Shakespeare / Sex

Contemporary Readings in Gender and Sexuality

Jennifer Drouin, Lucy Munro, Gordon McMullan, Farah Karim Cooper, Sonia Massai, Jennifer Drouin

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350108561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Shakespeare / Sex interrogates the relationship between Shakespeare and sex by challenging readers to consider Shakespeare's texts in light of the most recent theoretical approaches to gender and sexuality studies. It takes as its premise that gender and sexuality studies are key to any interpretation of Shakespeare, be it his texts and their historical contexts, contemporary stage and cinematic productions, or adaptations from the Restoration to the present day. Approaching 'sex' from four main perspectives – heterosexuality, third-wave intersectional feminism, queer studies and trans studies – this book tackles a range of key topics, such as medical science, rape culture, the environment, disability, religion, childhood sexuality, race, homoeroticism and trans bodies. The 12 essays range across Shakespeare's poems and plays, including the Sonnets and The Rape of Lucrece, Coriolanus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure, Richard III and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Encouraged to push the envelope, contributors to this essay collection open new avenues of inquiry for the study of gender and sexuality in Shakespeare.

Part One

Heterosexuality and its perils

1

Greensickness and Shakespeare

Jessica C. Murphy

Greensickness is no joke. If we take some early modern medical and other accounts to heart, then we see that greensickness can lead to a painful and sometimes drawn-out death. Greensickness is a joke. If we consider early modern broadside ballads’ portrayal of the disease as a comic cypher, we see that it can be used to deceive and mock. If there was an idea in circulation that could serve both the serious and the comedic, chances are that William Shakespeare engaged it in his plays. In what follows, I explore the way in which Shakespeare uses the comic-tragic valence of greensickness to explore and critique early modern ideas about young women’s, and occasionally men’s, bodies. Greensickness offers Shakespeare opportunities to signal chaste virginity, marriageability, male characters’ femininity and love melancholy. It also serves as a vehicle for asking questions about the state of affairs for young women of marriageable age.

Early modern medicine understood greensickness to be a disease that afflicted primarily female virgins because it was, in a sense, caused by their virginity. Women with greensickness were ‘stopped up’, or unable to meet the normative expectations of young virgins because they did not menstruate, they were pale and tired, and they could not identify the cause for themselves. Doctors sought to remove the obstruction that caused the lack of menses with the idea that regular menstruation would restore health. Cures for greensickness run the gamut from herbal mixtures to married sexual intercourse. Greensickness, positioned as a ‘disease of virgins’, could serve a number of different cultural purposes. In her excellent survey of the history of the disease, Helen King argues that the rise in greensickness diagnoses in the late sixteenth century are connected to the rise of Protestantism in England and the ‘conquest of virgin lands’ in the form of colonialism.¹ Greensickness functions both as a medical condition and as a cultural marker in early modern England. One of the ways we can see this dual function is through how early modern English writers engaged with the topic. The disease falls out of medical texts some years after the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and King attributes this to a shift in the rhetoric around virginity and conquest. For King, ‘The disease of virgins, green sickness, chlorosis and the white fever were “the same thing” inasmuch as they were expressions of these same anxieties about female puberty, which functioned by making it “a disease”’.² During the reign of Elizabeth I, ‘Virginity was “good to think with”: and, while conquest of virgin lands was in progress, such conquest could be seen as doing a favour to the health of the girl, or the territory, being invaded.’³ Greensickness can therefore be seen as part of the English thirst for conquest at home in the form of marriage. Taken seriously by medical texts, which warn of the potentially dire consequences of the disease, greensickness encourages marriage by pathologizing virginity. Thomas Trapham, in a text published in the late seventeenth century, brings together greensickness and conquest through his recommended cure:⁴ ‘I never yet found a better Medicine against the Green Sickness than the Bermudas Berries, taken familiarly in any Liquor; but I find the Tincture of it made with White=wine, and also the Spirits and Extract of the same, more efficacious than any other Form.’⁵ Trapham, writing from the Bermudas to share his experiments with the Honourable Robert Boyle, Esquire, claims to have found a cure for greensickness abroad. There is a metaphorical connection here between the fruit of an island colonized by the English in the earlier part of the century and the worry about the wild and ungoverned pubescent female body in England.

