Midwiving Subjects in Shakespeare's England (review)

In examining the representations of midwives in Shakespeare's plays, Caroline Bicks tells us about more than just Shakespeare: she has intriguing suggestions about the cultural roles of midwives in early modern England. She argues that they exercised extraordinary power in two areas. First, in their naming of the sex of a newborn infant, midwives spoke sexual difference into existence—it was as if the body was not sexed until the midwife spoke. The book opens with a wonderful anecdote from the works of the French midwife Louise Bourgeois: while the queen of France was in labor, Bourgeois was asked if it would be a girl or a boy, and she replied that she could make it either, as she chose. However, Bourgeois's work was never published in English (with one small twenty-seven-page exception), and it is unclear how Bicks thinks we should relate this French example to her English story. On the other hand, her discussion of the Old Lady in Shakespeare's Henry VIII—a midwife who toys with the King, telling him that he has a son, only to rescind her words and make it a daughter (the future Queen Elizabeth)—is fascinating and persuasive.

Second, Bicks shows how midwives shaped sexuality with their tools. She documents the extensive belief that cutting a newborn boy's navel-string (what we would call the umbilical cord) affected his adult sexual function. Short navel-strings meant short penises, but an overly long navel-string might render a penis too long for reproductive use. Here too, I have questions about the ways in which Bicks uses her sources. Her discussion of the navel-string focuses on male babies, but almost every vernacular text is also concerned with girls, linking the navel-string with both the vagina and the tongue: the usual advice was to cut the navel-string short, so that the vagina would be small (affording pleasure to her future husband) and the tongue short (ensuring that she would not be a gossip).

Bicks makes a real contribution to our understanding of midwives by showing us some of the cultural power accorded to these women. She builds upon the rich social histories of midwifery of the past decade, bringing a literary scholar's interpretive skills to a range of often-fragmentary texts, and illuminating larger patterns of power. For instance, she offers a rich reading of a moment in 1533 when women gossiped during a long labor, perhaps saying treasonous words about Henry's new queen, Anne Boleyn, calling her a whore and a harlot. We will never know just what was really said amid the accusations and counteraccusations, but Bicks makes clear for us the ways in which an ordinary birth attended by everyday midwives could be linked to grand political issues by means of gossip about sexuality.

This brief review can only touch upon many of the topics that Bicks tackles, reminding us of the multifaceted nature of the power ascribed to midwives. She discusses the richness of the word "gossip," which originally referred to the women attending labor; the peculiar and sometimes theologically troubling role of the midwife as baptizer of infants thought to be near death; and the politics of churching, a ceremony of thanksgiving for new mothers. Some historians already familiar with the medical texts that Bicks employs may be frustrated by her habit of treating them almost interchangeably, taking bits of one or another without much attention to their individual histories. That frustration, however, is counterbalanced by appreciation for the wealth of references in plays (not all by Shakespeare) and other literary works that gives us new insights into the cultural power afforded to women who delivered babies in early modern England.