Masculinity, Corporality and the English Stage 1580–1635

Christian M. Billing

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754656517
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317099758
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The significance of human anatomy to the most physical of art forms, the theatre, has hitherto been an under-explored topic. Filling this gap, Christian Billing questions conventional wisdom regarding the one-sex anatomical model and uses a range of medical treatises to delineate an emergent two-sex paradigm of human biology. The impact such a model had on the staging of the human form in English professional theatre is also explored in appraisals of: (i) the homo-erotic significance of a two-sex paradigm; (ii) social and theatrical cross-dressing; (iii) the uses of theatrical androgyny; (iv) masculine corporality and the representation of assertive women; and (v) the theatrical poetics of human dissection. Billing supports cultural and scientific study with close-readings of Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont, Fletcher, and Ford. The book provides a sophisticated and original analysis of the early modern stage body as a discursive site in wider debates concerning sexuality and gender.

Chapter 1

Man Made Woman: Early Modern Anatomy and the Emergence of Sexual Difference

[In the theatre,] Men are emasculated; all the honour and vigour of their sex is abated by the filthinesse of an effeminated body […] and he there gives best content who doth most dissolve himself into a woman […]¹

William Prynne (1633)

Hippocrates seems to attribute to passionate love the power of transforming women into men; where he sayes, that in the citty Abdera, Phaethusa, being stricken with the love of Pytheus and not being able to enjoy him for a long time, by reason of his absence, she became a man […] and grew hairy all over her body, had a man’s voyce and a long beard on her chin […]²

Jacques Ferrand (1623)

As for the authority of Hippocrates. It followeth not that all those women whose voyces turne strong or have beards and grow hairy do presently also change their parts of generation, neither doth Hippocrates say so, but plainly the contrary: for he addeth, ‘when we had tried all meanes we could not bring down her courses, but she perished’ wherefore her parts of generation remained those of a Woman, although her bodye grew mannish and hairie […]³

Helkiah Crooke (1615)

I

Any theatre-historical survey of early modern corporality must take into consideration the works of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen. Beliefs based on Classical anatomy dominated discourses pertaining to the human body in the middle ages, laid the foundations for the exponential increase in evisceration that took place in Europe in the mid-sixteenth century and continued to hold a degree of popular currency as England’s first professional theatres were built in the 1570s. Nevertheless, one must be wary of attributing too much authority to such sources. If the early years of the sixteenth century saw a range of European humanists publish editions of a number of ancient medical texts, the latter 1500s saw a pronounced shift in anatomical understanding – with the same authors considered less trustworthy sources that needed even the most basic of their a priori assertions contested or refuted by contemporary scientific practice. The published works of the great Renaissance anatomists set themselves out as careful negotiations between presentation of new evidence, gleaned for the first time from the dissection of actual human subjects, and rigorous analysis of ancient authority. What made early modern anatomy the discipline that changed the course of European corporal understanding was the fact that its exponents did not simply reiterate ideas of those who had gone before, but that they dared to publish disputations and disavowals of preceding methodological, ontological and epistemological paradigms.⁴ The issue of sex identity was no exception to this rule.

In relation to what would today be termed biological sex, much has been made in recent criticism of the fact that the ancients considered female reproductive organs internalised inversions of male genitalia (Galen) and that woman herself was thought to be an un-perfected version of the male (Aristotle). This one-sex anatomical model is argued to have dominated medical discourse until the close of the seventeenth century.⁵ In Classical anatomy, the ‘imperfection’ of a woman’s internalised reproductive organs was explained as having arisen due to a lack of sufficient heat during fœtal development for the penis, scrotum and testicles to be pushed out of the body. Lack of heat was considered characteristic of female humours (cold and wet), which normally stayed with a woman for life. Females were considered sluggish and moist compared to the more active, hot and dry male. The Roman physician Galen famously claimed that female sexual difference was due solely to the internalised location of genital organs – and asserted that women lacked nothing that men had, developing a trope of mole’s eyes in relation to women’s reproductive anatomy. Laqueur has summarised Galen’s lengthy simile as follows:

