Erin Sullivan

“The forms of things unknown”: Shakespeare and the rise of the live broadcast

“This has never happened before. The immediacy, the sense of being there, is unlike any experience you have ever known. This is the theatre of the future, taking shape before your eyes today.” —Richard Burton, promotional trailer for his “Electronovision” Hamlet, 1964 What is theater, if not the experience of “being there?” Of sharing the same space as the actors, of merging oneself into an audience, of enacting the rights of ritual? Such performance, Peggy Phelan has famously argued, “occurs over a time which will not be repeated” (146). It is fundamentally about what is happening now, right here, so much so that we might even say that it becomes a verb: theater is an act of doing, and we are part of it. But what happens when the very notion of “being there” starts to shift, when it is possible to stay in one place and yet move from here to the theater and back again with the push of a button or the tap of a screen? Are we there, and is what we’re doing still theater, or are we experiencing something so different that the form itself begins to rupture, producing what can only be thought of as new performances and “new texts” (Parsons 101)?1 Such questions have taken on new urgency in recent years with the rapid rise in theater broadcasting worldwide. Since 2009, the National Theatre in London has beamed a selection of its season to cinema audiences across the globe, resulting in what can only be thought of as a paradigm shift in theatergoing practices. Thousands of people still flock to the Southbank every month to see an NT production live and in person, but at least as many head to movie theaters around the world to

Culture, Literature, and the History of Medicine

Raymond Williams famously wrote that ‘culture’ was one of the two or three hardest words to define in the English language. That being true, it should come as little surprise to academics that defining ‘cultural history’, or the history of culture, isn’t much easier. Like ‘culture’, ‘cultural history’ can apply to many different kinds of things – the history of cultural production, the history of cultural representations, the history of cultural belief, the history of cultural processes – and the aims and methods for each of these potential areas of study are by no means clear. How, for instance, do you chart the progress of a cultural representation such as ‘The Leper’, attending to the social, moral, and political connotations that shape it, while avoiding the suggestion that such a representation was uniformly accepted across an entire group of people living in a particular time and place (an entity sometimes referred to as a ‘culture’)? Likewise, how might an historian investigate the history of a cultural process such as the rituals surrounding death and dying; what kinds of sources should be used, what kinds of assumptions avoided, what kinds of questions asked?

Book Reviews: Milton and Maternal Mortality

John Milton is not a poet well known for his kindness towards women. Despite his engaging, arguably feminist rendering of Eve in Paradise Lost, the historical Milton and his well-documented antagonisms with the women in his life have often clouded readers’ perceptions of this difficult, though brilliant, early modern writer. There is the fact that his first wife, Mary Powell, moved back in with her parents for three years after just two months of marriage with him; the long and bitter legal suit that he pursued with Mary’s mother concerning a debt between her late husband and his father; his unclear stance on women’s education (he taught his daughters to read several foreign languages, but not to understand them); and finally his famously vexed relationships with his surviving children, all women, each of whom he excluded from his will. Given these much-discussed biographical issues, a book on Milton’s interest in female childbed suffering may come as somewhat of a surprise. Indeed, Louis Schwartz is careful at the outset of his monograph to indicate that, while it is probably true that ‘Milton did not really care about women’s oppression, he did care about women’s suffering’ (p. 2). This suffering, Schwartz claims, linked directly to Milton’s interest in theodicy, a subject that would preoccupy him for much of his writing life and become one of the central concerns of his great Christian epic, Paradise Lost. Though all forms of human suffering, Schwartz suggests, could be seen within Milton’s religious worldview as just punishment for mankind’s sins, he convincingly argues that childbed suffering and its all too frequent result in maternal mortality particularly troubled Milton. That women suffered so much more than men in the fulfilment of God’s commandment to ‘be fruitful and multiply’, even considering Eve’s role in the Fall, was difficult for the writer to understand and accept. Such unease, Schwartz claims, emerged both from Milton’s intellectual engagement with theological questions, as well as from his more personal experience of maternal death. Two of his wives, Mary Powell and Katherine Woodcock, died after complications in childbirth, with their children dying in quick succession after them (in the case of Katherine, the child to which she had just given birth died shortly after her, while Mary’s new baby survived, but her one-year-old son John did not, allegedly as a result of being placed with a negligent nurse; Schwartz suggests that John’s death would also have been seen as a consequence of his mother’s passing, albeit indirectly). Such experiences, Schwartz argues, exposed Milton to the sorrows of childbed suffering as well as to the world of female medicine and obstetrics, all of which he maintains feature centrally in several key passages of Milton’s poetry. Schwartz contends that Milton was unusual in making childbirth and maternal mortality a subject for poetry, and, in his analysis of this literature, he identifies a distinctive shift from Milton’s early writing to his later literary endeavours; while works like ‘On Shakespear’ and ‘An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’ in some ways idealise maternal suffering, reading it as powerful metaphor for the act of creativity and corporeal transcendence, later treatments, including Sonnet 23 and Paradise Lost, offer more ambiguous conclusions. Such works, Schwartz frequently emphasises, were written after the deaths of Milton’s wives, and he argues that grief as well as guilt shape the scope and vision of these later literary efforts. Here poetry and childbirth are not presented as quite so similar: though both are creative, generative activities, which may very well move the human subject towards the divine, the dangers associated with writing are understood to be far less immediate and persistent than those linked to maternity (a realisation that Schwartz argues resulted in ‘guilt-laden relief’ for Milton [p. 193]). Such conclusions are of interest not only to Milton scholars, but also to those working more generally on early modern gender relations, reproduction, life cycles, and the relationship between literary, medical, and religious practices. Historians may find some of Schwartz’s close readings a bit ponderous (he is heavy on detailed philological analysis), but they should also find his integrated study of medical and religious beliefs highly informative and carefully argued. Though centrally interested in Milton and his literary output, Schwartz’s book highlights both the worldly and spiritual crises maternal mortality posed for all early modern families, helping readers understand how the presence of suffering in life both reinforced religious explanations as well as resisted them.