Furthermore, Trapham sees his cure as crucial to save young women from the suffering he has seen by those who do not use his curative services. The cautionary tale with which Trapham ends his text is one that illustrates the seriousness of the disease for young women:

And now because I know your Philosophical Inclination, I’ll tell you a remarkable Observation lately made by me upon a young Virgin, who dyed of this Disease, she was extreamly far gone into the Green Sickness, lost her Strength and Spirits, had taken great quantities of Powder of Steel, been blooded in the Foot twice, and at length dying; upon Dissection we found a Mortification in her Stomack and Bowels, caused by a sharp corroding Humour, which caused very acute Pains in her Body: Had I been called to her, I should certainly have applyed these Remedies, and I have great reason to believe they might have proved serviceable: if you think fit to recommend the use of them unto any of your Acquaintance, I don’t doubt but they may be procured at London.⁶

This young virgin died because Trapham was not called soon enough to apply his proven remedy. The details of her death recounted here suggest that it is not merely a wasting away, but it is a painful death that involves numerous internal organs. As the example of Trapham’s text shows, that which was diagnosed as greensickness could be a severe and sometimes fatal disease.

Broadside ballads consider the disease of virgins as worthy of attention well beyond the time when medical texts have moved onto chlorosis, which is thought to be a kind of anaemia.⁷ Often using greensickness as a stand-in for pregnancy or a sign of a woman’s agency in sexual partnerships, English broadside ballads regularly poke fun at the concept of greensickness. In many broadside ballads, greensickness works as a way for young women to seek out sexual encounters legitimized by medicine. Take, for instance, the maid in ‘The Maids Complaint for want of a dill doul. / This Girl long time hath in a sickness been, / Which many maids do call the sickness green. / I wish she may some comfort find, poor soul, / And have her belly filled with a Dill doul’.⁸ Learning from her sister about the curative effects of intercourse with a man, she declares:

Thus youngmen have I declared in brief

the causes of my grief and woe,

And if any of you will yield me reliefe,

speak chearfully to me, say ay or no:

I live at the sign of the Cup and the Can,

and I will be loving to any youngman.

For his dil doul, dill doul, dill doul, doul,

And all my delight, etc.⁹

The ballad plays with the notion of greensickness to suggest that the medical ‘cure’ in the form of intercourse opens up an opportunity for young women to offer themselves freely to any willing man. Further, the ballad makes a connection between greensickness and commerce in the use of the storefront location of the ‘Cup and the Can’. The consumer in this case is the young woman – willing to give anything to have her virginity taken away – but by positioning herself under the sign of the ‘Cup and the Can’ she also becomes the commodity. The virgin with greensickness in this instance brings to mind prostitution (as she is available for a client), medical treatments (as she solicits a cure from a young man), and the buying and selling of goods (as she herself becomes). As listeners and readers, we might be laughing at the young men who see themselves as a cure or the parents who are duped by their daughters or, perhaps, the notion of an illness that is connected to virginity.

Greensickness is generally associated with virgins whose virginity has blocked the ‘normal’ passage of their menses. In what follows, I look at a series of direct and indirect mentions of greensickness in Shakespeare’s works to argue that while the disease functions on the one hand to drive characters toward heteronormative relationships, it can also work as a counter to undermine that drive. For Shakespeare, greensickness serves the plays’ heteronormative drive while at the same time demonstrating that a world exists outside the same heteronormative expectations. The very notion of greensickness evokes a virgin who is in need of sexual intercourse; it therefore undermines the notion of virginity as signifying moral purity. But it can also offer a certain amount of power to the virgin, as in Pericles; drive her mad, as in The Two Noble Kinsmen; or serve as a tool to criticize expressions of masculinity that do not live up to expectations, as in Antony and Cleopatra or Henry IV Part 2.

