Shakespeare's Physic (review)

John Crawford Adams. Shakespeare's Physic. Reprint, revised. London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2000. 192 pp. Ill. £10.00 (paperbound, 1-85315-463-6).

Shakespeare's Physic, as the title partly suggests, uses Shakespeare's works to illustrate the medical world of his time. For the general reader, there is plenty of interesting information about the medical realities of the period: John Adams constantly compares the primitive state of medical knowledge with that of our own time in a Whiggish narrative of medical and scientific progress. The academic reader will not be so entertained, because although Adams, a retired orthopedic surgeon, has great knowledge of the medicine of our own time, his theoretical approach to both medical history and literature is antiquated, often underpinned by inadequate research for an academic work.

The book moves through nine chapters that deal with the different types of medicine (including magic) used at the time, the people who delivered that care, medical theory, predominant diseases, and conditions in the city of London, and ends with Shakespeare's "comments" on madness, love, and death. Each point is rather mechanically illustrated with a quotation from Shakespeare; for example, an explanation of the symptoms of the plague is followed by mentions of the plague from several plays. This is not a work of literary analysis, so no further textual explication is forthcoming. It is also to be regretted that Adams does not attempt to go more deeply into the cultural meanings of disease: the "errors" of this kind of medicine are set against modern "corrections," often without enough knowledge of medical writing of the period to explain the subtleties of what illness meant to the people of the period.

A serious instance of this kind of omission occurs in the chapter on madness, in which there is little or no mention of melancholy--one of the most important terms in the medical and cultural vocabulary of the time, and certainly one that needs to be discussed in some detail when examining Shakespeare. Similarly, Adams's pronouncements on the power of alternative medicines to affect people who were "highly gullible" stigmatizes sufferers who were finding meaning in treatments that were perfectly acceptable in this period (p. 102). The chapters on madness, love, and death are particularly weak, largely consisting of nonmedical speculations on Shakespeare's attitudes toward mental illness.

At this point, it is necessary to mention that Shakespeare's Physic itself needs to come with a health warning. That most famous of British literary critics, Terry Eagleton, in a review of a Shakespeare biography once said that what we really know about Shakespeare's life could be written on the back of a small postage stamp. This remains the case today, even to the extent that Shakespeare's authorship of the corpus we know as his plays and poems is heartily disputed. Adams has clearly taken his laudable enthusiasm for Shakespeare and medical history in the biographical direction, but without the sophistication that professional scholars bring to the complex problems of that area. Indeed, he has constructed an image of Shakespeare that is not justified by either the texts or the facts.

For Adams, Shakespeare must have been heterosexual, because he is able to represent all aspects of the emotion of love so authentically in his plays and poems. Similarly, he must have been a conservative figure, no doubt reflecting Adams's own values: "the greater one's acquaintance with Shakespeare, the clearer it becomes that he was a very normal man; a conformist in every aspect of life. He disapproved of too much eccentricity, and, especially of sexual deviation" (p. 153). Regardless of one's perspective on Shakespeare's probably unknowable sexuality, this is offensive stuff: Adams sees homosexuality as perverted and deviant, so Shakespeare has to be rescued from its taint. Such an antediluvian authorial mindset has ruined what might have been a perfectly acceptable coffee-table book for the general reader, although not of much use...