Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-wq484 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T12:18:52.282Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - Medicine

King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest

from Part I - Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2020

Katharine A. Craik
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores how medical knowledge shaped Shakespeare’s figuration of the passions. According to ancient writers, emotions originate in the organic soul, moving continually among the body, mind, and psyche. The passions are thus psychic in their inception and interstitial in their operations, both within the individual subject and in their transactions between people. Early modern emotions also shuttle between human beings and the meteorological world around them, as Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest exemplify. I supplement the precedence granted to Hippocratic and Galenic humoral theory in recent scholarship by charting how other ancient medical and natural philosophical sources informed early modern constructions of emotion. Emergent theories in medicine and natural philosophy (Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsian homeopathy) augmented existing understandings of the passions, as did vernacular medical treatises and popular medical controversies. While Shakespeare did not adhere in any systematic way to particular medical paradigms, their concepts and idioms influenced his eclectic representation of the passions. His plays depict the fundamentally interactive and dynamic nature of the emotions, the psychic intricacy of their physiological, mental, and imaginative functions, and the intensity of their intersubjective transmissions.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×