The eyes of the mole have the same structure as the eyes of other animals except that they do not allow the mole to see. They do not open, ‘nor do they project but are left there imperfect.’ So too the female genitalia ‘do not open’ and remain an imperfect version of what they would be were they thrust out. The mole’s eyes thus ‘remain like the eyes of other animals while they are still in the uterus’ and so, to follow this logic to its conclusion, the womb, vagina, ovaries and external pudenda remain forever as if they were still inside the womb. They cascade vertiginously back inside themselves, the vagina an externally, precariously, unborn penis, the womb a stunted scrotum and so forth […]⁶

This theory (also found in Aristotle’s historia animalium) led, in antiquity, to speculation as to whether the perfective transformation that had not occurred in the womb during fœtal development of a girl could take place ex utero. If the location of reproductive organs was solely a calorific issue, the question was posed as to whether women could develop sufficient heat through passionate love or acts of extreme exertion to transform themselves into males at some subsequent stage of life. The debate amongst natural philosophers in antiquity is interesting. It is unclear, however, whether it continued with any degree of seriousness in the Renaissance. Notwithstanding this, numerous gender-political critics and social historians have asserted that a calorific and teleological model of reproductive anatomy held a position of dominance and have emphasised the few anecdotal examples of post-natal sexual transformation mentioned by Galen and Hippocrates (in the Classical period) or Montaigne and Paré (in the early modern). This selective focus, together with over-emphasis of metaphorical claims of corporal instability found in anti-theatrical polemics, has been used to argue that corporal flux and the possibility of spontaneous sex change were the centre of significant medical, philosophical and social interest in the Renaissance.⁷ But does the fact that Gosson and prynne were habitual hyperbolists, or that Galen and the Greeks detected little difference between male and female reproductive organs in terms of form and function, constitute incontrovertible evidence that sex identity was considered precarious at the close of the sixteenth century?⁸

To illustrate to the modern student that it was, sets of reproductive organs from the illustrative diagrams of late medieval and early Renaissance anatomical texts have found their way into recent critical editions, playtexts and philological monographs (see Figure 0.1). Such images sit alongside textual glosses of the one-sex anatomical model that set out to persuade readers that early modern conceptions of human corporality were closer to antique understandings than our own. Whilst Classical conceptions of reproductive anatomy unarguably constitute the framework within which early Renaissance figurations of sex identity were conceived, however, it is untrue to say that ancient hypotheses maintained a dominant position in experimental anatomy or quotidian medicine throughout the entire early modern period. It is even less true to say that they had significant influence over figurations of the body in theatrical and popular culture. Theories of human corporality changed radically by the time that a fully developed professional theatre emerged in England in the 1580s. This epistemological shift had a profound effect upon the ways in which the sexed and gendered body was staged.

It has suited contemporary scholars to argue that the one-sex model of antiquity continued until the Enlightenment because the non-dimorphic figurations of sexual identity that exist within it place more emphasis on vacillating performance(s) of gender than they do on issues of stable corporality. The one-sex model sits very well with modern understandings of the performativity of gender and sexuality. Whilst it has become fashionable for critics to argue that fears of corporal instability were the root-cause of gender-related anxiety in the early modern period, in this chapter I call into question much current wisdom on this issue. In opposition to the supposed hegemony of the one-sex paradigm, I offer an anatomically grounded reading of early modern figurations of sex identity circa 1545 to 1651. My survey highlights contestations of the one-sex model in both elite and popular medicine. I also include a case study that goes a considerable way towards questioning the cultural significance of one-sex anatomy.

II

The first comprehensive anatomy written in English during the Renaissance was Thomas Vicary’s Anatomy of the Body of Man. First published in 1545, the title page of the 1587 edition proclaims its author to have been:

Sergeant Chirurgian to King Henry the 8. To King Edward the 6. To Queene Mary. And to our Souveraigne Lady Queene Elizabeth and also chiefe chirurgion to S. Bartholemewes Hospitall […]⁹

