This is editor of The Shakespeare Quarterly,
which is the leading scholarly journal devoted to Shakespeare, published by the Folger Shakespeare
Library in association with the George Washington University,
where she was a professor of English and taught since 1974 and had taught since 1974.
She's the author of numerous scholarly articles and three books, including The Idea of the City
in the Age of Shakespeare in 19, 1986 and The Body, Embarrassed Drama and the Disciplines of
Shame in Early Modern England in 1993. Her latest book, Humoring the Body
Emotions in the Shakespearean Stage, was published by the University of
Chicago Press in the fall of 2004, and she recently wrote The Introduction to Shakespeare,
The Essential Guide to the Life and Works of the Bard, published by Encyclopedia Britannica in 2007.
Please welcome her.
First of all, let me apologize for making you wait. I was. I didn't realize really quite the
number of security hurdles I would have to leap before I would get here.
But I am delighted to be here and I want to thank Michael and Steve Greenberg for inviting me.
And I want to thank all of you for coming here today. I've actually myself used the
National Library of Medicine, although clearly not recently and in doing my own research.
And perhaps some of you have been to the Folger Library to do some of your research.
But I certainly would want, as the director of the library, to invite you to come to the library,
not just for research purposes, but for for the many, many programs
that we that we offer the public. Right now we have an exhibition called
Breaking News on the birth of the newspaper. It was just, yeah, it there was just a little a
piece about it in the post. It's going to be up for the next until the end of the month.
It's a wonderful exhibition and Winter's Tale is starting in our theater in February.
And we would just be so delighted to have you come and join us.
Now I'm speaking to you informally today, and really I'm speaking to you not as
the director of the Folger, but in my capacity as Shakespeare scholar with,
as Michael's introduction suggested, a specialized interest in the cultural
history of the body and an even more specialized interest in the theory of the
of the four humors and and particularly using the theory of the four humors as
a way of reading early modern texts.
Now for me that has meant reading the texts,
the dramatic texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
But would I like to persuade you today
is that the theory of the four humors
is actually remarkably versatile and a
useful lens with which you can really
approach most of the texts of this period, although I think it does take learning
to hear or listen for the cues now. The mantra for my enterprise today
comes from the brilliant historian of science at Harvard, Shigehisa Kuriyama,
who has written, and I quote Kuriyama quote, The history of the body is a history
of the ways of inhabiting the world, UN quote. And what I would add to what I consider
to be a wise and wonderful phrase is, is my own addition. And that would be the history of the
body is also a history of the ways of being inhabited by the world. Now,
the humors are a huge part of what
that means of both inhabiting the world and being inhabited by the world.
And this is really what I want to talk to you about today. Now just as a reminder.
And for some of you this may be as familiar as your own face. And for some of you,
maybe you do need a little bit of reminder about the theory of the four humors,
but it was really it came from the ancients and certainly was formulated by Galen,
who proposed the existence of four bodily humors, First of all, blood,
the master humor, phlegm, collar, or otherwise known as yellow bile, and melancholy,
otherwise known as black bile. And these were more of the more or less. That is to say,
three of them were real fluids, real bodily fluids to which largely hypothetical origins,
sites and functions were ascribed. And this is what Nancy Suraci has written about the humors.
And in the humeral body, the body's internal oops, the body's internal organs produced
and sent these fluids out through the
bloodstream to deliver the qualities of hot, cold, moist, and dry out to the body's parts,
including to the body's flesh and of course to the brain. Now from blood came the quality
of hot and moist. From phlegm the qualities of moist and of cold and moist.
From color came the qualities of hot and dry, from melancholy,
the qualities of cold and dry.
So these are the four qualities, and they are the key, really,
rather than the four humors to finding the vocabulary of the four humors
and I would say the critical utility of the four humors in Shakespeare
and other texts of his period. Now, if any of you were English majors,
and perhaps some of you were English majors, you will remember how in an earlier critical generation,
the four humors used to be described and referenced. And that was with an explanation of the
kind I just outlined of the classical doctrine of the four humors as the
basis for Elizabethan theories of relatively rigid personality types, that is to say, the sanguinix,
the Collar, the the Melancholics, and the phlegmatics. And it was typically an explanation
that like a lot of explanations in the history of science and certainly in a
older model of the history of science, really emphasized how quaint,
old fashioned and wrong these Elizabethans really were.
And it and it's even though we, we ourselves do not describe.
I mean we may use the language of sanguine,
choleric, melancholic or even phlegmatic. Although I think to do so is to drop
into a relatively abstruse vocabulary that you risk people not understanding.
Certainly those to the degree that those types are recognized even now,
it seems to me they have a certain kind of hierarchy of value. So that I was teaching a course some
years ago in the history of the humors, and I asked just as a way of breaking the ice.
I asked the people around the table, my students around the table,
if they would be willing to describe themselves in any of these four types, and a number of them
confessed to be synguidic, and a number of them were proud to declare themselves as melancholic.
But not a single soul was willing to describe him or herself as phlegmatic. I mean,
it was simply not possible to think of yourself as a phlegmatic. So,
but I have used in my own work, I have used a rather different approach
than was the case for this earlier generation of critics interested
in the humors and and I would call what they did as a humoral allegory.
I mean it really, it really, they really produce allegorical readings using the four humors and
really obeying by large that sort of rigid typology that you do find
in the humeral text of the period. But which in my reading of the literature of the period,
both the vernacular medical literature
and also just the all of the writings that I've read in the period,
that is on the whole, not the way the language of the humors behaves.
