Historica Passio : Early Modern Medicine, King Lear, and Editorial Practice

This essay reinvestigates an old crux: why does King Lear say that he has "hysterica passio"? Peterson argues that contrary to most writing on the subject, Lear does not suffer from either hysterica passio or "hysteria." Several hundred years of criticism have attempted to illuminate Lear's statement, yet ironically, the historicizing and psychoanalytic methodologies most often marshaled by critics to elucidate Lear have obscured Shakespeare's perspectives on his character. The essay first defines hysterical ailments in 17th-century terms and explains that it is because Shakespeare understood hysterica passio as a strictly female pathology that Lear's identification of the illness must be perceived as the king's misprision, not as Shakespeare's errors in reading period medical case histories (such as Richard Mainy's case of "the mother," narrated by Samuel Harsnett) or the playwright's anticipation of psychoanalytic theories of hysteria. Tracing three hundred years' of commentary in some fifty editions of the play, Peterson documents how the glosses and commentaries on Lear's "hysteria" create a circular set of assumptions, all of which elide the relevance of hysterica passio to cultural, medical, historical, and literary contexts and controversies. The essay demonstrates how literary critics mistranslate or misread Harsnett's text (long recognized as an important influence on Shakespeare's composition of Lear) by altering the source's essential content, phrasing, and punctuation to make it match preconceived notions about the play's representation of early modern illnesses and "hysteria."