The Intoxications of Elizabethan Drama

THE INTOXICATIONS OF ELIZABETHAN DRAMA RYAN J. HUXTABLE* Dramatists have turned to poisons for plot aids long before the word toxicology was invented. Euripides, in his play Medea, first performed in 431 BC, has Medea murderJason's wife, Glauce, with a poisoned dress and coronet. Stage poisonings have been a growth industry ever since, along with therapeutic agents producing miraculous cures. A consideration of such agents—therapeutic or toxic—yields insight into the value systems of the playwrights' times. Although many ofthese agents seem to be imaginary and to have arbitrary properties, close examination can allow us to recreate past ages and the scientific thinking associated with them. In the latter half of the 16th century, the western world was redefining itself. Medieval concepts of the world with its Aristotelian physics were giving way to Protestantism, heliocentrism, and a modern emphasis on the individual. Elizabeth herself ascended the throne as a Protestant. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome for his heretical beliefs in, among others, the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. In this theory, it was no longer the earth which stood at the center of the universe but the sun. Indeed, Bruno had gone further, proclaiming that if the universe was infinite any point of it could be claimed as the center. The confusion in men's minds is expressed in John Donne's couplet: The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit Can well direct him where to look for it. In parallel with the changes in astronomy, the world itself seemed to be expanding inimitably. Portuguese navigators and Elizabethan seamen were probing the limits of the known world. The globe was becoming recognizably round, in contradistinction to the flat world of the medievalists. The Oxford English Dictionary records for 1553 the first usage of the word globe to refer to the world. And the Globe, of course, was the name of Shakespeare 's new theater, opened in Southwark on the south bank of the * Department of Pharmacology, College of Medicine, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85724. Preparation of this manuscript was supported by the Herb Society of America.© 1998 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/98/4201-1078101.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 42, 1 ¦ Autumn 1998 | 103 Thames in London in 1598-1599. The changes in geography were mimicked by changes in psychology. Donne's "O my America! my new-foundland ," from his poem "Going to Bed," explicitly links geography and psychology , comparing the exploration of a lover's body to the discovery of America ("How blest am I in this discovering thee!"). Shakespeare's play The Tempest, explores how man behaves when transposed to new worlds. The Elizabethan stage itselfis a fiction that encapsulates a reality—a reality of behavior, psychology, history. It mirrors life, while life in turn mirrors the stage with the need for suspension of disbelief in a rapidly changing world: Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. As with the changes ofthe 20th century, humans had trouble in adjusting to the rate of change. The realities being discovered were so unprecedented that the Elizabethans had trouble separating fact and fantasy. Old views and new concepts existed illogically side by side in the same person. Sir Walter Raleigh ventures up the miserable swamps of the Orinoco, convinced he would find Eldorado, the land of gold. The 20th-century equivalent would be a respected citizen disappearing into the Himalayas to search for Shangri-La, the valley of eternal youth. On the Elizabethan stage, many of the dramatic poisonings were by our standards simply fantastic. But they reflect the beliefsystems of the age and often mimic the perception of historical events. It is this parallelism between stage poisonings and historical events that will be explored in this article. Medicopharmacological knowledge at the turn of the 16th century was a mixture of rationality and mythology. That, with the belief in the limitless properties of matter, also has its echoes today. But one difference between us and the Elizabethans is that our newfoundland, with its magical botanicals and toxins, resides not across...