Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

FIVE Magic and Nature in the Later Shakespeare

166 FIVE Magic and Nature in the Later Shakespeare The Protestant emphasis on the importance of Scriptures written in the heart leads to the ideological and psychological paradox that religious discourse must be appropriated and internalized to the extent that it inevitably becomes secularized and individualized . But this discourse also beomes magically intensified, even while the rigors of Protestant manliness mount an attack on the false and demonically inspired belief in the magical power of language . Such a strategy, as we have already seen, leads to some very interesting ambiguities in the construction of gender, with woman’s role as a spiritual “permeable” repository of magical, procreative power—emblematized, for example, in Marlowe’s Duchess of Vanholt—significantly overshadowed or subsumed by female characters who appropriate the agency, physical and rhetorical, of the supposedly more “manly” role: Joan, Queen Margaret, Juliet. The Magical Context of Words and Deeds in All’s Well That Ends Well In All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare appears to daringly fuse these two female roles in the character of Helena, resulting in a controversial and problematic play that obliquely but Magic and Nature in the Later Shakespeare 167 fruitfully explores the cultural and psychological ramifications of the ideological configuration of masculinity and magic. Debate over the nature of Helena’s cure of the king of France’s fistula in All’s Well That Ends Well has certainly led to questions concerning the nature of human versus divine agency. Maurice Hunt argues for the “Triumph of the Word” in the play, although the various triumphs and failures he identifies depend directly on the relation each individual character establishes between his or her words and the larger social context: “characters in this dark comedy either infuse their words with charity, the essence of the Word Itself, or lapse pridefully into corrupted language or even a re-creation of Babel,” the obvious example of Parolles. According to Hunt, the king “possibly” receives his medical salvation through “the divine word, infused into a weak virgin,” or at least the king’s rhetoric suggests he chooses to view his healing in this manner—“Methinks in thee some blessèd spirit doth speak / His powerful sound within an organ weak” (2.1.177– 8)—which seems to me an important qualification in light of the vague way Shakespeare presents Helena’s achievement theatrically.1 F. David Hoeniger contextualizes the controversial issue of the fistula and its cure with Treatises of Fistula in Ano...,written by “the first great English surgeon,” John Arderne, in 1376. Hoeniger observes that in “Elizabethan times, physicians and surgeons were often as wary of treating fully developed fistules as they had been in the Middle Ages; for skill and daring, Arderne had been exceptional .” In fact, “Arderne confirms the impression that Helena’s cure is improbable, even with the help of a newly discovered recipe by her skillful father, since he tells us that only abscesses and apostemes can be cured by drugs and ointments alone,” that is, in the absence of surgical intervention.2 Thus, regardless of the actual location of the fistula (anal or otherwise), the healing brought about by Helena in only two days (as opposed to the eight days in Shakespeare’s source in Boccaccio) seems incredible or miraculous. 168 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama There has arisen a debate concerning whether Helena achieves her cure through Paracelsian or Hermetic magic, which in fact has its roots in the slightly older debate concerning the controversy between Galenic and Paracelsian medicine in early modern society. Richard Stensgaard notes that “London shortly past the turn of the century was alive with talk of medicine, the result of a devastating visitation of the plague (ca. 1602–06)”; this calamity fueled the debate between the Galenists, who, “arguing that herbal medicines were the best remedies for all manner of sickness , based their thinking on the ancient belief that herbals best acted to maintain humoral equilibrium,” and the more modern Paracelsians, who, “rejecting the humoral theory, insisted on the use of ‘specific’ chemical medicines, simplified, distilled medicaments designed to restore health by acting on the special toxicity of the particular disease.” Since in Shakespeare’s time a fistula was “an abscess or sore not unlike that caused by plague,” the playwright suggests a connection “between the king’s personal distress and the prevailing...