Book Review: Lovesickness and gender in early modern English literature

The frontispiece of Robert Burton’s The anatomy of melancholy (1621) offers readers a visual introduction to the diversity of conditions included under the banner of “melancholy” in the seventeenth century. Engravings of different melancholic types adorn the page, including the brooding, artfully dishevelled inamorato, or melancholic lover, whose courtier’s clothes and hat pulled low signal his lovesick condition. Importantly, the inamorato, like all the melancholic figures in Burton’s frontispiece, is a man, and much scholarship on melancholy in recent years has questioned the extent to which medical, scholarly and popular discourses about the condition accounted for female affliction. Lesel Dawson’s study of lovesickness and gender contributes to this growing field, investigating the ways in which women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England found themselves bound up in different and at times conflicting ideas about melancholic love. Drawing on recent studies of women, madness and illness, such as Carol Thomas Neely’s Distracted subjects (2004), Helen King’s The disease of virgins (2004), and to some extent Marion Wells’s The secret wound (2007), Dawson explores the problems the female body posed to early modern writers, who tended to blame any aberrant behaviour on the malign influence of the uterus. As Dawson demonstrates, however, popular depictions of women’s lovesickness did not always relegate the condition to a product of an unstable and ultimately inferior body; in much of the drama from the period, female characters subverted physiological explanations of their lovesickness and participated in more spiritually ennobling discourses about melancholic love. In her opening chapter, which explores the historical context primarily through medical considerations of melancholy, Dawson helpfully identifies how different “medico-philosophical systems” coexisted in the period and offered diverse explanations for lovesickness. In both women and men, debilitating love could be described as a result of humoral imbalance, mental fixation, sexual frustration and/or visual fascination, depending on the doctors or philosopher’s point of view. Though these descriptions reflected different disease aetiologies derived from the writings of Galen, Aristotle, Avicenna, and Ficino, among others, many doctors and writers appear not to have seen such differences as problematic. On the contrary, Dawson argues that this eclectically mingled intellectual tradition resulted in a “rich vocabulary … for imagining erotic passion” (pp. 19–20), and her ensuing chapters explore the different ways in which writers—most notably playwrights—put this vocabulary to use. Dawson’s identification of different paradigms for understanding and interpreting lovesickness extends through her study, which after the first chapter focuses centrally on female lovesickness. Here she considers Juliana Schiesari’s claim that, for men, melancholy is “a privileged state of inspired genius”, whereas for women the condition is “negative and pathological” and centrally linked to a disordered body (quoted in Dawson, pp. 92, 96). In her chapter on ‘A Thirsty Womb’, she demonstrates how commonly held beliefs about lovesickness, green sickness, hysteria and uterine fury did indeed interpret female love as a passive, organically induced state, but in the following two chapters she argues that melancholic women, both historically and in literature, also used their condition to exert agency in their personal lives. Particularly through the more spiritually based discourse of Neoplatonism, Dawson shows how women resisted (though not always successfully) the physiological explanations of female love and passion dominant in medical thought. Dawson’s final chapters look at the cures for lovesickness advocated in medical and popular literature, and it is here that her strongest theoretical claims emerge. Particularly in her closing section on “the menstrual cure”—which discusses how writers advised healers to expose besotted men to the menstrual blood of their beloved in order to induce revulsion—Dawson highlights the misogyny inherent in much of the contemporary literature concerning the female body. As is evident in her title, Dawson’s study is interested centrally in the literary exploration of lovesickness, but her insights are relevant to any scholars interested in gender, sexuality and the body. By working with both traditional historical and literary sources, she clearly demonstrates how medical ideas are always in conversation with their surrounding culture, which at various times may affirm, complicate, and also refute officially recognized understandings of disease and disability.

