Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

by Gail Kern Paster

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.

Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

Genres: History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published November 15, 2004

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here is my review of this fine study:

https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/...

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing that Gail Kern Paster writes is anything less than excellent, and a wonderful journey through some of Shakespeare's better-known plays (and a couple by his contemporaries) using a detailed reading of the language through a Galenic lens gives us insights into the plays that we weren't expecting. The separation of the body and the mind under Descartes has done so much damage, but this book shows us that the (sexist) medicine of the early modern era could create problems as well, particularly in relation to unmarried women and "greensickness".

Two things prevent me from giving this five stars:
1) It looks at the humours of the characters, but the audiences in the early modern playhouses seem largely ignored: did they not have humoral responses too?
2) Because this is about "the Shakespearean Stage", other early modern playwrights hardly get a look-in: even in reading this, one gets the feeling that a larger chapter on Jonson's Sejanus was cut down. Yes, it's important that she focus on the well-known plays (what she says about Merchant of Venice, for instance, is fascinating), and not enough people (myself included) know Sejanus well enough for it to sell to a large audience, but I would really like to read that chapter.