Despite the impressive biography, the book’s real author was Professor of Anatomy at the rather more prestigious University of Padua, because Vicary’s Body of Man, like most mid-sixteenth-century European anatomies, was a translation of Andreus Vesalius’s de humani corporisfabrica (Basel, 1543). In the sections dealing with sex identity, Vicary’s Body of Man contains a description of female reproductive organs startling in the degree to which it appears to be derivative of Galen, despite being written more than a millennium later. Vicary seems to change little of the received wisdom on sex identity and posits a version of female reproductive biology mediated through the mapping and translation of non-sex-specific corollaries proper to both men and women. Despite the fact that Vicary chose to express his understanding of reproductive biology in terms of the similarities between the exterior of the male and the interior of the female, however, closer reading reveals that just beneath the surface of his text (and therefore nagging at the logic of the mid-sixteenth-century anatomist) Galenic systems of homology were beginning to break down into much weaker schemes of comparison, metaphor and simile. Vicary’s language, like that of subsequent European anatomies, goes a significant way towards the delineation of quasiessentialist notions of anatomical difference and begins to outline for the first time discrete male and female versions of human reproductive organs.

That an unquestioning acceptance of Galenic paradigms should begin to break down in Vicary is not all that surprising, particularly given that the Body of Man is a translation of the fabrica. As early as 1543, Vesalius was at pains to distance himself from a Galenic vision of female biology; he asserted ‘Galen never inspected a human uterus’ whilst calling attention to the fundamental errors central to the three major Galenic texts on the subject: on the Use of Parts, on Semen and on Dissection of the Uterus.¹⁰ In Vicary’s translation of Vesalius, we read of the womb:

The Matrix in women is an officiall member, compound and nervous, and in complexion cold and drye: and it is the feelde of mans generation, and it is an instrument susceptive, that is to say, a thing receiving or taking: and her proper place is betweene the bladder and the gut Longaon, the likeness of it, is as it were a yard reversed or turned inwarde, having testikles likewise […] (Vicary, 58 [sic])¹¹

At first glance, male and female reproductive organs seem to differ only in location: the woman’s situated within, the man’s without. They seem to perform like function: women produce seeds of generation, as do men. Yet close reading reveals a subtext in which any underlying sense of exactitude is undermined. Note, for example, that when comparison is made to male reproductive organs, the matrix is served by the feminine possessive adjective ‘her’; it is deemed to be an ‘official member’ existing in its own right; it is perceived to be ‘an instrument susceptive’ (it ‘receives’ seed rather than ejaculating it) and similitude rather than homogeneity is invoked both in the phrase ‘as it were’ and in the direct simile ‘the likeness of it, is as it were’. Moreover, when female humours are mentioned, Vicary attributes to the womb a ‘dry’-ness instead of the received Galenic dampness; thereby indicating a sense of biological completion akin to the male’s hot, dry state.

Later, in a section ‘of the matrix in women’ in which Vicary expounds the function of the female ‘testicles’ (ovaries), Fallopian tubes are described as ‘semen ducts’ like those attached to the testicles within the male scrotum; yet, once again, male and female organs are separated by the clear notion of difference that emerges in Vicary’s observation that the two sets of vessels are of unequal length:

In the sydes of the vtter mouth […] are two testikles or stones, and also two vessels of sparme shorter then mans vessels, and in the tyme of coyt the womans sparme is shed down to the bottome of the Matrix […] (Vicary, 49 – my italics)

Crucially, these female ‘stones’ are not considered to be located within the matrix as the male testicles are within the scrotum – a fact that may also be noted in visual representations of the ovaries in late medieval and early Renaissance anatomical sketches dating from the first delineation of the womb and uterus onwards (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2) and more markedly in Vesalius’s tabulae anatomicae of 1543 (see Figure 1.3). Furthermore, female seed is understood to stay within the womb during conception and gestation, in contrast to that of the male, which is understood to be ejaculated from the penis. Such facts immediately render the Galenic notion of ‘the vagina [as] an externally, precariously, unborn penis, the womb a stunted scrotum’ all but impossible: for if such a vertiginous vagina and womb were to descend in order to form penis and scrotum, what would happen to external ‘stones’ not held within the so-called ‘scrotum’ of the womb? Likewise, what would become of vas defe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Man Made Woman: Early Modern Anatomy and the Emergence of Sexual Difference
• 2 Homoerotic Metamorphoses: Ide, Gallathea and Falstaff
• 3 Apparel, Anatomy, Agency: Performative Challenges to Masculine Authority
• 4 Roaring Girls and Tragic Maids: Strategies of Dramatic Recuperation
• 5 Misogynist Anatomy: The Visceral Imperatives of Fordian Tragedy
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index