Because really the language of the humors is saturated or saturates the
the discourse of the period through the language of the qualities. And it's really the language
of the qualities, that is to say a language of hot, cold, moist and dry,
that is really where you find the humors operating and they don't operate
in a rigid or typological way at all. Now, my basic interest,
that is to say my overarching
interest in and why I use the humors at all
as a kind of explanatory or heuristic model,
has to do with a kind of literary
criticism that is increasingly becoming known as historical phenomenology.
And by historical phenomenology I
really mean that those of us who are interested in the large this large
topic are interested in the ways of glimpsing the possibility of historical
difference in the quality of bodily experience and bodily self experience
between the early moderns and ourselves.
Now, to say this is to of course venture into the area of dangerous generalization.
That is to say, how can we possibly generalize about how they experience their bodies
when it's hard enough to generalize about how we experience our bodies.
And so it's it's relatively fraught trying
to find different ways of being in the body. But nevertheless,
it seems to me a worthwhile historical exercise, because what we're really trying to do
is to glimpse what it might have been like to live within the bodily frame
in an era that that that assumed a very different cosmology than our own.
And that, I think, is the invitation to us. What is it like to live in the
in a Renaissance cosmology? What is it like to live in a in an early modern cosmology?
And for me, the humoral, the language of the humors, the language of the four qualities,
has been one way to surprise the text of
the period into revealing what they are really not in the business of revealing.
And that is something about that which went without saying that
which everybody assumed to be the case in early modern Europe.
And So what when you are reading for the language of the four qualities or when you're reading
for the language of the humors, you are really reading sub thematically.
You're not reading about what these texts are are trying to jump out and talk to you about.
You're really reading for something that is is kind of the subterrestrial
a little bit of that which they assumed in order to say that which they they meant to be saying.
Now, the reciprocal thinking about inhabiting
the world and being inhabited by the
world that Kuriyama and and me and cahoots with Kuriyama are interested in
is really a description of reciprocity between the body and the world.
And it suggests a kind of ecological approach to the history of the body
and to the questions of the humors and the passions and the emotions.
And it's that that has really been driving my interests.
Reciprocity is key to understanding why it is that the four humors become
an interesting way of approaching literary texts of all kinds in the in early modern literature.
It's pretty clear from to me, from reading the medical literature,
especially, as I said, the vernacular literature and the and the
imaginative literature of the period, that the early modern body
was conceived as a porous and fragile container that is a more porous than our bodies,
more fragile as a container than our bodies. And it was filled with it had an
interior that was filled with fluids that moved pretty sluggishly from
part to part and sloshed around.
Here is the English physician Halkaya Crook
in 1615 for the matter of man's body.
It is soft, pliable and temperate,
ready to follow the Workman in everything and to every purpose.
For man is the moistest and most sanguine of all creatures.
So it's the most adaptable to divine, to divine instruction,
It's the most adaptable to divine endowment, says Crook. He goes on to say, quote,
all bodies are transpirable and
transflexible that is so open to the air
that it may pass and repass through them.
It's that kind of thinking that lies behind John Dunn's remark in a
sermon in 1623 in which Dunn says, quote, every man is a sponge and
but a sponge filled with tears.
I This is the kind of imagery that makes
me sit up and say what's going on here?
It's this kind of imagery that one wants to try to unpack and say what
what is the way of thinking that would
lead done to say every man is a sponge?
Because I don't think that that's a kind of body metaphor that we ourselves
are likely to use, so that this humoral body is open to the world,
inhabited by the world in in a way that seems to me significantly
different from our own more closed, more protected bodily envelopes.
And I would say that the humoral, the humoral self, that is to say,
the, the, the, the, the, the conscious interior that
inhabits this body, is considerably it thinks of itself
as considerably less stable, considerably more open to emotional
psychological change than typically we think of ourselves as being,
which is to say a fairly steady state. OK, So the question then is,
what is living in a human body like, And how did the theory of the
humorous provide Shakespeare and his contemporaries with a discourse for
representing the body and its emotions? And I would say that the doctrine of
the four Humors gave Shakespeare and his contemporaries a theory of personality,
a theory of behavior, a theory of status, gender and age and ethnicity,
with the distinct advantage of being rooted in what Shakespeare and everyone else in 17th century
England and pretty much in 17th century Europe thought were the facts about the human body and its
relation to the natural world. Especially in the humoral interaction of the four qualities,
early modern people accounted for thoughts and deeds in a way that
does not distinguish between the physical and the psychological.
This is summed up in the galenic commonplace that is often repeated
in text throughout the period. Quote The mind's inclination
follows the body's temperature, and you do just find it everywhere.
And everyone repeats it as something that Galen said. The mind's inclination follows
the body's temperature. OK, what does that mean?
It means that heat stimulates action. Cold depresses it.
Sound judgment and prudence require the free flow of clear fluids
in the brain through the brain.
But Kohler or melancholy produce
dust soot smoky vapors that ascend to
the brain cloud. Judgment darkened.
Mood produce imprudent, rash,
aggressive behavior. The young warrior's heat and
caller gave him impulsivity. A good thing for warriors.
Cowards were phlegmatic.
Women were naturally phlegmatic.
Youth was hot and moist. Age was cold and dry.
Men were hotter and drier on the whole than women,
and thus women rarely had the capacity for historically significant action.
They couldn't get it together.
Cold gave northern people's
valor hardiness, slow wittedness.
Heat gave southern peoples sagacity and quickness of response,
but a tendency towards jealousy.
So as I suggested at the beginning, a earlier generation of literary
scholars thought the humors were a typology of behavior to be broken down
into four temperaments or dispositions. But in fact there is some usefulness.
And there's some usefulness and remembering the the typologies.
