Overview
- Examines medical treatises, domestic manuals, and diaries to establish normative early modern ideology about the womb
- Engages with semiotics to consider how the visual medium of the theatre appraised an inaccessible, interior space
- Demonstrates how Shakespeare challenges contemporary notions of female volatility, inconstancy, and undependability by accentuating the significance of the womb as a source of self-defiance and agency for female characters across his canon
- Explores early modern medicine’s attempt to theorize and interpret the womb, specifically its role in disease, excretion, and conception
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine (PLSM)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book explores how the humoral womb was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the Shakespearean stage by considering the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. Galenic naturalism applied the four humors—yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood—to delineate women as porous, polluting, and susceptible to their environment. This book draws on early modern medical texts to provocatively demonstrate how Shakespeare’s canon offers a unique agency to female characters via humoral discourse of the womb. Chapters discuss early modern medicine’s attempt to theorize and interpret the womb, specifically its role in disease, excretion, and conception, alongside passages of Shakespeare’s plays to offer a fresh reading of (geo)humoral subjectivity. The book shows how Shakespeare subversively challenges contemporary notions of female fluidity by accentuating the significance of the womb as a source of self-defiance and autonomy for female characters acrosshis canon.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Amy Kenny is Visiting Assistant Professor at University of California, Riverside, USA. She holds a PhD in Early Modern Literature and Culture from the University of Sussex and has worked as Research Coordinator at Shakespeare’s Globe, where she was chief dramaturg for 15 productions and conducted over 80 interviews with actors and directors as part of an archival resource for future scholarship. She has published on dramaturgy, performance of laughter, the senses, and disease in Shakespeare.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage
Authors: Amy Kenny
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05201-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-05200-3Published: 08 February 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-05201-0Published: 21 January 2019
Series ISSN: 2634-6435
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6443
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XI, 202
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations
Topics: Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, British and Irish Literature, History of Science