Syphilis in Shakespeare's England (review)

This is an attractive publication: thirteen chapters on syphilis during the Renaissance, mainly in English life and letters (three of these on Shakespeare), carefully printed on excellent paper, with many illustrations from the period, all instructively explicated in extensive legends. I found the earlier chapters about Fracastoro and the controversy over the origin of the disease (chap. 1), about the drugs used to fight it (chap. 2), and about Renaissance English books on it (chap. 3) the most informative—although here, as elsewhere in the book, there is some overlap between chapters in the material presented.

Generally the author writes better as a historian than as a literary critic with his own agenda; the latter mode sometimes leaves an impression of considerable unease. This is particularly true of the sections relating to Shakespeare. Since the two modes or subjects are often intermingled, it is unfortunately not possible to recommend reading one half of the book and avoiding the other: readers will have to be on their toes.

I mention only three problematic issues: (1) As early as in chapter 2 (on drugs) the passage from Hamlet comes up in which the Ghost reports that the murderer poisoned him by pouring into his ears “juice of cursed Hebona in a vial” (I.v.62, Riverside ed.). On the basis of various associations, Fabricius argues at length (and I believe unconvincingly) that the “leperous distilment,” as the Ghost calls it, “can only be” Lignum Guaiacum, the American wood then commonly used as a remedy against syphilis (p. 43). Although he recognizes the difficulty of considering the antilueticum a poison (p. 47), he believes that it was considered so dangerous when administered incorrectly that this is what Elizabethans would have associated in this place. (2) Chapter 10 expands on Caroline Spurgeon’s work from the thirties on image clusters in Shakespeare, supposed to represent associations in the unconscious and resulting in statistics that have long been critiqued and (I would think) discredited in scholarship. (3) Fabricius is entirely persuaded by A. L. Rowse’s suggestion of 1974 that the mysterious dark lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets is Amelia Lanier. Although much work has been done recently on this poet and her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, this identification (like many others Rowse has proposed) has not met with much enthusiasm.

Thus forewarned, the reader will find this book useful and pleasurable. It complements well such books as Greg Bentley’s Shakespeare and the New Disease (1989), which is more literary, and Claude Quétel’s History of Syphilis (translated from the French in 1990), which is mainly about Continental authors. Fabricius’s wide range of references from Goethe and Nietzsche to Baudelaire and Maupassant make the book pleasantly urbane.