But the fact of the matter is that if you follow the language of the four humors
through the language of the four qualities, the language of hot and moist, cold and dry,
you can get to a place where you will find Northern people described
as as as courageous but stupid. Southern people described as
brilliant but hot tempered. Women described as too slow except when
their maternal juices are aroused and they're trying to defend their babies too,
too phlegmatic for significant and sustained historical action.
Because manliness in this model is a model of sustained heat,
a sustained heat which will produce a plan
and the executive ability to carry it out. And this is, on the whole,
what women are imagined to lack.
Well, if you take the language of the humors and the qualities seriously, and I do,
and in effect asking you to do the same,
one of the effects is that it will take away the metaphorical in the language,
the bodily language of the period, and replace it with the literal.
And in fact, that is on the whole,
one of the ways in which I propose that
we read the language of the period, that is to say, as language that had,
that we have inherited, that we accept as metaphorical descriptions
of bodily and emotional events in which we project back onto the past,
because it's almost impossible not to. As being equally metaphorical for them.
But but the history of bodily language is a history of progressive
abstraction and dematerialization, and the, the,
and what we regard as as the as dead, dead metaphors of bodily language
is at least it is at least possible,
and I think at the end of the day,
warranted, to see this language as literally descriptive of psychological
and bodily events in the period.
For example, the Elizabethans would not have understood what we mean by a sense
of humor by having a sense of humor. They did not have senses of humor.
The language did not exist to use the
term a sense of humor because for them,
humor, a bottle of humor, was a liquid. It was hot or dry,
or it was drier or moister or colder.
A dry sense of humor is a late
example for us of humoral thinking, but in it is probably equivalent to what
the Elizabethans might have called wit. Since wit was thought to be a
relatively quick and dry state of mind early on in the 17th century,
the word humor becomes associated with having an impulse or a whim,
or an eccentricity or an idiosyncrasy. It became something that one
had one had a humor. And then over the course of that century, until you get to the 7th,
to the 18th century, gradually the language alters such that you
can then come to possess a sense of humor, which is to say, your characteristic
way of looking at the world, some way in which you are disposed to see events,
and you possess it, and you possess it as your own.
And if somebody accuses you of lacking one, you will probably feel as if some
someone has just taken something away that is very precious to you.
But if I asked you to locate it, to tell me where in your body
your sense of humor was, you would be hard pressed to do so. It is something we possess,
but it is not something that we
we designate A bodily locust for.
And it is that habit, that habit of not assigning A bodily
locust for emotional or psychological traits, that the Elizabethans on the whole
do not share with us on the whole, that their psychological traits, their emotional,
their their feelings have a bodily sight and have a bodily origin,
and that bodily origin is actual.
So for the Elizabethans, the cycle, the the physical model underlying the
psychological model was a simple a relatively simple hydraulic system based
on a clear localization of psychological
function by organs or system of organs. And I'm pretty much paraphrasing here,
Catherine Park, the historian of science, Catherine Park.
So rather than the term psychological
to describe what we would describe as psychological events,
I find it is much more accurate in
this period to use the term psycho, physiological as clunky and clumsy
and invented as a jargony sounding as as that term is.
But it is much more accurate in pushing us back before Descartes
to an earlier moment of of bodily sensation and being in the body,
in which the psychological and the
physiological are simply not separated out,
and in which the mind's inclination follows the body's temperature. Now, as a social discourse,
particularly for the privileged male,
the humor has become a way of claiming an emotional or social privilege based on something natural,
unalterable, and and inalienable. So the Elizabethan courtier or the
Elizabethan Gallant would claim to have a humor when they wanted
to get away with something, when they wanted their desires or
their habits to take precedence over somebody else's.
And so they they're to have a humor becomes a way of asserting the
primacy of one's own psychological and emotional needs over somebody else.
So that, for example, the timid emotions, the cold,
wet emotions of fear being far less valued than the hotter,
drier emotions that belong to the blood,
or in particular to melancholy or or color,
become things that males claim and
and ask their servants or their wives
or their children simply to defer, to defer to their humor.
And So what develops is something that I call the humoral right of way. Who gets to have it? Who?
Who inhabits the humoral highway? Whose emotions get to take precedence over somebody else's.
So that servants would would say that it was was part of their
duty really to
to cater to their masters humors. And that that really means that their own
humors have to take a kind of backseat to the the hotter humors of their masters.
Now, in Shakespeare, the character most associated with the
explicit language of the humors in the
sense of whim or impulse or idiosyncrasy,
is a character named Corporal Nim. And Corporal Nim is a minor character in Henry the Fifth,
who Shakespeare brings back in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
And Nim is one of the most inarticulate characters in all of Shakespeare,
and we know this because of this habitual recourse to the phrase. Well, that's the humor of it.
And this is the phrase that Nim uses basically to substitute for his lack of a
better vocabulary or a better vocabulary for expressing a point of view or an attitude.
So at one moment in The Merry Wives of Windsor,
he has decided to revenge himself against Falstaff, who has insulted him.
And he decides to do this by revealing Falstaff's plan to seduce
Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. And so Nim goes to their husbands and declares, quote,
my name is Nim and Falstaff loves your wives. I love not the humor of bread and cheese.
And there's the humor of it, UN quote, and walks off.
Page and Four are simply dumbfounded. I mean, here's this guy,
he walks up to them. He makes this declaration. He says I love not the humor of bread
and cheese completely unprepared for. And there's the humor of it and stalks
off and Master Page says here's a fellow frights English out of his wits.
Now what This means two things. Not only does it mean that Nim scares the English language out of
its ability to mean anything at all, and certainly to mean anything to Page and forward.
