Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (review)

Gail Kern Paster analyzes the "premodern ecology of the passions" (9) as they are constructed by the humors and the humors' natural cognates in air, water, fire, and earth. Paster presents humoralism as a field in which "the dynamic reciprocities between self and environment [are] imagined by the psychophysiology of bodily fluids" (14). The focus differs from The Body Embarrassed (1992), where Paster attends to the "difference humoralism . . . makes to the subjective experience of being-in-the-body" (3). Here she concludes that for the early modern world being-in-the-body is equivalent to being-in-the-world: "Humoral subjectivity . . . [is] a fluid form of consciousness inhabited by, even as it inhabits, a universe composed of analogous elements" (137). Simultaneously, social expectations shaped the expression of humors.

A person's passional inner landscape, governed by the humors that construct identity, however, "had a more than analogical relation to liquid states and forces of nature" (4). Inner (psychophysiological) and outer (natural) worlds, Paster suggests, mutually inscribe each other. In the humoral and natural language of fire and air in the First Player's description of Pyrrhus in Hamlet, for example, the images "suggest how bodily interiority and affect express themselves environmentally as part of the 'vast systems of fluid exchange' between the body and the world" (42).

Paster's extensive bibliography gives copious evidence for the mutuality of inner and outer worlds. Much of the evidence comes from early modern texts on the humors, through which Paster traces the theory of humoral psychophysiology. But she is particularly interested in applying the theory to early modern drama, especially Shakespeare's but also to other playwrights' works. Her method is consistent. Having elucidated an aspect of humoral theory by reference to one or more of the theoretical texts, Paster reads passages in plays to develop new ways to read old texts.

A brief review cannot do justice to how Paster's local readings transform the reading of entire plays, indeed of character generally in early modern drama. One strand of the argument, involving the psychophysiology of heat, might suggest the sometimes startling results of her analyses. Paster argues that the interpenetration of inner and outer worlds makes a person's "temperature," his or her sense of identity, highly contingent. The contingencies of identity challenge "the self-sameness — the manly constancy — so prized by humanist thought" and so "produce the un-self-sameness that is so striking a feature of humoral being-in-the-body" (22). As Pyrrhus's destructive self-assertion suggests, however, the greater "heat" of men makes them capable of some degree of self-constancy. And yet melancholy reduces heat and therefore reduces self-constancy. Hamlet's famously mysterious "volatility," then, "is to be understood less as a striking feature of his disembodied personality and more as a humoral inevitability" (60). By the same token, the "coldness" of women "tamps down individuality" (80). The stereotypical "green sickness" of young women, says Paster, is an expression of coldness. "Heated" by desire, however, women do not achieve the self-constancy of men because in fact they are differing from their natural humoral condition. The heat of women's desire, then, produces "temperamental inconstancy" (80), which suggests that changes in the behavior of female characters, in Desdemona for example, is not psychological complexity but psychophysiological necessity, a stereotypical framework "for recognizing and normalizing the social transforma-tion . . . from still, quiet maiden to boldly articulate wife" (109).

The final chapter treats the decline of humoral identity into affectation and social posturing, especially in Jonson's city comedies. To the extent that "manly constancy" expresses authority over others as well as over self-identity, to assert what Paster calls a "humoral right of way" (197) is particularly important where social hierarchy is contested: the court and the city. The display of an assumed humor, then, becomes an artificial, and easily mocked, way of affirming social superiority.

A caveat...