Revenger's Tragedy] represents the audience, are we, the play's external spectators, tortured like him with the fatal spectacle of Gloriana?" [119]). But this is a minor reservation about an otherwise useful and informative book. Pollard's exploration of the "newly emerging world of ambivalent pharmacy" (147) directs our attention to an aspect of English Renaissance drama that otherwise exists on the periphery. Like the best examples of somatic criticism in recent Renaissance studies, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks us to attend to the intense corporeality of Renaissance dramatic writing. As Pollard notes of the plays she discusses, "The worlds they present, steeped in medicines, ointments, drugs, paints, and poisons, insist that words, plays, and selves are all material, tangible, embodied presences" (148).

The theatrical, social, and discursive landscapes of Beyond the Body are embodied, as well, though William Kerwin's interests in this embodiment are different than Pollard's. As his title suggests, Kerwin explores the limits of a purely medical approach to the body as a historical entity. Unlike traditional studies of Renaissance medicine, Beyond the Body adopts the more socially directed approach of more recent medical historiography. This kind of history, Kerwin notes, "is often called 'externalist' to signify the importance of nonmedical history in shaping medical activities in contrast to 'internalist' history, which studies medicine or science as discrete bodies of knowledge" (5). Rather than analyzing the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in terms of medical theory alone, Kerwin examines the ways in which nonmedical controversies, economic factors, and historical trends determine the meanings of medical culture, medical practice, and their representations in Renaissance drama. As Kerwin writes in his opening chapter, "Medical stories are always also social stories, and in this book I present five case studies of how medicine's formation was a social contest in which different forces in society created multiple forms of the medical" (1). While Beyond the Body is detailed in its examination of medical debates and practices, its critical gaze is ultimately directed toward "group encounters that precede but shape embodiment" (vii).

A closer look at two of Kerwin's "case studies" suggests the methodological benefits of this approach. Chapter 2 addresses the influence on Renaissance dramatic texts of the pharmaceutical culture examined by Pollard. But whereas Pollard focuses on the operations of individual drugs and remedies and their metatheatrical appropriation, Kerwin explores the changing professions of apothecaries and alchemists in the context of "new markets, new class relations, and a new sense of the liquidity of wealth" (18). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, apothecaries developed from a medieval guild to a medical profession able to take advantage of an expanding market economy and a rapidly developing urban world. The Friar and the unnamed Mantuan apothecary in Romeo and Juliet represent two historical moments in this transformation, and their juxtaposition underscores Shakespeare's skeptical attitude toward both drug cultures. Alchemists underwent similar transformation during the early modern period. Paracelsian alchemy paved the way for the emergence of modern chemistry and, in so doing, encouraged new market practices. Not only were chemical ideas "nurtured by modernizing economic forces" (46), but the new alchemy was also framed in terms of Puritan Reformation ideas (Paracelsus was referred to as the "Luther of Medicine"). These extramedical contexts allow powerful readings of Jonson's Mercury Vindicated from the Alchemists at Court and The Alchemist, which Kerwin sees as an investigation into alchemy's association with economic and religious innovation. As Kerwin argues, alchemy in Jonson's plays is not merely a metaphoric or thematic device; rather, it is part of a cultural formation that includes a broader sphere of economic and religious meanings.

Chapter 3 considers the social and theatrical presence of women healers in early modern England. As revisionist historians have demonstrated, women practitioners were central to health during this period, even going so far as to practice surgery. Predictably, these women were denounced as unlearned and dangerous by medical authorities, including the College of Physicians, which sought--usually unsuccessfully--to curtail their practice. (The efforts of the College to consolidate its medical authority in the face of emerging practitioners during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is one of the central narratives of Beyond the Body, and Kerwin works insightfully with the College's annals and other writings.) Given the prevalence of women healers in London and rural England, it is striking how seldom they appear on the English Renaissance stage. When they do, their portrayal differs from their denigration in official accounts. In Lyly's Mother Bombie, Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, and Hey wood's The Wise Woman of Hogsdon, women healers are given "a strikingly social authority" (64). In keeping with the range of contemporary social narratives in which these figures were described, playwrights "give voice to this ambiguous social position, drawing on the struggles of the historical woman healer to create a symbol of women struggling to work" (96).

The book's remaining chapters explore the intersection of medical and social discourses in other areas of early modern medical culture. Chapter 4 examines the importance of surgery for early modern notions of inwardness, surface, and the individual. As the cultural function of surgery expanded in the sixteenth century, surgeons assumed a central role in cultural negotiations about the line between private and public domains. In an engaging parallel to Pollard's analysis, chapter 5 considers the relationship of theatricality to professional medical identity. Whereas Elizabethan and Jacobean physicians used the language of antitheatricality to stigmatize their competitors for being "mere actors" (133), dramatists used the figure of the histrionic charlatan to describe members of the medical profession themselves. By the Caroline period attitudes toward acting had changed, and a new model emerged: that of the doctor-scientist, or virtuoso, who signaled his increasing social prestige through the performance of cures and social experiments. Chapter 6 turns to patients themselves and the ways in which early modern subjects defined their identities in medical terms. In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare satirizes the anchoring of identity through humoral categories and the discourses of spiritual healing. In keeping with the argument of the book as a whole, Kerwin's Twelfth Night debunks medicalized diagnosis that neglects the role of social determinations of lived experience.

Beyond the Body is an impressive contribution to the fields of Renaissance medical culture and theater. The link between these fields is stronger in some discussions than it is in others, and the analyses of medical developments and controversies are sometimes more illuminating than the play analyses they support. Moreover, Kerwin's insistence on the innovation of his externalist approach is not always fair to earlier scholarship on Renaissance medicine, much of which is aware of broader disciplinary, economic, and social developments even if it does not choose to foreground these. But the book's rhetorical strategies do not detract from its accomplishment. By taking advantage of the most recent trends in medical historiography, Kerwin offers a powerful account of the early modern body, its emergent technologies, and its complicated representation on social and institutional stages. Like Pollard's book, it reminds us how different medical practices could be in early modern Europe and how often these practices mixed the scientific with the magical; Shakespeare's age is never stranger than when it theorizes and treats the body. At the same time, its account of the crisis of medical authority that characterized the English Renaissance and the changes that medicine underwent as a result of the age's economic transformation establishes antecedents and surprising correlations to our own age of medical specialization, technological development, and alternative therapies. Four hundred years after Jonson's alchemists took the stage, the questions and possibilities raised by a medicalized culture are as urgent as ever.

Notes

1. Keir Elam, "'In What Chapter of His Bosom?': Reading Shakespeare's Bodies," in Terence Hawkes, ed., Alternative Shakespeares, vol. 2 (New York: Routledge, 1996), 143.

2. In addition to the books reviewed here, see Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare's England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson, eds., Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); Ken Jackson, Separate Theaters: Bethlem ("Bedlam") Hospital and the Shakespearean Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005); Hillary M. Nunn, Staging Anatomies: Dissection and Spectacle in Early Stuart Tragedy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Maurizio Calbi, Approximate Bodies: Gender and Power in Early Modern Drama and Anatomy (New York: Routledge, 2005).

Reviewer: STANTON B. GARNER JR.