I mean, if English is the language in which you are supposed to be conducting
social intercourse in which you are supposed to be making sense to one another,
here comes Nim, and he makes no sense to either one of them at all. And of course,
to say that it fright he's fighting English out of his wits. It also means that he's he's he's pretty
much frighted English out of his own wits, since he uses the word humor as a
as an absolute placeholder to mean anything else to mean anything else
more particularized in the world.
So what he is doing is declaring himself a humoral subject. I am,
I am possessed by humors in order to justify boorish behavior
and to put it out of question, as that which simply is in his nature,
cannot be altered, cannot be rebuked, cannot be refused, reproved, cannot be questioned.
So using the term in this way over using the term in this way, Nim justifies his unwillingness
to regulate his behavior, articulate his his thoughts or
reflect upon his world or actions to fellow human beings.
So that in for Nim, the humors and the way he uses them expand to become the basis
of a way of being in the world, a way of social interaction. It's a maladaptive way.
It's an inarticulate way. It's a way that is characterized by impulsiveness and aggressiveness.
[no speech detected]
I'm not asking you to care about Corporal Nim, but I am asking you to think
about what I just said in in relation to Corporal Nam and to translate it
to a much more compelling case of the humors in The Merchant of Venice.
And I thought I would focus on a well known scene in this well known play.
To give you an example of what I mean by the language of the four humors at
work and the scene in question is Act 4, Scene 1 of The Merchant of Venice.
And this of course is the long courtroom scene in which Shylock has appeared
before the Duke of Venice to to extract,
to cut out the pound of flesh from the Merchant to Antonio.
Even when because the debt has come due, and Antonio has been unable to pay it,
and he is coming to the court to claim to claim the exaction of the bond,
even though in fact he has been offered triple repayment of his
bond belatedly by Bassanio.
So let me quote from the Duke here,
And this is the Duke of Venice to Shylock. Shylock The world thinks,
and I think so too, that thou but leadest this fashion of
thy malice to the last hour of act, and then to thought that show
thy mercy and remorse, more strange than is thy
strange apparent cruelty. And where thou now exact the penalty,
which is a pound of this poor merchant's flesh,
thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture,
but touched with humane gentleness and love,
forgive a moiety of the principle,
Glancing an eye of pity on his losses
that have of late so huddled on his back
enough to press a royal merchant down and pluck commiseration of his state
from brassy bosoms and rough hearts of Flint.
From stubborn Turks and tartars never
trained to offices of gentle courtesy,
sorry, of tender courtesy.
We all expect a gentle answer, Jew. And of course there's a pun here,
a gentile answer, Jew.
Now what the Duke says here is that the natural response,
as far as he is concerned, the natural response, the natural response to the
spectacle of human suffering, is human gentleness and love is pity.
Pity such that would soften. Brassy bosoms that would soften
hearts made of metal. And it is so natural, in fact,
that even peoples like Turks and Tartars, whom Elizabethans regarded as
especially ferocious, barbaric, and uncivilized, would respond with pity,
tenderness, commiseration, to the spectacle of suffering.
So the Duke is calling on human nature
and and the softness that he thinks
of as the quality in human nature
of pity in response to suffering, and Shylock refuses it.
But what Shylock does in responding
to the Duke is to invoke another
to invoke nature and human nature in another form.
And he does so by using the language of the humors to explain
why he refuses to relent. So here is Here is Shylock.
[no speech detected]
You'll ask me why I rather choose to have a weight of carrion flesh
than to receive 3000 duckets. I'll not answer that,
but say it is my humor. Is it answered?
What if my house be troubled with a rat, and I'd be pleased to have to give
10,000 ducats to have it banned? What are you answered?
Yet some men there are love, not a gaping pig, some that are mad
if they behold a cat, and others, when the bagpipe sings in the nose,
cannot contain their urine for affection.
Masters OFT passion sways it to
the mood what it likes or loathes. Now for your answer,
as there is no firm reason to be rendered.
Why he cannot abide A gaping pig,
Why he a harmless, necessary cat,
why he a woollen bagpipe, but of force,
must yield to such inevitable shame
as to offend being himself offended.
So can I give for no reason,
nor will I not more than a logitate and a
certain loathing I bear Antonio that I thus,
that I follow thus a losing suit against him.
Are you answered Now what?
What Shylock does is to take his hatred for Antonio,
a hatred that we know to be a compound of personal history,
wounded self-interest, and religious hatred.
And he turns it using the language of the humors.
He turns it into deep antipathy, intense humoral incompatibility,
what we would call, in effect, an allergy.
I mean, he's in effect saying I'm allergic. I can't help this,
I can't help this behavior. He uses the bodily humors as an
agreed upon instance agreed upon between the Venetians and himself,
agreed upon by everybody of that which in
the body comes before religious difference, ethnic difference,
before cultural inscription, before the history of Christians and Jews.
He equates his hatred for Antonio. We might call it, if we don't call it an allergy,
we would call it a phobia, we would locate it in the mind,
or we would locate it in the body. But he is not locating it in
either one sphere or the other. He is locating it. He's locating it in the the
doctrine of the humors, and he equates it to why some men hate cats,
why someone cannot hold their urine, and when they hear bagpipes, why other men don't like pork.
Which is an interesting example, actually, since of course he doesn't eat pork,
although he doesn't say he doesn't like pork, of course we know that he won't eat it.
He describes it using the Renaissance doctrine of sympathy and antipathy
as a natural antipathy and antipathy that he describes as his humor,
and he thus roots it in the natural order of things and makes it unanswerable.
He says, Now are you answered? I will not give you a reason.
