Abstract
Male characters such as King Lear, Falstaff, Holofernes, Hamlet, Edgar, and Angelo rhetorically appropriate the womb to reveal their interiority to the audience. This chapter explores why the womb—and not male anatomy—is used to delineate their inner experiences. Male characters imagine their bodies possessing wombs, which proposes that their own bodies lack sufficient organs to articulate their inner passions, and subversively emphasizes the womb’s agency. Through an analysis of King Lear’s infamous self-diagnosis of hysterica passio, this chapter considers the semiotics of humoral wombs on stage in summoning a gendered, invisible organ in a visual medium. During performance, the storm and olfactory props render the womb perceptible within the theatrical space by externalizing popular herbal remedies for Lear’s wandering womb.
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Notes
- 1.
Valerie Traub. “Prince Hal’s Falstaff: Positioning Psychoanalysis and the Female Reproductive Body.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40, no. 4 (1989): 461.
- 2.
Elizabeth Sacks, Shakespeare’s Images of Pregnancy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 10.
- 3.
Here I separate from Katharine Eisaman Maus, who argues in “A Womb of His Own,” that the generative metaphor is “not a search for a substitute, but a claim that they already possess the real thing” See “A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body.” In Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England ed. Douglas A. Brooks (Burlington: Ashgate, 2017), 91.
- 4.
For more on this, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, “A Womb of His Own,” 96.
- 5.
This differs from Freud’s notion of castration anxiety, which stems from the boy’s realization that the girl does not have a penis and results in a (literal and figurative) fear of castration as punishment. The womb envy that I analyze here stems from a desire to possess the functions of the womb in a corporeal and emotional sense. Instead of deriving from an anxiety over the punishment of the female body, this womb envy derives from a longing to inhabit the female body’s unique physicality. For more on castration anxiety, see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 2nd issue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 6.
William Harvey, Anatomical Exercitations Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (James Young: London, 1653), 419, 415.
- 7.
Helkiah Crooke. Mikrokosmographia, A Description of the Body of Man (Barbican: W. Jaggard, 1616), 454.
- 8.
Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia, 455.
- 9.
Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia, 455.
- 10.
Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia, 457.
- 11.
Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia, 463.
- 12.
For more on Holofernes’ exclusion of women, see Katherine Eggert, Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 202.
- 13.
Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 165.
- 14.
Mary Thomas Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 159.
- 15.
Tanya Pollard, “Conceiving Tragedy” in Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England, ed. By Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 87.
- 16.
For more, see Coppélia Kahn, “The Absent Mother in King Lear” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 242.
- 17.
Nicholas Fontanus, The Woman’s Doctor or, An exact and distinct explanation of all such diseases as are peculiar to that sex (London: John Blaque and Samuel Howes, 1652), 52. Philip Barrough, The Method of Phisick, Containing Cases, Signs, and Cures of Inward Diseases in Man’s Body (London: Richard Field, 1596), 191–194.
- 18.
Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London: John Windet, 1603), 7.
- 19.
Edward Jorden, 6. See also R. C., I. D., M. S., T. B., The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged (Angel in Cornhill: Nathaniel Brookes, 1659), 238.
- 20.
R. C., The Compleat Midwife’s, 239.
- 21.
Richard Mainy was thought to contract the disease, but used erroneous evidence, as the patient admits. He refutes that he suffered from the mother, claiming his symptoms were similar but he was diagnosed with vertiginem capitis instead. See Samuel Harsnett, Declaration of egregious popish impostures (London: James Roberts, 1603), 263.
- 22.
Ambrose Paré, The Works of that Famous Chirurgeon Ambrose Parey, trans. T. H. Johnson (London: Mary Clark, 1678), 574. Hippocrates, On the Nature of the Child, 18.1.
- 23.
Kaara L. Peterson, “Historica Passio: Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice.” Shakespeare Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2006): 4.
- 24.
Thomas Wright, Passions of the Mind in General (London: Valentine Simmes for Walter Barre, 1604), 65.
- 25.
For the feminine aspects of the storm, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 114. Laurie Shannon’s “Lear’s Queer Cosmos” explores a queer reading of the storm in Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Madhavi Menon (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 171–178.
- 26.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered (London: Simon Miller, 1671), 317.
- 27.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 318. See also Ambroise Paré, ɶuvres (Paris: Gabriel Buon, 1598), 973.
- 28.
Sebastiano Serlio, A book of perspective and geometry, being the ABC, and first degree of all good art (London: M. S. for Thomas Jenner, 1657), 30.
- 29.
John Melton, The Astrologaster, or, the figure-caster (London 1620), 33.
- 30.
John Bate, The Mysteryes of Nature and Art (London, 1634), 63.
- 31.
Peter Whithorne, Certain Ways for the Ordering of Souldoious in Battelray, and Setting of Battles, after Diverse Fashions with Their Manner of Marching (London: T. East for J. Wight, 1588), fol. 24r.
- 32.
J. H. This World’s Folly (London, 1615), B2v.
- 33.
Barnabe Barnes, The Devil’s Charter (London: G. E. for John Wright, 1607), A2r.
- 34.
The smell of female sexuality appears in several early modern plays, including John Marston’s The Scourge of Villanie: Three Bookes of Satyres (London: J. Roberts, 1599), sig. C5 r-v and his The Malcontent (London: Valentine Simmes for William Aspley, 1604), sig. B r.
- 35.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives: or, A guide for women, The Second Part (London: Peter Cole, 1662), 204.
- 36.
John Gerard, The Herball or General History of Plants (London: Adam Norton and Richard Whitakers, 1633), 79.
- 37.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives, 214 and 137.
- 38.
John Gerard, The Herball, 201–2.
- 39.
Aristotle, The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher Containing his Complete Masterpiece and Family Physician; his Experienced Midwife, his Book of Problems and his Remarks on Physiognomy (London: Clifton, Chambers & Company, No year), 205.
John Gerard, The Herball, 1087–9.
- 40.
The Works of Aristotle, 205.
- 41.
Eucharius Rösslin, The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Called The Woman’s Book, trans Thomas Reynalde (London: By Thomas Raynalde, 1545), 131 and Ambrose Paré, The Works, 574–5.
- 42.
For contemporary jokes about the similarity between dildos and pessaries, see Cynthia’s Revels in Ben Jonson, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London: William Stansby, 1616), sig. Z2r.
- 43.
Ambrose Paré, The Works, 574. Jane Sharp offers a similar cure for suffocation of the mother in The Midwives Book, 323.
- 44.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives, 63; Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 323.
- 45.
Stephen Bradwell, Mary Glover’s Late Woeful Case, Together with her Joyful Deliverance, MS Sloane 831 (1646), Fol 5v.
References
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Wright, Thomas. Passions of the Mind in General. London: Valentine Simmes for Walter Barre, 1604.
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Kenny, A. (2019). The Male Womb. In: Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05201-0_7
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