Abstract
On 27th November 1599, Robert Thompson, a practising, foreign surgeon, was hauled before the Company’s officials and warned for ‘useinge surgerie without a signe’ [italics mine].1 The masters and governors determined that Thompson should be examined, but it was not until 17th July 1600 that he was ‘approved’, following assessment, ‘admitted & sworne’.2 I am interested in the Company officials’ concern that surgery could be carried out without the formal proof that the practitioner was trained and regular. The ‘signe’ of the practitioner’s practice was important and was something people could see, comparable to a degree certificate: a physical, legible indication of the authorized surgeon, which spelt out his professionalism.
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Notes
Gary Taylor, ‘Divine []sences’ in Shakespeare Survey Volume 54, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), pp. 13–30 (pp. 17–18, 27–8).
Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003), pp. 6–11.
Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Reading the Signs’, trans. Keir Elam, in Alternative Shakespeare, ed. John Drakakis, 2nd edn. (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 121–46 (pp. 124, 123).
Jean E. Howard, ‘Figures and Grounds’, SEL 20:2 (1980), 185–99 (p. 186).
Simon Palfrey, Shakespeare’s Possible Worlds (Cambridge: CUP, 2014): ‘I want to hypostasise the quotidian stuff of theatre, in the sense of recover its multiple nodes of substance: not to wash everything in the bland light of the divine, or still less do service to a centralising or centripetal ideologeme. Rather, I want to give what often seem to be merely “accidents” — figurative ornaments, necessary tools of the trade, serviceable instruments of the craft — their own substance, their own reality’ ([italics mine], p. 146).
John D. Staines, ‘Radical Pity’ in Staging Pain, ed. James Robert Allard and Mathew R. Martin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 75–92 (p. 85).
Sasha Roberts, ‘Let Me the Curtains Draw’ in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Natasha Korda (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 153–74 (p. 153).
William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), p. 46.
See Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), p. 10;
Kathleen E. McLuskie, ‘The Shopping Complex’ in Textual and Theatrical Shakespeare, ed. Edward Pechter (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), pp. 86–101.
On late medieval surgeons’ attempts to alleviate pain and the common practice of restraining patients, see Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 108–11.
John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Guy De la Bédayère (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), p. 71.
Alan C. Dessen, Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 59–63.
Cf. Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, and Scaffold (Oxford: OUP, 2011), pp. 208–10.
Foakes (ed.), King Lear, p. 5. Cf. Neil Carson, A Companion to Henslowe’s Diary (Cambridge: CUP, 1988), p. 53.
Tally Abecassis and Claudine Sauvé, Barbershops (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2005). The collection of photographs captures the modern barber shop as a celebrated feature of our urban heritage.
Ben Jonson, Epicoene, ed. Roger Holdsworth (London: A & C Black; New York: WW Norton, 2002).
Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Michael Hattaway, 2nd edn (London: A & C Black; New York: WW Norton, 2002).
See Dorothy C. Hockey, ‘The Trial Pattern in King Lear’, SQ 10:3 (1959), 389–95. Hockey senses the perversion of a trial motif in III.vii, but does not explore how that perversion is characterized (see p. 393).
See Foakes (ed.), King Lear, pp. 102–4; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), pp. 94–128;
Stuart Gillespie, Shakespeare’s Books (London: Athlone Press, 2001), pp. 228–35.
John Lyly, Midas in Galatea/Midas, ed. George K. Hunter and David M. Bevington (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000).
Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: OUP, 2007), p. 245 (see pp. 240–65, esp. pp. 244–6).
Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: CUP, 1984), p. 121.
Although ‘lances’ refers to soldiers’ weapons, it has phonemic correspondence with ‘lancets’. See Patricia Parker, ‘Cutting Both Ways’ in Alternative Shakespeares 3, ed. Diana E. Henderson (London; New York: Routledge, 2008), pp. 95–118.
Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 59.
John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. David Crane (London: A & C Black; New York: W W Norton, 1997).
Margreta de Grazia, ‘The Ideology of Superfluous Things’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 17–42 (p. 28).
Cf. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 128–9. Mullaney likens the theatre stage to the public scaffold when discussing the effect of Macbeth’s severed head.
Katherine Rowe, Dead Hands (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999), pp. 73–80.
Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1950), p. 157 (D335).
See Margaret Pelling, ‘Appearance and Reality’ in London 1500–1700, ed. A. L. Beier and Roger Finlay (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 82–112 (p. 89); Sidney Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (London: Blades, 1890), p. 119.
Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed (Ithaca, New York: Cornell U P, 1993), p. 83.
Cf. Catherine Belling, ‘Infectious Rape, Therapeutic Revenge’ in Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 113–2.
Louise Christine Noble, ‘And Make Two Pasties of Your Shameful Heads’, ELH 70:3 (2003), 677–708.
Wendy Wall, ‘Blood in the Kitchen’ in Staging Domesticity (Cambridge: CUP, 2002), pp. 189–220 (esp. p. 196).
Patricia Parker, ‘Barbers and Barbary’, RD 33 (2004), 201–44 (p. 201).
See Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), pp. 35–55 (pp. 37–8, 44).
Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005), pp. 134–67 (p. 159).
Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols (London; Atlantic Highlands NJ: Athlone, 1994), I, pp. 357–9.
See Bate (ed.), Titus, pp. 8–9; Laurie Maguire, Helen of Troy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 83–4.
E. A. M. Colman, The Dramatic Use of Bawdy in Shakespeare (London: Longman, 1974), p. 60.
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© 2016 Eleanor Decamp
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Decamp, E. (2016). Semiotics of Barber-Surgery in Shakespeare: Chair and Basin. In: Civic and Medical Worlds in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471567_4
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