Abstract
Early modern medical texts privilege scholastic knowledge over lived experience, suggesting female anatomy—epitomized by the womb—was secretive and unknowable. Medical practitioners were uncertain of how to diagnose pregnancy in the early stages, and often diminished the woman’s ability to determine gestation herself since many of the signs were open to interpretation. Even when it progressed to delivery, pregnancy offered a private, exclusively female space in early modern birth rituals, perpetuating its mystery to male observers. This chapter shows how Shakespeare often privileges female, experiential knowledge in a period which attempted to dismiss it outright. During childbirth scenes in Shakespeare’s canon, women become knowledge-bearers on which male characters depend, demonstrating how lineage and paternal identity are reliant on the female body.
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- 1.
John Sadler, The sick woman’s private looking glass (London: Anne Griffin, 1636), epistle dedicatory. See also Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Called The Woman’s Book, (London: By Thomas Raynalde, 1545), sig. B4r. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, De secretis melierum et vitorum (Leipzig: Melchior Lotter, 1501), ch 3 sig c5r; Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De secretis melierum with Commentaries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). Monica H. Green, “From Diseases of Women’ to ‘Secrets of Women’: The Transformation of Gynecological Literature in the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000), 7–14.
- 2.
John Sadler, The sick woman’s private looking glass, 5.
- 3.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, or An Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise of the Generation and Birth of Man (London: E. Griffin for S. Burton, [1554] 1637), A3. Please note some editions of the text list the author as “James Rüff” while others list it as “Jacob Rüff.” For more on the midwife’s role in childbirth, see Caroline Bicks, Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare’s England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) and Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 224–244.
- 4.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, A3.
- 5.
Thomas Raynalde, The Byrth of Mankynde, trans Richard Jonas (London 1540), sig C8v. I use the term “recycled” to show that Raynalde’s text is a translation of Christian Egenolph’s De Partu Hominis (1532), which in turn is a translation of Eucharius Rösslin’s immensely popular Der Swangern Frauwen und Hebammen Roszgrten (1513). Helen King gives a history of obstetrics and gynecology in Midwifery, Obstetrics and the Rise of Gynaecology: The Uses of a Sixteenth-Century Compendium (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 1–23.
- 6.
George Abbot, The case of impotency as debated in England: in that remarkable tryal an. 1613. between Robert, Earl of Essex, and the Lady Frances Howard, who, after eight years marriage, commenc’d a suit against him for impotency (London: printed for E. Curll, 1715), 9. John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton 23 June 1613 in The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, ed. Kate Aughterson (London and New York; Routledge, 1998), 123. Thomas Bayly Howell, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, Vol II (London: T. C. Hansard, 1809), 803.
- 7.
Richard Napier, Case files, 20 October 1617, MS Ashmole 220, f. 95v. With thanks to Dr. Jo Edge for helping decipher this crossed-out portion of these case records.
- 8.
Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 135–156.
- 9.
R. C., I. D., M. S., T. B., The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged (Angel in Cornhill: Nathaniel Brookes, 1659), 35. See also Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Called The Woman’s Book, (London: By Thomas Raynalde, 1545), sig Dr. See also Galen, Claudii Galeni Pergameni, secundum Hippocratem medicorum facile principis opus De usu partium corpius humani, trans Niccolò of Reggio (Paris: Simon de Colines, 1528), bk 14, 409 and Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1543), 532.
- 10.
Ambroise Paré. The Works of that Famous Chirurgeon Ambrose Parey, trans. T. H. Johnson (London: Mary Clark, 1678) 85.
- 11.
Eucharius Rösslin, The Birth of Mankind, Otherwise Called The Woman’s Book, trans. Thomas Reynalde (London: J. L., Henry Hood, Abel Roper, and Richard Romlin, [1545] 1654), 26.
- 12.
Perceval Willughby, Observations in midwifery (Warwick: Shakespeare Printing Press, 1863, written 1672), 276.
- 13.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, 44.
- 14.
Adriaan van de Spiegel, De Formato Foetu Liber Exornatus (Padua: Apud Jo. Bap. de Martinis, & Livium Pasquatum, expensis ejusdem Liberalis Cremae, 1626). Engraving by Francesco Valesio (b. ca. 1560), after drawing by Odoardo Fialetti (1573–1638).
