1 For a survey of the criticism see Price, Joseph G., The Unfortunate Comedy: A Study of ‘All's Well That Ends Well’ and its Critics (Toronto, 1968), pp. 75–129 Google Scholar passim, esp. pp. 99-102.

2 Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (New York, 1931), pp. 32-77, esp. pp. 55-63.

3 Ca. 1603-04 as argued by G. K. Hunter (Arden Shakespeare, pp. xviii-xxv), though certain external evidence points to 1605 (New Shakespeare, p. 105).

4 Commonly known as the Plague of 1603. Mullett, Charles F., ‘The Plague of 1603 in England,’ Annals Med. Hist., N.S., 9 (1937), 230–247 Google Scholar, esp. 246, n. 2.

5 For a general history see Debus, Allen G., The English Paracelsians (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Kocher, Paul H., ‘Paracelsan Medicine in England: The First Thirty Years,’; J. Hist. Med., 2 (1947), 451–480 Google ScholarPubMed. Regarding the currency of the outbreak of ca. 1603 see annotated bibliography of medical and related works, Stensgaard, Richard, ‘Shakespeare, Paracelsus, and the Plague of 1603: An Annotated List,’ Shakespearean Research and Opportunities, No. 4 (1968-69), pp. 73–77 Google Scholar; also testimony of “ Clowes, William, A Right Frutefull Treatise for the Artifidall Cure of Struma (London, 1602)Google Scholar, sig. A2V: ‘[As] much strife I know there is betwen the Galenistes and the Paracelsians as was in times past betweene Ajax and Ulysses.'

6 Pagel, Walter compares the two conceptions in Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York, 1958), pp. 126–144 Google Scholar.

7 [Ruscelli, Girolamo], The Secretes of Alexis (London, 1615)Google Scholar, fol. 11: ‘To make oyle of Brimstone, to heale all manner of cankers, diseases, or sores, which come of a putrified humour, and runne continually, commonlie called Fistules.'

8 E.g., Hester, John, Key of Philosophic, the Second Part annexed to The First Part of the Key of Philosophic (London, 1596), pp. 91–92.Google Scholar [Penot, Bernard Georges], A Hundred and Foureteene Experiments and Cures of the Famous Physitian Paracelsus (London, 1596)Google Scholar, sig. B [I]V. See also evidence of the near legendary notoriety fistula would seem to have acquired as an especially fit subject for chemical therapy: Woodall, John, The Surgion's Mate (London, 1617), p. 303 Google Scholar ('In Praise of Quicksilver or Mercurie’)—

9 The opening blast was Francis Herring's Certaine Rules for this Time of Pestilentiall Contagion: with a Caveat to those that Wear Impoisoned Amulets as a Preservative from the Plague (London, 1625). N o copy of the first edition of 1603 survives; Ent. SR 14 Jy 1603. Peter Turner's The Opinion of Peter Turner, Doct: in Physicke, Concerning Amulets or Plague Cakes (London, 1603) followed shortly thereafter, to be answered in turn by Herring's rejoinder, A Modest Defence of the Caveat Given to the Wearers of Impoisoned Amulets (London, 1604).

10 The insinuation is several times made, e.g., sig. A2^v, p. 36. On Herring's status as a fellow of the College see William Munk, The Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London. Turner was a mere licentiate.

11 The mention of'fistula’ is, of course, in Shakespeare's source, the tale of'Giletta of Narbona’ from Boccaccio's Decameron, tr. William Painter in the Palace of Pleasure (1566); the special emphasis placed upon it is Shakespeare's.

12 Citations from All's Well are to the Arden Shakespeare, ed. Hunter, G. K. (London, 1959)Google Scholar.

13 The distinction is between the ancient principle, ‘Contraria Contrariis Curentur,’ and the newer ‘homeopathic’ principle. See Pagel, , Paracelsus, pp. 144–148 Google Scholar

14 In Boccaccio, Giletta hears simply that ‘there was no Phisition to be found’ who could heal the king.

15 Copeman, W. S. C., Doctors and Disease in Tudor Times (London, 1960), pp. 141–143 Google Scholar, 148-149.

16 In Boccaccio, the medicine is described briefly as ‘a pouder of certaine herbes.'

17 Pagel, , Paracelsus, pp. 131–133 Google Scholar.

18 Turner, pp. 4-5; [Duchesne], Joseph Quersitanus, The Practise of Chymicall and Hermeticall Physicke (London, 1605)Google Scholar, sigs. C2-C2^v, E3.

19 As was strikingly revealed in alchemical transformations, where substances subjected to fire were seen to undergo strange alteration, often to be found, as Duchesne writes, Practise of Chymicall Physicke, sig. T2^v, ‘farre otherwise, and oftentimes different not onely in taste, but also in ordour, in color and in their whole substance.'

20 Pagel, , Paracelsus, pp. 56–58 Google Scholar; Herring, , Modest Defence, pp. 3–5 Google Scholar; Hester, The First Part of the Key of Philosophie, sigs. A[6]-A[7]^v.

21 R[obert] B[ostocke], The Difference betwene the Auncient Phisicke … and the Latter Phisicke (London, 1585), sigs. D[5]-D[6]; italics mine.

22 Pachter, Henry M., Paracelsus: Magic into Science (New York, 1951), pp. 104–111 Google Scholar.

23 [Penot], A Hundred and Foureteene Experiments, sig. E2^v.

24 Pachter, pp. 15-17.

25 First noted by Bucknill, John C., The Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare (London, 1860), p. 102 Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., p. 100.

