When Goneril scolds her father for his entourage’s behavior, Lear’s response is to attack her ability to conceive children. He berates her:
Why does Lear believe cursing Goneril’s womb will distinctively disparage her? How does he plan to “convey sterility” and create a “child of spleen” in his daughter’s body? How was this internal, corporeal process enacted in the early modern playhouse? Lear’s understanding of Goneril’s fertility raises larger enquiries explored by this book about the intersection of humoralism and performativity when analyzing the early modern womb. Lear wishes to preclude the womb from the generative process by empowering the spleen, a byword for malice and rashness, to procreate a perverse child. By attacking her fertility, Lear demonstrates the womb’s prominent role in the body as he attempts to denigrate his daughter solely by assaulting her hostile womb. His premise is predicated on a valid geohumoral reading, constructing the climate’s heat as intercepting the internal moisture of Goneril’s womb. Sterility was thought to derive from humoral imbalance in the female body, which prevented male seed from receiving proper nutrients in the womb.1 Cursing Goneril with an internal humoral drought, Lear emphasizes the leakiness expected of wombs in early modern discourse by rhetorically dehydrating his daughter’s interiors. While drastic, his malediction illustrates the concept at the heart of geohumoralism: that the humoral body is mediated by the external world. Lear’s curse situates the womb as a potentially dangerous organ, able to deplete the body of moist humors necessary to remain fertile. The fact that he consolidates his animosity toward his daughter on the womb highlights the way it became conflated with the female body over the course of the early modern period. Cursing Goneril’s womb effectively admonishes her womanhood, agency within patriarchy, and purpose in reproduction. His humoral imprecation offers one of many instances where the womb is evoked on the Shakespearean stage, which is the focus of this book.Into her womb convey sterility,Dry up in her the organs of increase,And from her derogate body never springA babe to honor her. If she must teem,Create her child of spleen, that it may liveAnd be a thwart disnatured torment to her. (King Lear 1.4.275–280)
In early modern England, Galenic naturalism utilized the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—to delineate the psychological and physiological apparatus. As other scholars have shown, humoral theory was part of the common vernacular of people of all classes, believed to be the rudimentary premise on which the body was based.2 All bodily systems were understood as part of the Galenic framework, which conceived of the body in flux, with the humors in constant need of regulation. The title page of Thomas Walkington’s The Optick Glasse of Humors categorizes each of the four humors in relationship with the elements, age, planets, and zodiac signs, illustrating the humoral body’s reciprocal relationship with the larger environment. The humoral body was considered porous, adaptable, and susceptible to innumerable changes in the climate, season, region, or age, even when healthy. Illness was conceptualized as an imbalance of the humors, and therefore, people were encouraged to use the non-naturals: sleep, diet, exercise, climate, excretion, and the passions to regulate their bodies. While each subject was born with a predisposition for one humoral temperament, she/he could mediate the humors through nutrition, bloodletting, enemas, temperature, and other remedies utilizing the non-naturals, which functioned interdependently. Humoralism endowed individual organs with a sense of agency within the body, with the subject often acting as a passive recipient of the organ’s autonomy. Much of the writing from this period shows that an organ could act independently without the subject’s consent or knowledge. The womb in particular was understood within this ideology, often described as an “animal in an animal,” able to impact the female body based on its own desires.3 This framework offered medical practitioners a discourse for describing and constructing an interiority that was otherwise impenetrable to them. Using somatic terminology to expound inward experiences highlights how humoral theory seeks to visualize and externalize inner processes. While our post-Cartesian ontology makes metaphors of bodily experience, no distinction between internal and external identities exists in humoral discourse. Galenic models are based on the body’s permeability to the surrounding environment, rendering all physical discourse not merely linguistic representation but an exploration of the porous self. In attempting to recover the performativity of the humors in this context, we can further explore the role the interior played in early modern playhouses.
This book considers how the humoral womb was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the early modern stage by exploring the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. Gail Kern Paster demonstrated how humoral theory can develop our understanding of affect in Shakespeare’s canon, and this book draws on that work by examining how the humoral womb was signified in a theatrical space. While this book will focus exclusively on Shakespeare’s canon for the sake of brevity, it hopes to inspire future scholarship to explore similar questions about the paradoxical, intriguing depiction of the womb across early modern drama. The humoral wombs that I trace in this book are Shakespearean in nature, and as such, were portrayed on an all-male stage during public performances. Therefore, I consider both an early modern medical reading of the female body presented in the canon and how it was represented on stage through the male performer. The body of the actor physicalizes a conceptual awareness of the humors on stage, inviting the audience to interpret language and character in corporeal terms. His physical presence in front of the audience interrogates the body not as metaphorical or elusive but material, carnal, and palpable. Humoral Wombs is interested in the interaction between the invisibility of humoral wombs and the visual medium that conjured them on stage, particularly in considering their impact on our interpretation of theatrical moments which invoke the womb. This introduction outlines the humoral concept of the womb disseminated in medical tracts, domestic manuals, diaries, and pamphlets, specifically interrogating how it was crucial to the larger socio-political discourse surrounding women’s bodies in the early modern period. The book begins by providing a medical framework for the literature analysis that occupies the remaining chapters. The purpose, structure, and function of the womb in early modern medicine are explored in a variety of texts to demonstrate how early moderners broadly theorized female anatomy when Shakespeare wrote his plays.
“receptacle and receiver of seed”
Humorally, women were typically considered phlegmatic, which produced a cold and moist temperament and was elementally connected to water. Midwife Jane Sharp attributed this to the “defect of heat in women,”4 while barber surgeon Ambroise Paré claimed “a woman’s flesh is more sponge-like and softer than a man’s: since this is so, the woman’s body draws moisture both with more speed and in greater quantity from the belly than does the body of a man.”5 Regardless of the cause of a woman’s succulence, it was generally agreed in medical texts that the “man therefore is hot and dry; woman cold and moist: he is the agent, she the patient, or weaker vessel.”6 Crucially, the woman’s cold and moist humors were thought to produce a passive, less assertive disposition. The female body was therefore akin to the grotesque: unfinished and porous, known for its inability to control itself.7 Casting the female body in this manner contrasted it with the perfected male form, which situated the womb as central to this Othering process. Medical authors used the biblical creation narrative as justification for denigrating women, stressing the importance of difference among genders for procreative success. If men and women embodied the same humoral constitution, these writers claim, they could not reproduce as their seed would not combine accurately. By predicating conception on differing humoral temperaments of men and women, medical theorists justified their own subjugation of women by cultivating a distinct female humorality responsible for behavior.
Various terminology was used to denote the womb, including “matrix,” “mother,” or “female yard.” Famed physician Eucharius Rösslin notes in his immensely popular The Birth of Mankind, “these three words, the matrix, the mother, and womb do signify but one thing.”8 As the byword “mother” suggests, the womb’s function was primarily understood in connection to gestation in these medical texts. Defining the womb in terms of fertility hints at the underlying premise in early modern medical texts that the womb served no other purpose in the female body other than facilitating reproduction. Rösslin even defines the organ as “the place wherein the seed of man is conceived, fortified, conserved, nourished, and augmented.”9 Referred to as the “receptacle and receiver of seed,” the womb’s principal function was to produce a healthy fetus by sustaining male seed.10 Jane Sharp explains simply “the concavi...