Book Reviews: Reading sensations in early modern England

At 138 pages before notes and bibliography, Reading sensations in early modern England is a slim volume, but a valuable one. In six taut chapters, Katharine A Craik adds much to our understanding of gentlemanly reading practices in early modern England, explaining how these experiences (like so many during the time) were caught up in both acts of self-fashioning and questions of embodiment. Craiks study builds strongly upon recent work in early modern literary studies concerned with the humoral body, including that of Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt. She responds nimbly to the central claims of both scholars, exploring at once how the porous boundaries of the body were susceptible to outside influences—such as diet, environment, and, in this case, reading material—and also how contemporary ideas about gentlemanly behaviour required aspirational men to regulate carefully their physiological and emotional responses to such influences. In her first chapter, Craik provides an overview of early modern theories of the passions, using texts such as Thomas Wrights The passions of the mind in general (1606) to trace “the overlapping histories of reading, bodily sensation and gentlemanly conduct” during this period (p. 12). Arguing that acts of reading were both private experiences and “performative activities” (p. 13), she explores the ways in which reading material could alter the physical makeup of the reader (through the humours via the passions) as well as the ways in which gentlemen readers were expected outwardly to demonstrate moral and physical mettle through their responses to texts. In chapter two Craik elaborates on the relationship between the general reader and the literary text, examining how contemporary works of rhetorical and literary theory depicted poetry itself as having certain humours and temperaments. Through the interaction between the complexion of the reader and that of the text, positive (but potentially dangerous) reading experiences shaped not just the readers imagination but rather “the entire psychophysical self” (p. 51). In the final four chapters, Craik delves more specifically into particular literary genres and their concomitant emotional responses, paying close attention to how contemporary writers negotiated the delicate balance between constructive and corrupting reading experiences. In chapter three she investigates Sir Philip Sidneys unconventional argument that poetry, rather than history, was the ideal reading material for soldiers, since it encouraged virtuous choler that would inspire them on the battlefield. Chapter four examines the aims of elegy and John Donnes conclusion in The anniversaries (1611–12) and Devotions (1624) that the writing and reading of funerary verses in fact only exacerbated sadness and despair, while chapter five offers an engaging analysis of how Thomas Coryats Crudities (1611) uniquely developed the familiar trope of “bibliophagia” (the consumption and digestion of books) into an argument for the value of reading for pleasure. In chapter six Craik considers the emerging genre of pornography, arguing that such literature was defined less through its erotic content and more through the unsettling physiological changes it could work in its readers. Intriguingly, such worrisome effects did not necessarily include sexual arousal, but rather were more linked to bewildering “sensations such as rapture, transport, and the disorientation caused by losing oneself in fiction” (p. 138). Indeed, in each of the examples of reading Craik explores, it seems that the possibility of losing mastery and control over ones passions, humours, and—ultimately—oneself was the gravest danger of all. Such reading experiences threatened early modern ideas about the proper conduct and comportment of the gentleman, suggesting that emotional and physiological self-governance might be beyond the capabilities, as well as the desires, of even the most distinguished men. Readers coming to Reading sensations with a firmly historical point-of-view may find themselves wishing for more contextual information, such as a survey of library holdings among the gentlemen Craik writes about or a broader discussion of literacy during the period. Craik does not get into much specific detail about the production and reception of the texts she examines, but such omissions cannot really be deemed a fault as they are beyond the scope of her project. At heart a literary study, her book excels when offering close, interpretative readings of the texts she has chosen to discuss, and its clear argument and elegant execution make it a rewarding read.

