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  • Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage
  • Linda Woodbridge
Gail Kern Paster. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004. xiii, 274 pp., illus. $35.

Gail Paster's excellent book brims with fascinating information about sixteenth-century concepts of the body, especially the interactions of body, mind, and environment that produce emotion. Her work forms part of the larger project of excavating the early modern mental landscape. This historical reclamation takes on a particular importance with regard to Shakespeare, on whose behalf claims of global and temporal universality have so often been made. Over the past several decades, scholars have demonstrated that Shakespeare's celebrated transparency actually hides from view a sixteenth-century world in which ideas about everything from sexuality, gender relations, and race to politics, religion, and science differed crucially from their modern counterparts. Paster shows that so fundamental a matter as human emotion was conceptualized very differently in Shakespeare's time. This is a useful corrective to the way that Shakespeare has so often been taught—as a sage whose timeless wisdom should be imparted in classrooms to rising generations.

As Paster argues, "we tend not to imagine the emotions . . . as part of the fabric of the body," but for Shakespeare's contemporaries, black bile wasn't simply a producer of melancholy but in some sense was melancholy (p. 5). Emotions were material, "embodied" (p. 7). She tries to discover "the phenomenological character of early modern experiences of emotion—what passions of many sorts might have felt like in a penetrable body containing wriggling animal spirits, a heart whose blood did not yet circulate, and . . . four humors whose attributes of hot, cold, wet, and dry carried enormous emotional, psychological, and . . . ecological significance" (p. 20).

Emotions were also vitally connected with the world beyond the body. The "passions" were related to the wind, for example (p. 9); the body was [End Page 220] "filled with moving currents of air in the bloodstream, [and] . . . air taken within the body became part of the stuff of consciousness" (p. 41). Climate was closely implicated in temperament: "the cold . . . gave northern people their valor, hardiness, and slow-wittedness; the heat . . . gave southerners their sagacity and quickness of response" (p. 14). Wrath, exceeding the boundaries of the body, was "a quality of matter dispersed into the natural order" (p. 28). Animals and humans were thought to experience a similar range of emotions, and even palm trees could be amorously attracted to each other.

Paster is good on gender differences affecting emotion: "men's bodies were thought to be hotter and drier, women's bodies colder and more spongy" (p. 77). And "the coldness and sponginess of female flesh . . . became traits of great ethical consequence by explaining the sex's limited capacity for productive agency, individuality, and higher reasoning" (p. 79). Paster's subtle analysis of green sickness (the "virgin's disease") and her reading of several texts, including As You Like It, in light of the Renaissance notion that sexual maturity in girls involved a significant increase of bodily heat are sure to prove of interest to feminist readers. She is also good on masculinity, especially the role of displays of wrath in the formation of male identity.

Paster never explains why she chose to focus on "Shakespeare's plays, and sometimes those of other playwrights" (p. 23). Why not include some non-dramatic texts? In particular, Petrarchan poetry, which is all about emotions, would have provided fertile ground. Where else, for example, are sighs so relentlessly identified with wind, and tears with rain?

An earlier generation of literary scholars succeeded in putting readers completely off the four humors. Studies such as Lily Bess Campbell's Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, Slaves of Passion (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1930) reductively shoehorned the behavior of literary characters into rigid humoral pigeonholes. Paster's book, however, brings humoral study very fruitfully to bear on a series of literary texts, of which she is a careful and sophisticated reader. She provides wonderfully illuminating discussions of the Pyrrhus passage in Hamlet, of Othello's "puddled" spirit, of Desdemona's seeming character changes, of Shylock's strategic reduction of...

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