I will cite my humor, he says. I do not have to explain this.
I claim that I am unable to. Turks and Tartars and people
with brassy bosoms would relent. It can't happen in my city because my city
is ruled by the doctrine of human nature,
and human nature has at its root pity and gentleness.
A resident of Venice would not be so cruel as to take a pound of flesh.
Natural passion, says the Duke, Requires Shylock to re relent.
Shylock says no. My natural passion of hatred for Antonio,
which is rooted in my humor, which is part of my body,
becomes that in the body, in my body, which cannot be answered, cannot be altered,
cannot be other than it is, is below signification.
It's it is the it's it is that. It's an example of what the
philosopher Judith Butler has called the bodily unsignified.
And that is that we're moving
to an area below inscription, below cultural inscription in which
the body is simply imagined as being not culturally constructed.
And that is, that is what Shilak is is saying here. But the Duke has said it too.
And So what you have are these warring notions of what is not,
what is natural and what is not culturally constructed. He pretends this is an embarrassment,
it's an embarrassing he's, he pretends to be embarrassed, he says. He says I can't help this just
the way other people can't help embarrassing themselves and in the
process of embarrassing themselves, offending you, offending offending other people by
being unable to contain their urine, or being unable to tolerate cats,
or being unable to do anything else that other people are unable to do.
But of course the real embarrassment is for Venice itself, because it has brought Shylock to
this position of power and now
cannot cite nature in order to
claim to have some power over him.
Now at this point Bassanio interjects and he says
[no speech detected]
this is no answer, thou unfeeling man to excuse the current.
Of thy cruelty, the current, of thy cruelty.
This is the this is the language of the humorous because it imagines cruelty,
the synonym for which is caller. They're used synonymously
throughout the period. The current of the of that cruelty
is the running of the humor of caller and of color in Shylock
Current. The phrase current tips us off
to the underlying humoral logic here that his cruelty is based on the hot,
dry humor of color, and it's not a metaphor. The current of cruelty,
which we I think accept is metaphorical,
is I am proposing not metaphorical at all, but a way of thinking humorally about how anger works,
how anger moves from the gallbladder to the
brain and produces language and behavior. Where anger comes from in the body.
Now at this point they're at an impasse, the Venetians and Shylock.
And it's at this point, of course, that Porsche intervenes.
And what's interesting about Porsche's
response is that she shifts the discourse into another register altogether,
into the the language of religion. But she does not leave the language
of the humors entirely behind. And here is her famous speech.
The quality of mercy is not strained. It droppeth as the gentle rain
from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed.
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes his mightiest in the mightiest.
It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown. His scepter shows the
force of temporal power, the attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein does sit the dread and fear of kings? But mercy is his, is above this scepter's sway.
It is enthroned in the heart of kings.
It is an attribute of God himself.
Well, OK, in effect here,
it seems to me Portia is conceding the naturalness of Shylock's cruelty by
characterizing its opposite, that is to say, mercy or compassion as a liquid.
That is to say, it is like the rain falling on the earth.
In this case. If it were to work in Shylock's body, it would moisten the place beneath.
And in terms of this extended simile, what is the place beneath?
The place beneath is Shylock's hard heart, the hard heart that has been hardened
and dried by the current of his cruelty.
So that Shylock's heart is being compared to hard, dry earth
and the ability of a soft, moist emotion like pity to soften
Shylock's heart would depend literally on
how hard the heart was in the 1st place,
Lear says of his cruel daughters.
Is there any cause in nature that makes these
hard hearts the heart of a cruel person? In this period is regularly characterized as
Stony or hard because the effects of anger,
particularly anger held in the body over a long period of time,
would have the literal physiological effect of hardening the mind,
hardening the heart, hardening the flesh. That is why it makes it so hard for
sinners or constitutionally angry people
to behave with pity and and mercy, because their flesh is coming
from so far away from that place. And so in fact,
Portia concludes that there is no you cannot, as the Duke has done,
call on Shylock to be naturally pitiful or compassionate.
And so there's nothing to be gained by expecting his heart to be softened.
And therefore she turns elsewhere to the law, to an overly literal interpretation
of the words of the bond, to look for an escape clause to benefit Antonio.
And as you know, she allows the cutting of Antonio's flesh only on the condition that
quote in the cutting of it, if thou dost shed one drop of blood,
thy lands and goods are by the laws of Venice confiscate.
Now, in the rewriting of this bond, Porsche brings nature and culture
together in the language of blood.
Nature in that Shylock cannot
possibly hope to cut Antonio's flesh
without spilling his blood culture because the legal distinction,
which she invokes here, between Christian and Jew, which she talks about Christian and Jewish blood,
is actually located in a discursive register, conveniently distant from the old
fluid Physiology which Shylock and the Duke have invoked. The language of humoralism recognizes
a number of differences in the blood, but it does not recognize Christian
blood or Jewish blood. It recognizes Northern blood, Southern blood,
but it simply does not recognize religious blood.
OK, what we see in this exchange
in between the Duke and Shylock is different aspects of humoral discourse.
Shylock manipulates its theoretically undeniable basis in nature,
but when Portia comes, she she actually manipulates its
actual susceptibility to what I would call hegemonic redefinition
by invoking that which supersedes the natural and displaces it through
the symbolic complexity of blood. The fact that in fact you can talk
about in familial terms or racial terms but not in biological terms,
the symbolic complexity of blood. It's in Shylock's interest to portray
the humorous as fixed and irreducible, but it's in Porsche's interest to
invoke a different register altogether. Most often in humoral discourse,
the humors are represented as part of the natural body that can and
must be manipulated through various dietary regimes for the sake of physical and emotional health.
