Kaara L. Peterson

Introduction: The Afterlives of Ophelia

In the decades since Elaine Showalter’s groundbreaking essay “Representing Ophelia: Women, Madness, and the Responsibilities of Feminist Criticism” appeared in 1985, Shakespeare’s probably most famous — or notorious — character’s representational life has witnessed even greater expansion.1 Building on what was already, by the mid-1980s, a substantial “afterlife” of the character, Ophelia’s name has been lent to countless more consumer products beyond those enumerated by Carol Solomon Kiefer in her catalogue for the 2001 exhibition The Myth and Madness of Ophelia and by Showalter herself, including the notable example of the Cannon Mills floral bedding named “Ophelia.”2 Between the sheets, since the mid-1980s Ophelia has also acquired an emancipated, Western-style sex life in films by Kenneth Branagh (1996) and Michael Almereyda (2000), her on-screen romances with Hamlet elaborated in titillating bedroom scenes that reveal her liberation from early modern patriarchal constraints on virginity. Plays and novels taking a sensationalist approach to the same topic have been written in her name (The Secret Love-Life of Ophelia); her rather more chaste and innocent girlhood story told; her French face profiled; her neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian, expressionist, surrealist, symbolist, modernist, cubist, postmodernist iterations depicted in the plastic arts; and her avatar created by online Ophelias to fit the “sim skin” of virtual reality communities.3

Elizabeth I’s Virginity and the Body of Evidence: Jonson’s Notorious Crux

In a famous, frequently quoted statement, Ben Jonson claims that Queen Elizabeth I “had a membrana on her which made her uncapable of man.” This essay reinvestigates the basis for Jonson’s 400-year-old crux and, more broadly, argues for the relevance of an unexplored area of critical studies on Elizabeth: what early modern medicine and culture thought about lifelong virginity and its distinctive perils for the queen’s aging body natural. Finally, looking at the inner-circle gossip about Tudor and Stuart queens’ health and various records documenting Elizabeth’s identified illnesses, including hysterica passio, the essay uncovers how virgins’ diseases were thought to afflict Elizabeth over her reign and possibly contribute to her death.

Medical Discourses of Virginity and the Bed-Trick in Shakespearean Drama

Early modern medicine describes the classic virgin’s diseases of lovesickness and greensickness as maladies suffered by ‘virgins fit for a man,’ for which ‘venery is good,’ Nicholas Culpeper explains.1 The existence of the ‘marriage cure’ has gained widespread recognition as an early modern cultural phenomenon especially worth noting, given its social and ideological implications for young virginal women. Of course, lovesickness and greensickness are not the sole gynecological ailments commonly thought to be suffered by young virgins, as a quick survey of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical texts will reveal to readers. When Culpeper alludes to ‘all the symptoms that befall all virgins and women in their wombs, after they are ripe of age,’ he follows centuries of received writing on gynecology, discussing many possible permutations of virgins’ diseases, for ‘It is not to be expressed what miserable diseases women are subject to: both virgins and others from the womb.’2 Virginity and disease are especially, if not exclusively, tied together in the early modern imagination, though the era’s variable means of demonstrating this common bond is no longer always immediately evident to current readers. As this essay will explore, the literary plot device of the bed-trick can be seen as one particular manifestation of the early modern habit of linking female sexuality to virgins’ diseases, a good example of how common medical beliefs leave their traces on the lives of female characters represented in Renaissance drama, namely four plays by Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, and The Two Noble Kinsmen.

Play review: HamletHamlet, directed by LockwoodDoug, Actors’ Shakespeare Project, Church of the Covenant, Boston, USA, 29102016, centre left pew, aisle end (Plates 6a and 6b).

commands, ‘Enter Pirates’. Pirates (Barzin Akhavan and Samuel L. Wick) obligingly clamber up over the rear stage platform, Leonine makes a hasty exit crying an unscripted ‘Oooh!’ and Marina is carried away. This blatantly comic exploitation of the theatrical rescue proves so pleasing that the Guthrie gift shop sells it emblazoned on tee shirts. An alternate tee shirt, designed for the earnestly romantic consumer of Pericles paraphernalia, quotes the Latin motto Thaisa reads from the withered branch that the shipwrecked Pericles hesitantly presents her at first sight: ‘In hac spe vivo, I live in hope’. Together, the mottos reflect Joseph Haj’s directorial approach to the sprawling script as a heart-warming romantic adventure, the stuff of musical comedy. The next play he directs for the Guthrie is South Pacific, and for his second season, he has chosen to take charge of both King Lear and Sunday in the Park with George.

