“Bloody Business:” Passions and Regulation of Sanguinity in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear

Abstract

According to traditional histories of European medicine, ideas of how blood circulates around the body changed radically in the first half of the seventeenth century with the publication of William Harvey's De Motu Cordis (1628). However, a number of English vernacular texts predated Harvey's magnum opus, including Nicholas Gyer's The English Phlebotomy (1592), Helkiah Crooke's Mikrokosmographia (1615), and Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Mind (1601), which focused on the circulation and balancing of sanguine spirits and passions, and further evidence of cultural conceptions of the circularity of bodily functions in early modern drama. This chapter argues that there was a central congruity between the passions and the humoral body fluids in early modern scientific thought, and that ideas of circular sanguinity were in fact widespread in medical as well as in cultural conceptions of the body before the introduction of Harvey's thesis. It draws on William Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear and early modern English medical texts, as a means of conceptualizing ideas of animacy, spirit, and circulation in theories of early modern blood.