That is to say, on the whole, the kind of impasse that you are
getting in The Merchant of Venice
between two ways of regarding the humors actually is not what mostly takes
place in the language of the humors. Because instead of seeing the
humors as as determining as Shylock finds it convenient to do here,
for the most part in the medical texts the humors are regarded as an
aspect of bodily health which can be manipulated through finding balance
so that if you're too hot and dry,
you look to foods and other remedies for for cooling and moistening.
If, for example, it's the summertime and you're hot and dry, one of the things you would you're
recommended to do by the almanacs is to avoid sexual intercourse.
I have no idea whether that particular
piece of advice was ever followed. There would be times of the year when
you would be told not to bathe yourself, that is to say through immersion bathing. So on the whole,
the humors are not regarded as this, this sort of deterministic as they're
not regarded as having the last word. They're regarded as that in the body
which makes you what you are and if you can regulate them properly,
makes you as good as you are possibly able to be.
And it's it is because of this remarkable flexibility of the of the language
and the thinking of the humors that I find it an absolutely fascinating way
of reading the text in the period. So thank you very much.
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All right. That was wonderful. Thank you.
And we have some time for some questions.
I'm wondering if if you have a question perhaps press the button in front
of you so that your microphone will come on and everybody can hear you.
I have a question actually.
I was wondering what you have thought of people who've tried to use a
different sort of a psychological, slightly medical, psychological way
of interpreting some Shakespeare. I'm thinking of things like people who've tried to use Freudian
theory or union theory to interpret some of Shakespeare's passages.
Well, that's really interesting, Michael. Actually this sort of the dominant
the dominant critical language right now for psychoanalytic critics is
really Lacanian which is of course several generations thank you very
much past Freud and and but what's interesting it seems to me part of
what's interesting is that Freud begins by looking for a a physical
a physical answer to psychological problems and and and simply and moves
beyond it and what what interests And
I'm and I don't really have a quarrel. I'm not myself a psychological critic,
but I I don't. I find that psychoanalytic criticism is often enormously exciting.
Gets you, you know, really gets you to thinking. But my enterprise is a different enterprise.
In other words, what what I really want to do is to try to figure out what Elizabethan's
thought was happening in their minds and in their bodies when they were
under the impress of powerful emotions. I mean, this is a period,
remember before 1628, when the blood doesn't circulate the blood.
I mean the the model was that you you consumed food,
the food was transformed into first into Kyle and then into blood,
and then the blood was refined into into various kinds of spirits.
And so basically your in your energy
came in a far more direct way than it
does for us with with with food And so,
so food becomes blood and and that's that's what happens.
The idea that that the blood is circulating, even though Harvey discovers it in 1628,
it doesn't really take hold as a way of thinking about the body for decades after that.
And so when you when you start to say, OK, they're a set of bodily facts, the the non circulation,
non circulation of the blood being a very good example, but really the possession of the humors
and the qualities that go along with the humors as being the paradigm, the framework.
Then I think you're in a very different set of bodily facts and it's it's
that that I use as the starting place.
And IA friend of mine says the problem with what you do is that you think
people have theories and then they have experiences and that that is not.
I mean it may sound as if I'm saying, ah, they had a theory and then they
had then they had a sensation. But I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that if we wish
to write a history of the body, and if we wish to write a history of the emotions,
and if we wish to imagine that that that
that the emotions in the body has a history, then we ought to be able to try to figure
out how we're going to get at that at some kind of historical difference.
We have to, we can't interview Elizabethan's. We have to use the language that's
that's come down to us in text and see if we can surprise it into
revealing something new and strange. And what I find
invariably fascinating is reading texts that I that I feel as if we we all
have known how to read for a long time, and finding something leap out of the page at
me like every man is but a sponge and saying, OK, why what? Where is that?
Where is that metaphor coming from in the language of the body and
particularly the language of the emotions?
Yeah. Was there any sort of contemporary
debate or counterpoint to the idea that you are predetermined or programmed,
if you like, by your humors, which would be analogous to the debate
that goes on today, is to the extent to which you're predetermined by
your genes or whatever the current, you know, the medical theory
of how you're constituted is. I mean, I think one of the, one of the reasons that it's so that I
find it so interesting to look at this language is that it's really a biochemical.
It's a really a biochemical model of behavior. And to the degree that we are,
we are now in a bio biochemical
model for thinking about emotions. You know, we're really,
we're really touching the 16th century, 17th century in a very profound way it seems to me.
Of course, our our typical everyday commonsensical language seems to me still to be pretty dualistic.
And so we use a dualistic language even if we know that that.
I mean sometimes it's convenient to cite our genes and sometimes it's convenient to cite adrenaline
rushes and sometimes it's convenient to cite mom or sometimes it's convenient you know what mom did
to me and sometimes it's you know, I mean we, you know we we typically pick
and choose the bodily model that that suits us at at whatever.
I mean I think we're not only self contradictory but quite self interested in the bodily language
we typically tend to pick.
But to answer your question,
there is a fairly wide range of opinion in the period.
That is say if you read the the vernacular medical literature which is what I what I have done,
you'll find that there are some physicians that regard the humors as as deterministic in the way that
Shylock does at that moment in in the Merchant of Venice and that there's
very little you can do about them. And there are and but the but the the the health manuals tend to
offer a great many remedies which are designed to balance to to take
in a situation of imbalance and produce better bodily solubility.
Solubility being really the the ideal, an ideal kind of you don't want
to be too moist, but you want to be moist enough.