Let’s start with one mention that is clearly meant to signal the subject’s purity as it is associated with her virginity. Pericles might be one of my favourite plays to teach because I am able to give it a wild synopsis on the first day (Pirates! Incest! Shipwreck! Prostitution!), but also because with all of that wildness, there is a character who stands firm in her convictions against the tide. Marina, the lost daughter of Pericles, spends a good portion of the play in a brothel converting men to better morality. No matter how hard Pander, Bawd and Bolt try, Marina will not be moved. As part of his complaint about Marina, Pander exclaims: ‘Now the pox upon her green sickness for me.’¹⁰ A note by editor Suzanne Gossett points out the metaphorical use of greensickness here: ‘literally, an anaemic disorder of young women, associated with virginity; here, a metaphor for excessive squeamishness in sexual matters’ (4.6.21n). Pander uses the term to denigrate Marina’s choice of virginity, and more importantly how that choice is hurting his business model. Greensickness, for Pander, is the unjustified avoidance of sex by young virgins. As is typical for him, the transaction is all: greensickness is a blight on the product he would like to sell. In the medical discourse, however, there is no indication that sufferers of greensickness have a tendency towards moralizing or ‘squeamishness’. Bawd’s response demonstrates an awareness of the cure for greensickness: ‘Faith, there’s no way to be rid on’t but by the way to the pox’ (4.6.22–3). The only way to cure Marina of greensickness is the same as the only way to cure her of her moralizing – sexual intercourse (‘the way to the pox’). In fact, although Marina takes the moral high ground throughout the play, and Pander’s use of the word ‘greensickness’ highlights her virginity, one can imagine that broadside ballads would have had much fun with this example. The greensickness sufferers in those texts do not moralize; they search for cures.¹¹ But ultimately, even though it might have been good for business to claim that he had a virgin in need of a cure, Pander’s metaphorical use of greensickness does not render Marina susceptible to his control. Against Pander’s intention, his reference to greensickness further strengthens the position of Marina as virgin.

Romeo’s reference to the ‘sick and pale’ moon and ‘Her … sick and green’ ‘vestal livery’ also uses greensickness as a critique of virginity.¹² Editor René Weis claims that this allusion to greensickness and virginity is part of Romeo’s wish that Juliet will not stay a virgin (2.2.8n). As in the Pericles example, Romeo’s use of greensickness suggests a wilful virginity, a rejection of heterosexual union. Greensickness takes on this mantle – that of the deliberate refusal to engage in heteronormative marriage or to succumb to compulsory heterosexuality – and this tells us that the disease can be read as a choice by the young woman in question. A choice that Romeo hopes to discourage, a choice that Pander sees as ruining his goods.

Greensickness, as it is a disease caused by the sufferer’s virginity, can therefore be understood to stand in for a host of criticisms of young women who choose virginity rather than heterosexuality. Theodora Jankowski claims that ‘the position occupied by adult virgin women can be considered as a queer space within the early modern Protestant sex/gender system’.¹³ For Jankowski, ‘Virginity can be viewed as a means by which women refuse to be part of the sexual economy, refuse to be defined exclusively in terms of their reproductive capabilities, and embrace love relationships which allow these refusals.’¹⁴ Jankowski’s analysis can help us understand how greensickness functions when it is mentioned in the context of women who choose to maintain their virginity in the face of challenges.

As a choice that lies outside the normative expectation of marriage for young women during Shakespeare’s time, virginity can be read as something of a threat on its own. Of Marina in Pericles, Jankowski writes, ‘Marina’s virginity is shown to carry with it a queer aura of power that needs to be controlled’.¹⁵ In these terms, then, a diagnosis of or reference to greensickness may be understood as an attempt to control that ‘aura’. Referring to a virgin as greensick undermines the power that might inhere in her choice of virginity. At the same time, however, the use of greensickness by Pander in an attempt to use Marina as a commercial good, or by Romeo in an attempt to persuade Juliet to return his affection, demonstrates the potential power and threat of female virginity.

While both men are working to draw the virgins to whom they speak away from their choice of virginity, the difference between Romeo’s and Pander’s use of the idea of greensickness demonstrates that it can also be considered a signal of a young woman’s ‘marriageability’. Although Romeo laments Ju...