- 15.
Kathryn M. Moncrief, “‘Show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to’: Pregnancy, Paternity, and the Problem of Evidence in All’s Well That Ends Well” in Performing Maternity in Early Modern England, ed. Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson (New York: Routledge, 2007), 30.
- 16.
Caroline Bicks, “Planned Parenthood: Minding the Quick Woman in All’s Well” Modern Philology 103:3 (2006), 326.
- 17.
Laura Gowing, Common Bodies, 122.
- 18.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives (London: Peter Cole, 1662), 156. Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, 49. Jane Sharp, 82.
- 19.
James Guillimeau, Child-birth, or The Happy Delivery of Women (London: Anne Griffin for Joyce Norton and Richard Whitaker, [1612] 1635), 2. In 1558, Queen Mary I (falsely) believed herself to be pregnant and even showed signs of gestation. For more, see Christopher Hibbert, The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the Golden Age (Reading, Pennsylvania: Addison-Wesley, 1991), 55.
- 20.
François Mauriceau, Traité des Maladies des Femmes Grosses et Accouchées (Paris, 1668). 65–6.
- 21.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, 181. See also Eucharius Rösslin, The byrth of mankynde, newly translated out of Laten into Englysshe, trans. Richard Jonas (London: T[homas] R[aynald]], 1540), LXXXI–LXXXII.
- 22.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, 181–3. Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives, 156.
- 23.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, 186–7. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book: Or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered (London: Simon Miller, 1671), 104.
- 24.
James Guillimeau, Child-birth, 5.
- 25.
James Guillimeau, Child-birth, 2–3.
- 26.
Aristotle’s Masterpiece (London: J. How, 1684), 124. Please note there are many editions of this text that are edited and published over decades. See also James Guillimeau, Child-birth, 1–5.
- 27.
R. C., The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, 82.
- 28.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives, 156; Daniel Sennertus, Nicholas Culpeper, and Abdiah Cole, The Sixth Book of Practical Physik of Occult or Hidden Diseases (London: Peter Cole, 1662), 156; and James Guillimeau, Child-birth, 6; and See also Philip Barrough, The Method of Phisick, Containing Cases, Signs, and Cures of Inward Diseases in Man’s Body (London: Richard Field, 1596), 196–7. (mislabeled p. 166).
- 29.
R. C., The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, 85; James Guillimeau, Child-birth, 16.
- 30.
Bodleian, Ms. Ashmole 215, f. 45 V. Cited by Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 121–2.
- 31.
SARS Q/SR 110/75 and 109/28. Cited by Laura Gowing, Common Bodies, 121.
- 32.
Elizabeth Joceline, The Mother’s Legacie to her unborn child (London: John Haviland for Hanna Barres, 1625), 30.
- 33.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, 142.
- 34.
Jacob Rüff, The Expert Midwife, 141.
- 35.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 110.
- 36.
R. C., The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, 84.
- 37.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 111. This is a reoccurring theme throughout the period. See Rösslin, Eucharius, The Birth of Mankind (1540), LXXXI–LXXXII; Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives (1651), 153–5; William Harvey, Anatomica Exercitations, Concerning the Generation of Living Creatures (London: Printed by James Young for Octavia Pulleyn, 1653), 172–5; Anonymous, The English Midwife Enlarged (London: Printed for Rowland Reynols, 1682), 319; and James McMath, The Expert Midwife (Edinburgh, 1682), 4.
- 38.
John Sadler, The sick woman’s private looking glass, 124.
- 39.
James Guillimeau, Child-birth, 13.
- 40.
For more on gendered knowledge of female interiors in early modern discourse, see Laura Gowing, Common Bodies, Mary E. Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, and Sara D. Luttfring, Bodies, Speech, and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 41.
William Painter, The Palace of Pleasure (London: Henry Denham, 1566), 100 V.
- 42.
Jonathan Gil Harris argues the play “destabilize[s] Helena’s redemptive swelling and the forward movement it represents in “All Swell That End Swell: Dropsy, Phantom Pregnancy, and the Sound of Deconception in ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’” Renaissance Drama 35 (2006), 181. E. W. J. Honigmann contends Helena would appear “padded and visibly pregnant” in Myriad-Minded Shakespeare: Essays on the Tragedies, Problem Comedies, and Shakespeare the Man (London: Macmillan, 1998), 144. David McCandless states Helena is “visibly pregnant” in Gender and Performance in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 23.