Play Reviews: King Lear, Twelfth Night, the Comedy of Errors, the Tempest, a Midsummer Night's Dream, a Midsummer Night's Dream, the Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, the Taming of the Shrew, a Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Hamlet

of revenge against those he loves most, and the pleasure of his new freedom is drunken brawling with courtiers who are now his mates. However, Hicks’s natural physical elegance, a striking contribution to the success of this production, suggests that a man may have potential beyond his historically constructed public persona. Later, as Lear lurches in and out of madness and grief, Hicks’s graceful strength suggests beauty even in the tragedy of an old man reduced to nakedness. Similarly in Act IV Scene 7, his long white body and the wild meadow flowers that crown his ludic Lear evoke the stillness of sculpture even in the middle of frantic movement. There is a similar quality of underlying quietness in Hicks’s delivery of some of Lear’s most desperate words. He frequently diminishes the sound and fury (“Howl, howl, howl” [V.3.258] and “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” [III.2.1] are almost whispered), choosing instead to emphasise Lear’s personal insights. One of many instances occurs after Goneril and Regan join forces to reject him. He turns abruptly away from them as if looking for another audience and loudly proclaims like a king, “I will do such things” — only to look helplessly around before mumbling to himself, “What they are yet I know not, but they shall be / The terrors of the earth!” (II.4.280-82). His sudden recognition of the scale of his helplessness is shocking. Arguably, King Lear can stand or fall on the central performance, but this production is truly an ensemble achievement. Two sets of juxtaposed performances in particular stand out. The first is the Duke of Kent (Darrell D’Silva) and Earl of Gloucester (Geoffrey Freshwater). D’Silva’s Kent energetically exemplifies the fearlessness and loyalty of a man who is no thinker but who, as the first signs of crisis show themselves, senses his importance to the king as a truth-teller. His strong, muscular figure seems anchored to the earth and is a fitting expression of his moral directness. At the end of the play, spiritual exhaustion drains his voice as he asks, “Is this the promised end?” (V.3.263). His medieval-style roughness is ably complemented by Freshwater’s equivocating Edwardian Gloucester, whose loyalty to the king and conscience are initially compromised by his comfortable and self-regarding affluence. He sucKing Lear, directed by David Farr for the RSC, The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 4 March 2010, left-centre stalls. [See photos, 55]

Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England (review)

tudes toward the Other, women, and sexuality at a pivotal point in French history. This volume will make the text deservedly more accessible. The introduction provides a thoughtful overview. Although Williams’s emphasis on a literal translation occasionally means that nuances are lost, the translation is readable and accurately conveys the impassioned tone of the original. Especially helpful to those who wish to correlate the translation with the French text is that the original page numbers to the 1612 edition are given in square brackets in the text. Explanatory notes, including de Lancre’s own citation information, are provided for all names referred to the text, as well as to quotations. The volume also includes some notes on the translation, a glossary of legal terms, and a useful but limited bibliography. Together with its (in these days) reasonable price, this volume will be very useful in graduate courses and will also be helpful for scholars, especially as the only modern French edition is abridged. ELSPETH WHITNEY University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (review)

found in the Latin translations of Paracelsus, and shows how they were modified by Le Baillif and then translated by him into French. He concludes from this analysis that Le Baillif was not simply a translator of Paracelsus, but also a commentator and interpreter of his thought, and thus ought to be seen as a contributer to the development of French Paracelsianism in his own right. Baudry’s Contribution serves as an introduction to the companion volume, a critical edition of the Demosterion. As the previous discussion should suggest, the Demosterion is an important source in the history of early modern medicine. Several sections of the work are of particular interest: Le Baillif’s lengthy dedication to Louis de Rohan, in which he delivers a scathing attack on the ignorance and envy of the Galenic physicians, his discussion of magic and its relation to medicine, and his brief Latin treatise on chiromancy. As indicated above, the bulk of the book consists of the aphorisms in Latin and French. Considering the obscurity of Paracelsus’s terminology, it is not surprising that Le Baillif also included in the Demosterion a glossary of terms. This critical edition includes the complete text, including prefaces and dedications, marginal notes, aphorisms, a dictionary, and illustrations. Baudry provides no additional introduction in this volume, but his extensive footnotes serve to explicate many details of the text. On the whole, they serve to illustrate the way in which Le Baillif was part of a community of physicians and philosophers who were striving to come to terms with complex medical issues. Baudry has also provided a series of useful indexes, including a list of crossreferences from the Demosterion to Paracelsus’s writings, his own glossary of Paracelsian terminology as found in the Latin and French aphorisms, and a list of modern French equivalents for the medical terminology used in the sixteenth century by Le Baillif. Both volumes represent the result of a highly-specialized French scholarship that involves a close textual reading and formal analysis of historic texts. What Baudry has accomplished here will be of use to scholars of the history of medical literature and, more generally, to historians interested in the transmission of Paracelsian ideas in the late sixteenth century. His efforts serve to illuminate the intellectual context in which the complex ideas of the early modern era’s most notorious physician were propagated and received. YVONNE PETRY Luther College, University of Regina