Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage by Mary Floyd-Wilson (review)

In Occult Knowledge, Science, and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage, Mary Floyd-Wilson depicts an early modern world propelled by uncontrollable sympathies and antipathies. Bodies, both animate and inanimate, attract and repel other bodies like lodestones; corpses bleed anew in the presence of their murderers; wombs chase after sweet scents; and menstrual blood’s affinities with rabies and tumors produces cures for both. Far from being erratic or irrational, however, these and other sympathetic responses were understood to follow specific and predictable rules; theorizing the finely calibrated effects of bodies on bodies lay at the heart of science. This book’s impressive achievement is to demonstrate the implications of these pervasively held theories for the workings of the early modern theater. If playwrights see bodies’ responses to other bodies as determined by forces that go beyond simple physiological, humoral, or affective reactions, we need to identify these invisible pressures in order to understand their theatrical origins, effects, and meanings.

This monograph has roots in recent scholarship on early modern bodies, environments, and emotions. Floyd-Wilson’s first book, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003), focused on geohumoralism in order to situate early modern conceptions of racial identity in both Galenic medical thought and geography. In more recent coedited collections on embodiment, emotions, and environment, she has argued for historicizing our understanding of transactions between early modern selves and their settings: not only did bodies shape emotional experience, but also both bodies and emotions shaped, and were shaped by, the natural world in which they were embedded. Occult Knowledge shows its intellectual origins in its close attention to bodies’ engagement with the natural world but diverges from familiar materialist approaches by insisting on situating early understandings of bodies within a broader framework of beliefs in preternatural and occult forces. For early modern thinkers, “some emotions could not be explained in humoral terms” (7); profound attractions and revulsions instead reflect hidden sympathies and antipathies shaped by intrinsic occult properties. Sympathy itself, now primarily an affective and ethical concept, referred specifically to an affinity, typically resulting in some form of influence between bodies that shared similar elements. Because female bodies were understood to be privileged sources of occult secrets and to exert especially potent magnetic forces, Floyd-Wilson shows that early modern ideas about female agency were also colored by assumptions about these properties, which conferred distinctive powers and privileges as well as restrictions.

Floyd-Wilson begins her book by exploring widespread early modern beliefs in sympathetic correspondences and influences. Although much of the material explored in the introduction speaks more to broader intellectual history than to literary study per se, toward the end Floyd-Wilson turns her attention to the implications of bodily sympathies for the theater. Noting that the period’s drama necessarily reflects the cultural beliefs about sympathies in which it was embedded, she goes further to argue for widespread beliefs that plays “could stir an audience member’s emotions against her will, in the same way that antipathies or sympathies in one entity might draw or repel the affections of another” (20). More specifically, she suggests that the particular effects attributed to female bodies provide an important new context for understanding the transvestite stage: contagiously emitting potent vapors and spirits, female bodies convey a unique threat to audiences. As she goes on to suggest in later chapters, plays themselves reflect on this threat when they depict the unsettling consequences of sympathetic contagion experienced in response to female bodies. Understanding preternatural theories of sympathies, then, adds an important new dimension to the period’s debates about theater’s effects on audiences, as well as to conversations about affective contagion within plays themselves.

After establishing intellectual background on contemporary occult thought in the introduction, the book’s chapters explore theatrical depictions of bodies’ sympathetic influences and effects, with a particular emphasis on the female body’s hidden powers and...