Stephanie Moss and Kaara L Peterson (eds), Disease, diagnosis, and cure on the early modern stage, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity Series, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004, pp. xvii, 218, £45.00 (hardback 0-7546-3791-3).

Abstract

When Shakespeare began crafting his plays in the closing years of the sixteenth century, the London College of Physicians was still a relatively young affair. Created in 1518 to represent university trained physicians practising in the ancient humoral tradition, it rapidly began flexing its muscles in the battle against the large number of alleged “impostors”—wise women, quacksalvers and emerging “chymical” practitioners—who were daring to compete with its members in the medical marketplace. The trouble was, of course, that the expensive and often unpleasant “cures” of this elite coterie of Galenists, involving painful and invasive bloodletting and purging treatments, were frequently perceived as more dangerous and less effective than, for example, the wise women's comparatively innocuous herbal remedies. But, as the essays in this volume serve to remind us, the harnessing of medical authority in the early modern period had far less to do with statistical success rates than with prognostication and—crucially—with playing a part convincingly. Medicine and theatre were in this sense intimately related: both required skilful performances and in the late sixteenth century both depended on elaborate sartorial codes. Thus in 1597, as Barbara Howard Traister observes in ‘Doctors and healers in the drama of Shakespeare’, the College created for itself distinctive dress codes involving a great deal of scarlet, purple and silk that served to lend power and authority to the new brand of establishment physician in a far more effective way than the old iconographic tradition of brandishing the urine flask. On stage, clothes made the character, but they could also function to demystify and hold the role up for sceptical interrogation, exposing hypocrisy. Doctors and quacks were notoriously the butt of renaissance satire but Shakespearean drama may have been making a rather more serious point: Traister foregrounds how the few notable medical cures that occur on the Shakespearean stage are the work of empirics (one of them a woman) —types who would definitely have been excluded from the College of Physicians circa 1600. Kaara Peterson's, ‘Performing arts: hysterical disease, exorcism, and Shakespeare's theatre’, furthers this book's premise that early modern medicine and theatre were mutually constitutive. While the early modern stage scrutinized medical performance, members of the London College were called upon to interpret patients' performances, reading bodily signs in order to arbitrate in disputed cases of hysteria, possession and witchcraft. Such performances of authority inevitably veered in the penal direction, bringing to the fore the complexity of medical role-playing: indeed, the essays in this volume are careful to acknowledge what the editors term the “messy heteroglossia” that constituted medical discourse and practice in this period. It is difficult to write something new about disease, diagnosis, and cure in Shakespearean drama: it is a field that has received extensive and thorough critical attention in recent years. Yet most of the essays in this volume focus on Shakespeare; this is inevitably why some of their arguments appear laboured and remarkably familiar. There are some fine exceptions though. Imtiaz Habib's theorized focus on the politics of Elizabethan mental health in relation to race and discourses of nationhood yields some fascinating observations about “racial psychoanalysis” (begging the question is Shakespeare Freudian or is Freud Shakespearean?). Louise Noble's exploration of “mummy” and the therapeutic value of Desdemona's corpse produces some remarkable insights, while Lynette Hunter's knowledgeable study of figural/literal “cankers” in Romeo and Juliet is equally innovative and thought-provoking. With the one caveat that it would be refreshing to see more studies of Shakespeare's contemporaries alongside those of the bard himself, Ashgate's bold foray into the widely uncharted territory of the ‘Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity’ is to be commended—I, for one, eagerly await more titles in this series.