And so there were all sorts of bodily symptoms for for being too
hot or too dry or too cold or too moist and so the there's a lot of
medicine which tells you what to eat. All of the all foods, for example,
had their own combinations of the qualities. I mean, they were hot in the degree and
cold in a degree and wet in a degree and dry in a degree. So if you had a sense of what
you were suffering from or what you felt yourself to have, you would then remedy it through diet,
and that the complexity of the theory is such that that diet would be
altered by time of year by it might be altered by how old you were.
The more extreme remedies like phlebotomy was certainly not prescribed for pregnant women,
for children, for people who were sick. I mean, you had to be really in the peak
of health to to be a candidate for opening your your vein, to make yourself feel better.
I mean, I know it's very peculiar, but
Ficino is a very interesting example because Ficino is,
if you read Ficino's three books on life, you'll find out that he was born under
Saturn, therefore melancholic and born in born in a melancholy month.
I mean, he felt that he, you know, as far as astrologically speaking,
he was in a very bad place. And he writes and and consequently
for him it's all about remedying, being cold, being cold and dry. And he recommends,
and he's also very interested in an extending human longevity,
very interested in how it is that you get to live longer. And so he recommends things like
drinking a young person's blood because it would have the qualities of hot
and moist that he thought he lacked, or drinking the drinking milk
from a young nursing mother to to also that would also have the
qualities that you would would lack. So he he really, on the one hand, he wasn't giving up, right?
But on the other hand, he felt that he was astrologically challenged.
He was astrologically challenged.
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Well, I don't think it's.
I mean, I think it's
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on the whole, what the humors do is tell you how things happen,
how things are imagined to happen.
They don't really explain
metaphysically why things happen. I mean, what Portia says to go
back for a minute to that place. You can't expect him to be compassionate.
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But she doesn't. She she doesn't. She doesn't say. But why does he? Why does he hate Antonio?
Given that he hates Antonio, you can't expect him to be compassionate.
That's what the humorist will tell you. They can't, they can't do anything
to soften religious animosity. But it's a so it's a language of.
It's a language of how rather than why now, as far as Hamlet is concerned.
Well Hamlet berates himself in the if you remember that the the famous
syllogue where he begins what a Rogan peasant slave am I that I,
the dear son of a dear father murdered. OK and on and on and he says no.
I peek like John dreams unpregnant
of my cause and and can do nothing.
Well John A dreams is a sleepy fellow. John A dreams is a sleepy, low born fellow.
And So what he is saying is why do
I behave as if I have the humors,
the phlegmatic, cowardly humors of a lowborn,
not royal person? He says it cannot be. But I am pigeon livered and lack
Gaul to make oppression bitter. That is the language of the humors, he says. I'm a Prince.
I should be, I should, my Gaul should be more full of
collar than it is and it's not.
And therefore I'm ashamed of being
being who I am at this moment. And so and so you, you watch him and
then that's at that moment that he, I mean, he's clearly depressed. He's clearly melancholic,
and he decides to stage the play, stage the mousetrap for him.
But it's that pigeon liver. What does that mean? It means your liver is too small, It's too cold.
It doesn't have enough. Because your liver in this bodily paradigm is where your blood is made.
It's not made in your bone marrow. They didn't know that, They thought,
because if you think about what a liver looks like, it's very bloody right.
And so since it's so bloody, it obviously has to be that place in the body where the blood is made.
So he's saying my liver, you know,
and he berates himself for in this bodily language. Now
does he believe it? Well, I think what he believes is that
this kind of behavior is characterized
by this kind of bodily cause. But it isn't clear at this moment. And I think that gets to the
last part of your question, that that he really believes it. He's saying I I act like
somebody who has a pigeon liver. I act like somebody who lacks gall.
But that can't be right because I'm a Prince, therefore I've got to do something.
What am I going to do? Oh, I think I'll put on a play.
And then he does put on the play and he gets the reaction he wants.
And then his change of mood is dramatic. And when Rosa Cranston Guildenstern
come to talk to him he said, Sir, can we have a word with you? A whole history.
He says bring it on. I mean he's and at that point he says now, now, now I could drink hot blood
and do such bitter business as I can't remember the rest of the line.
I mean this transformation of mood in him is one that he describes
in humoral language and it's it's what I said at the beginning this
the the volatility of the humoral self is quite extraordinary.
And so Ham and we see Hamlet as being a very changeable character, but he's telling us about it all
the time and he's telling us about it in the language of the humors.
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Oh, yes, Sir. Sorry. So dreams figure prominently
plays they do. So how would Hannibal be? Can have dreams.
What happens in in dreams is that you had better watch out what
you ate because because what you ate would produce because the
model is the model of cooking. The you know the your body is is
basically a kind of a kitchen and the the food is getting cooked and and
which is why sooty smoky vapors can ascend. And so there is a real connection between
vapors in the brain smoke soot and so forth in the brain and the and the
quality of and the quality of dreams. There's a wonderful line in Othello this, this is slightly off,
but there's a wonderful line in Othello where where he is his jealousy is
just starting to manifest itself. And Desdemona says sure something
has has has puddled his clear spirit. Something has has darkened and
muddied is clear spirit. And so that's what a bad dream was was really kind of your muddy
spirit producing these these images. There's a wonderful book of by Elizabethan writer,
kind of wild Elizabethan writer named Thomas Nash called The Terrors of the Night.
And it's really a dream vision and it, you know, it's full of of, you know illusions and it's very
full of humoral language too. Yes,
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well, Iago is an interesting character
because it he doesn't, he doesn't
much use the language of the humors. I mean, he does use language of blackness,
but the question of what kind of blackness is being invoked, whether it's a sort
of metaphysical blackness, right, the blackness of the devil, or whether
it's blackness of bodily blackness, like the blackness of of melancholy, which of course was the
one real imaginary humor. I mean that was the one that they knew had
to be there because there had to be 4. But they could never, they could never find it.