- 43.
For more on the eroticization of boy actors, see Lisa Jardine’s Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex, UK: Harvester Press, 1983); and Stephen Orgel’s “Nobody’s Perfect: Or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” in South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 7–29. Works that discuss how boy actors undermine gender binaries include Catherine Belsey’s “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Methuen, 1985),169–93; Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 2011); Stephen Greenblatt’s “Fiction and Friction,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66–93; Phyllis Rackin’s “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA 102 (1987): 29–41. An exception to this focus is Sara Thiel, whose work I cite below.
- 44.
For more on the performance of pregnancy , see Sara Thiel, “‘Cushion Come Forth’: Materializing Pregnancy on the Stuart Stage,” Stage Matters: Props, Bodies, and Space in Shakespearean Performance, ed. Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018), 145. In it, Sara Thiel identified 22 extant pregnancy plays written between 1603 and 1642, which she defines a “play portrays a pregnancy (whether visible or unknown to the audience) or a pregnant character who drives the action of a plot in some significant way.” I would like to thank Sara for her generosity in allowing me to see the chapter before publication.
- 45.
David Mann, Shakespeare’s Women: Performance and Conception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 103–4.
- 46.
- 47.
Thomas Heywood, The Royal King and Loyal Subject (London: 1637), epistle.
- 48.
Philip Stubbes, The Anatomy of Abuses (London: Richard Jones, 1583), CII.
- 49.
Lori Schroeder Haslem, “Troubled with the Mother”: Longings, Purgings, and the Maternal Body in Bartholomew Fair and The Duchess of Malfi” Modern Philology 92, no 4 (1995), 443.
- 50.
John Jones, The Arte and Science of Preserving Bodie and Soul (1579; STC 14724), 31–2.
- 51.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 210.
- 52.
Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599–1605 (Thrupp, Stroud, and Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1998), August 15, 1599 p. 6 and May 30, 1604 p. 203.
- 53.
R. C., The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, 129.
- 54.
R. C., The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, 133.
- 55.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 211; Happy delivery of women, 101.
- 56.
Nicholas Culpeper, Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives, 186; Daniel Sennertus, Nicholas Culpeper, and Abdiah Cole, The Sixth Book of Practical Physik, 186.
- 57.
Dorothy Leigh, The mothers blessing. Or The godly counsaile of a gentle-woman not long since deceased (London: John Cudge, 1616), 9.
- 58.
Dorothy Leigh, The mothers blessing, 10.
- 59.
“True Copies of Certaine Loose Papers left by the Right honorable Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, collected and transcribed together here since her death, anno din 1663, Examined by John Bridgewater.” Manuscript at Huntington Egerton Family papers, ca 1150–1803 (bulk 1580–1803): MS EL 8377–8391 box 210, pp. 70–1.
- 60.
True Copies of Certaine Loose Papers left by the Right honorable Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, collected and transcribed together here since her death, anno din 1663, Examined by John Bridgewater, p 54 manuscript at Huntington Egerton Family papers, ca 1150–1803 (bulk 1580–1803): MS EL 8377–8391 box 210.
- 61.
True Copies of Certaine Loose Papers left by the Right honorable Elizabeth, Countess of Bridgewater, collected and transcribed together here since her death, anno din 1663, Examined by John Bridgewater. Manuscript at Huntington Egerton Family papers, ca 1150–1803 (bulk 1580–1803): MS EL 8377–8391 box 210, p. 68.
- 62.
Elizabeth Richardson, A Ladies Legacie to Her Daughters (London: Thomas Harper, 1645), 6.
- 63.
The bachelor’s banquet (London: T. Creede, 1603), Samuel Rowlands, ’Tis Merrie When Gossips Meet (London 1602), sig. A4r, and W. P., The Gossips Greeting (London, 1620).
- 64.
A similar scene appears in William Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1605), when Henry VIII awaits the news from the birth chamber.
- 65.
Lawrence Twine, The Pattern of Painful Adventures (London, 1594), ch 8.
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Kenny, A. (2019). The Fertile 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_4
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