Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

Book Description
Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism--blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm--early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.

Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.



About the Author
Gail Kern Paster is director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. She is the author of The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England.




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"In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way of interpreting the emotions of the early modern stage so that readers may recover some of this historical particularity." "Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major Shakespearean plays, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by underscoring the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. Beginning with an overview of the differences between early modern behavioral theory and the models of mind-body relations dominant in post-Enlightenment thought, Humoring the Body goes on to consider the relationship among the body, the emotions, and the natural world in Hamlet and Othello; the phenomenon of the melancholy virgin in As You Like It and the opposite phenomenon of choler in The Taming of the Shrew; the representation of animal and human emotion against the backdrop of early modern natural history in Macbeth; and the connection between early modern social and emotional hierarchies. With unmatched acumen, Paster expertly probes how Shakespearean characters experienced rage, pain, and joy in a world in which no distinction existed between physiology and psychology." A major contribution both to Shakespeare studies and to the history of embodied emotions, Humoring the Body challenges modern readers - steeped in the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology - to reexamine the literal language of embodied emotion in early modern England.


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