So it was a little bit of a of a puzzle. But on the whole he doesn't use the
language of the humorous to describe what's happening in him in his language,
his in his language towards Othello. The language of the humors is
very much in the play and it's very interesting in the play, but it but it tends to hover around
Desdemona and and Othello their Desmond and Othello are the much more the
users of humoral language in that play. What is interesting about Othello is of
course Othello is a Southerner, right? He is a sub, I mean depending upon
where you think he comes from. OK And the play is a little vague on
that subject because the because what a more could be in Elizabethan English
was varied enormously from somebody, you know who was we call a North
African or someone who's from further South in in Africa.
But what what's very interesting about Othello, according to scholars who study
what's called geohumeralism and that is the language of the humors as it is applied to the world and
and the regions of the world, is that there are really two there is there is infumeral thinking
and this is not untypical at all. That is a contradictions. So on the SO there is a theory
that the the blackness of skin, which of course is a humoral attribute,
every physical attribute has a humoral cause, was either considered to be a
sign of unnatural melancholy, and therefore collar the residue of collar
the residue of intemperate passion,
or, which is to say it's that kind of color is called unnatural melancholy, or melancholy a dust.
The natural, I know this is complicated. The natural kind of melancholy, natural melancholy,
which could also produce black skin, in some theories,
would produce wisdom and wisdom and coolness of behavior and coolness of temper.
So you've got these two in the period
two very powerful and absolutely a contradictory notions of what black
skin and and the temperament that would go with black skin would be like.
And what you have in Othello is that
he moves from the one to the other in the course of the play because when
we first see Othello he's coming on he's being accosted by Brabantio's
Brabantio and his kids kinsmen Vermont. He was furious, is ready to attack him.
He's coming at him with swords. What's a fellow say put up your bright
swords for the dew will rust them and they, you know they accuse him of stealing this.
The Duke will answer this. Let's go to the Duke. I mean absolutely cool.
I mean he tells us remarkably eloquent story of his life.
I mean he is he's eloquent he's wise.
He's he's that model of the African. And what happens is that
Iago through working on him, through inflaming him, through puddling his clear spirit,
is in Desdemona's phrase, turns him into the jealous, the impulsive, the murderous,
the the the the hot tempered other S other black person.
The problem is that in that for us, those two paradigms have been turned
into the one, in other words, the the, the the other, the the paradigm of
the black person is dispassionate, cool, wise, has largely been overtaken for reasons having a lot
to do with everything that goes on in terms of colonialism and slavery.
And the that second paradigm overtakes it. So it's very, very hard for us to read
a fellow before that, that before,
before those that racial paradigm has set in. And so we see Othello.
I mean we we see, we see the stereotype, but we don't see the other,
we don't see the counter stereotype, if you will.
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Well,
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the thing about reading for the humors is, is that what you you want the
text to invite you to do it? OK. In other words, when I when I was talking
about an earlier form of allegorical reading, the way that it tended to work was, Oh yes,
there's this doctrine of the four humors. Let's just slap it onto the plays and see what happens.
My own, I hope somewhat more
nuanced approach is that you look, you look for that discourse and
you find it when you hear hot, cold, wet, or dry.
If you can't, if somebody isn't going to be kind enough to use the word collar,
then you've got to find other words that will lead you into the sense that
you're inhabiting you're, you're in the, you're in a humoral paradigm.
But it's like any other discourse sometimes it's simply not in play.
And what what is interesting is when it is called upon,
when it is invoked by speakers and why.
And so in the case of The Merchant of Venice, the Duke says, hey, nature tells me,
human nature tells me that you'll show pity right now. And Charlotte says not.
No, human nature doesn't. In my case it doesn't. So you you have to you What you need
to do is to say OK, is the play,
is the play moving into a humoral language? And why is it doing so?
In whose interest is it for the humorous to be invoked here? And as I say,
it's not that if you start reading him, really you're taking tragedy out. OK, it's that's.
I don't think that's what's happening. I think what is happening is that
the humor has become a language in which the Elizabethans looked
for answers in what we would call, well,
either in the in the psychophysiological, trying to find ways in which
they could find natural explanations for
things that were things that were happening.
Yeah. I'm sorry I can't hear you.
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If you had access to a physician you'd
you would you and and the means you could certainly go to a physician and
we have as I'm sure you all know we have some surviving case books and
there and typically those physicians in England are astrological physicians.
I mean are astrological empirics and they you know they will certainly
they will certainly you know they will cast horoscopes and do a whole
bunch of things like that. But typically you'd go to an if you
were in this city or town you'd go to an apothecary. If you were out in the country you'd
probably go to the Manor house and the lady of the Manor house very
often would have her own little home distillery and would have remedies.
So that was often the way that it worked. There's an amazing diary medical
diary of a of a Elizabethan woman named Lady Grace Mile May. And if if Lady Grace Mile May were
alive today, she'd be in medical. She'd she'd be the surgeon general. I don't know.
She'd she'd she would she would have gone to medical school because she lived.
She bank she she impoverished her family by by ordering medicines, expensive medicine,
so she could dose the whole neighborhood. She loved it and her and and she
says things like, if you're melancholic, don't walk abroad at night by
yourself because your body will suck up the humors of the night. And that would be very bad for you.
Very bad. You'd get really suicidal. You'd start acting like Romeo. She doesn't say that.
OK, great. I think that's about
all the time that we have. But thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you all so much.
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