Book review: Melancholy and the care of the soul Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007

ROGER SMITH since early retirement in 1998, is Reader Emeritus in History of Science, Lancaster University, and Consultant, Institute for History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. He has published on the history and historiography of the brain sciences and of the human sciences, including The Norton History of the Human Sciences (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997, published in the U. K. as The Fontana History of the Human Sciences) and Being Human: Historical Knowledge and the Creation of Human Nature (Manchester University Press, 2007).

Book Review: Murder after death: literature and anatomy in early modern England

Murder after death is a study of anatomical knowledge, practice, and reference in early modern England, as explored in the plays, poems, sermons, and stories of the period. It contributes to a growing field of scholarship interested in understanding the history of the body not only through the study of scientific discovery and medical progress, but also through the close reading of the contemporary and often popular literature that seized upon such advances for its source material. The book begins with a consideration of the impact continental anatomical works like Andreas Vesaliuss De humani corporis fabrica had on the English literary imagination. In particular, Sugg emphasizes how the methodology and investigative impulses of anatomy presented new rhetorical opportunities for writers. In an appendix to the book, he provides a bibliography of 120 English “anatomies” published between 1576 and 1650, and this empirical evidence provides strong support for his ensuing argument about the relationship, both etymological and epistemological, between anatomy and analysis. In the practice of both, he argues, investigators split and sort their subjects into sections for scrutiny, incrementally asserting mastery over the entire corpse / corpus. Both are involved in a quest for knowledge, its limits, and its control, and Sugg frequently returns to this point as he takes his readers on an eclectic and enjoyable journey through topics as various as early modern stage properties, the drug trade, pornography, and vivisection. The first two chapters investigate anatomys links to aggression as expressed through revenge and cannibalism. Through vivid examples, Sugg explores how writers used extreme violence not only as a means of representing spectacular physical torture, but also as a device through which a victims soul could be controlled and conquered. The following two chapters pursue questions of body–soul sympathy more explicitly, suggesting that while anatomy initially reinforced religious ideas about the soul, over time it came to endorse a view of the body as separate, secular, and mechanistic. In the final chapter, Sugg returns to the subject of violence, considering how the practice of vivisection or “live anatomy” in this period was both entangled in ontological questions about personal identity and otherness, and also influential in the development of modern medical science. Though engagingly written throughout, one of the limitations of the book is its failure to set out and stick to what parts of anatomical discourse it wishes to explore. Sugg covers an admirable list of topics as they relate to anatomy, but at times his discursiveness weakens his argument, resulting in a sense that everything, from knowledge to power to violence to sexuality, can be read as an expression of anatomy. Furthermore, given the vast amount of scholarship in the past fifteen years that has concerned itself with unravelling the relationships among anatomy, literature, and the body, it is unfortunate that Sugg does not introduce his book with a review of the field and his place in it. Such an undertaking might have helped stave off the inevitable suggestion that the work follows too closely in the wake of Jonathan Sawdays The body emblazoned (1995), which over a decade ago made similar claims about the affiliation between literary and dissective enquiry in early modern English culture. Still, Suggs work offers its own insights, mining lesser-known dramas like Henry Chettles The tragedy of Hoffman and John Stephens’s Cynthias revenge for new explorations of anatomy and its metaphorical and literal uses. His chapter on cannibalism keenly probes the incongruity between early modern tales of New World savagery and the Old World belief that the consumption of mummified human flesh was a useful medical treatment. Finally, his detailed appendices illustrate the scope for anatomical rhetoric in early modern writings and will be of great use to other scholars in the field.