Shakespearean Maternities: Crises of Conception in Early Modern England (review)

So much significant scholarship has appeared on the subject of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays, from seminal writings such as Mary Beth Rose’s “Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare?” (1991) and Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers (1992), to more recent works such as Theresa M. Krier’s Birth Passages (2001) and Kathryn M. Moncrief and Kathryn R. McPherson’s anthology of essays Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (2007). These are only a few. Psychoanalysis, feminism, new historicism, cultural materialism, and the history of medicine have provided a wealth of approaches through which this subject has been thoroughly explored. Against this imposing background, Chris Laoutaris’s Shakespearean Maternities is all the more impressive for finding a new slant: the role of the maternal, widely defined—from dead pregnant bodies dissected in anatomy theaters to affective effigies displayed on funeral monuments—in the professionalization of the primarily masculine disciplines of anatomy, natural science, demonology, and heraldry. Laoutaris’s book is extraordinarily well researched in each of these four disciplines and others, such as archaeology and art history. (The bibliography includes twenty-three pages of closely packed entries, including three pages of primary manuscript material.) This extensive research is rendered all the more accessible by the book’s eighty-six illustrations and photographs of anatomical texts, underground grottos, exotic or “pregnant” fruit, wonder cabinets, witch bottles (containing bent pins and locks of hair), a desiccated chicken, and numerous funeral monuments. This historical material alone provides sufficient interest for a serious volume. Most impressively, however, the perspectives Laoutaris brings into view also provide strikingly fresh and plausible insights into Hamlet, The Tempest, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Based on a wide reading of critics, as well as an intuitive literary sense, her readings do not distort the plays to fit the evidence. Shakespearean Maternities is an important book to read, not only for those interested in maternal figures, but for any scholar who wishes to be well informed about these four major plays.

In chapter 1, Laoutaris discusses the role of the pregnant female body in the professionalism of the science of anatomy. In this context, Laoutaris’s analysis of the title page of Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica is a tour de force. As she observes, the chaotic jostling of bodies, both human and animal, around the exposed female corpse unsettles the unitary focus of an analytic gaze. The thrill of illicit body snatching and sexual voyeurism taint any pure origin of the science of anatomy. This is to be expected. What is new, however, is the connection between this scene and satire and reformed religion in Wittenberg. The satyr’s mask hanging directly beneath the cartouche expresses an iconoclastic urge common to Vesalius’s rejection of received Galenic doctrines and to the satirists’ desire to expose the follies of hypocrisy. Produced in the workshop of Titian, this title page portrays a classically garbed figure that, as Laoutaris notes, strikingly resembles the sympathetic Pilate of Titian’s Ecce Homo, itself a rendering of Vesalius’s humanist friend Pietro Aretino, who scandalized Europe with his sonnet sequence accompanying the pornographic plates of the infamous I modi (The Positions). While a transgressive eroticism implicit within the science of anatomy would seem to fit oddly with the sober doctrines of Lutheran Wittenberg, both of them shared an impulse to dismantle the received authorities of the Galenic and Catholic past, respectively. The “step-bystep revelation of inward depravity” (52) revealed in the diseased organs exposed in an anatomy theater provided a powerful analogue for Melanchthon’s project of spiritual self-examination. From these materials—satiric, erotic, reformist—Shakespeare constructed a Hamlet who adopts an “‘antic disposition’” to find out truth, as God’s “‘scourge and minister’” (64). Hamlet focuses especially on the female reproductive body: on Ophelia, whose conception of a fetus (like the maggots bred in a “‘dead dog’” [70]) would not be a blessing, and especially on Gertrude, for whom this...