27 As in Henry Yellowlees’ dismissal of Helena as a mere ‘Queen of Quacks,’ ‘Medicine and Surgery in the 1955 Season's Plays,’ in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London, 1959), pp. 175-177. C.J. Sisson's rebuttal of Yellowlees, ‘Shakespeare's Helena and Dr. William Harvey,’ E&S (1960), pp. 1-20, while demonstrating Helena's general reputability, fails to examine the medical implications of her role as an irregular practitioner.

28 Not a contradiction of terms if'empiric’ is taken in the sense of'one who … relies solely upon observation and experiment’ (OED. B.Ib); not as ‘pretender, impostor, charlatan’ (OED. B.2b). Debus, pp. 140-145; Roberts, R. S., “The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in Tudor and Stuart England,’ Med. Hist., 6 (1962), 363 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

29 Clark, Sir George, A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London (London, 1964), 1 Google Scholar, esp., 117, 121, 143-149, 201-202.

30 E.g., B[ostocke], Auncient and Latter Phisicke, sig. F3

31 Both this sense (OED. 7.3.) and the depreciatory sense, as in addressing an inferior (OED. io.c) would be implied. See similar derisive reference to the Galenists in Hester's, John ‘Epistle Dedicatorie,’ to Phillippus Hermanni's An Excellent Treatise Teaching Howe to Cure the French-Pockes (London, 1590)Google Scholar, sig. ¶2v: ‘these fellowes that to fill large volumes rather set downe what other men have said then what they should have said … I say these fellowes … lead a great many good wits a woolgathering’ (italics mine).

32 The Act of 1543. The Statutes at Large, 34 and 35 Hen. VIII, c.8.

33 Annals of the Royal College of Physicians, Letters of Dec. 1581. In Bucknill, p. 32.

34 Clapham, Henoch, An Epistle Discoursing upon the Present Pestilence , . . Reprinted with some Additions (London, 1603)Google Scholar, sig. A3. See also Godskall, James, The Arke of Noah for the Londoners to enter in from the Plague (London, [1603])Google Scholar; The King's Medicine for this Present Yeere 1604 (London, 1604). Kocher discusses the issue in “The Idea of God in Elizabethan Medicine,’ JHI, 11 (1950), 15-20.

35 Arke of Noah, sig. C3; King's Medicine, sig. B[I].

36 Epistle upon the Pestilence, sig. A3; Godskall, King's Medicine, sig. E2.

37 Kocher, , Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (London, 1953), pp. 247–249 Google Scholar.

38 Especially implicated would be those fellows either outspoken in their adherence to Galenic naturalism or active in independent investigation of natural causes: besides Herring, men like the late William Gilbert (d. 1603), author of the scientific treatise De Magnete (1600), and Edward Jorden, whose Suffocation of the Mother (1603) offers a scientific account of the physiological causes of hysteria. Whether Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learning (1605), might in any sense be included in this group is uncertain. Though critical of Galen, his concern was similarly for the independent investigation of ‘second causes'; and his considerable dealings with the College, as his special interest in medical affairs, might well have served to connect him with its naturalist activities. See Clark, pp. 148, 169, 198.

39 Wherein … that unlearned and dangerous opinion, That the Plague is not infectious, lately broched in London, is briefly glanced at and refuted by way of Preface, sigs. A2-B[3].

40 Pagel, , ‘Religious Motives in the Medical Biology of the Seventeenth Century,’ Bul. Hist. Med., 3 (1935), 213–215 Google Scholar.

41 Auncient and Latter Phisicke, sig. [x8]^v.

42 Godskall, King's Medicine, sig. E3; Clapham, , Doctor Andros His Prosopopeia Answered (London, 1605), pp. 12–14 Google Scholar.

43 Sig. [x8]^v.

44 As attested by Clapham's citation of Paracelsus as an authority on miracles, Doctor Andros, pp. 44, 46-47, and by his depiction of plague-visited London as ‘a city full of miracles,’ whose sizable remnant of untouched citizens has proven ‘miracles [to be] no more ceased then is the pestilence’ (p. 48). See also Pagel, ‘Religious Motives,’ 216-217, 310.

45 That is, a response to the kind of thinking reflected in the Galenically oriented circle of ‘scientific naturalists’ of the London College to which the ‘pious naturalists’ (the terminology is Pagel's) of Paracelsian persuasion offered a reverential alternative. Similar conceptions of the religious role of Paracelsism have been suggested by P. M. Rattansi, ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution,’ Ambix, 11 (1963), 25-28, and C. Webster, ‘English Medical Reformers of the Puritan Revolution: A Background to the “Society of Chymical Physitians”,’ Ambix, 14 (1967), 25-26; see also Carre, Meyrick H., Phases of Thought in England (Oxford, 1949), pp. 206–235 Google Scholar, esp. 210, 231-233. For the larger conflict of ideas, see Spencer, Theodore, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1942)Google Scholar, and Haydn, Hiram, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950)Google Scholar.

46 Cf. Clapham's definition of ‘faith termed miraculous’ in His Demaundes and Answeres touching the Pestilence (London, 1604), pp. 15-16; also comments on ‘miraculous faith’ in Doctor Andros, pp. 41-45 passim. Contrariwise, cf. also France's reference in Lear (1605) to a ‘faith that reason without miracle / Could never plant in me’ (i.i.225- 226).

47 Murray, W. A., ‘Why was Duncan's Blood Golden?’ Shakespeare Survey 19 (London, 1966), pp. 34–44 Google Scholar.

48 Poynter, F. N. L., ‘Medicine and Public Health,’ Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964), p. 157 Google Scholar; Clark, pp. 106-124.

49 Simpson, R. R., Shakespeare and Medicine (Edinburgh and London, 1959), pp. 91-126.Google Scholar