The Science of Shakespeare (43 page)

At least the contagious nature of the disease was recognized. It was believed to be spread—somehow—through the air, and people caught it from others who were infected. During outbreaks, foreign ships were kept at anchor, and travelers on foot were either turned back by guards posted well outside a town's limits, or forced to stay in makeshift hospitals for forty days—in Latin,
quarantina
—until they could be confirmed not to pose a risk. (It is from this practice, of course, that we have the word “quarantine.”)

Houses in which someone had contracted the disease were sealed off, and family members were trapped inside with the afflicted person (hopefully aiding in the patient's recovery without catching the disease themselves). Overcrowding was recognized as a problem, and those who had the means fled to the countryside with each outbreak. Of course, nothing drew crowds like the theater, which, as mentioned, could attract as many as three thousand people for each performance. When plague deaths exceeded thirty per week, authorities in London closed the theaters in an effort to slow the spread of the disease. This of course had an enormous impact on Shakespeare and the actors in his company, who would have been forced to look for work in the country when the theaters shut down. Records show that the theaters were closed for some seventy-eight months between 1603 and 1613—closed, in other words, more than half the time. During an outbreak in 1609, Thomas Dekker noted that the playhouses stood with their “dores locked up, the Flagges … taken down”; in the surrounding neighborhoods one saw “houses lately infected, from which the affrighted dwellers are fled, in hope to live better in the Country.”

Shakespeare makes only a handful of direct references to the plague, and usually it is at least somewhat metaphorical—for example, in
Timon of Athens
, where Timon is less than thrilled to hear that the Athenian ambassadors are at his doorstep: “I thank them; and would send them back the plague, / Could I but catch it” (5.1.137–38). None of Shakespeare's characters die from the plague; in fact, none of them even catch it. Perhaps the subject was simply too close to home. Nonetheless, more general references to disease, infection, and fevers are everywhere in the canon, and this surely reflected the concerns that ordinary people had with their health and well-being—neither of which was guaranteed to last you through to next Tuesday. “Mortality and anxiety,” notes Peter Ackroyd, “were part of the air that the citizens breathed.”

“THAT WAY MADNESS LIES”

There were, of course, mental ailments along with physical ones, and their effects were equally frightening. The causes of mental illness were not well understood; it was thought that madness could be triggered by emotional trauma, severe anxiety, and even unrequited love. There could also be physical causes, such as a fever or a bite from a mad dog. Or, as Shakespeare suggests in
Macbeth
, it could come from eating “the insane root” (1.3.82)—a reference, perhaps, to the root of the mandrake plant; similar to nightshade, it was known to have hallucinogenic properties. Even the the moon was thought to play a role, either due to its phase or (more rarely) due to its distance from Earth (hence “lunacy,” from the Latin word for moon,
luna
). Shakespeare frequently alludes to the moon's influence on human affairs. In
Othello
, for example, the title character reacts to the news that “foul murders” have been committed:

It is the very error of the moon:

She comes more nearer earth than she was wont,

And makes men mad.
*

(5.2.111–13)

(Not that Othello is one to talk; he murdered Desdemona barely a dozen lines earlier.)

There was little to be offered in the way of treatment. Some of those deemed “mad” were cared for by their families; others, as Olsen notes, “simply wandered from town to town, blamed for any increase in local crime.” There were hospitals for the insane, but the level of care was appalling; patients could be beaten or even put on display as public entertainment. The most famous mental facility was London's Bethlehem Hospital, known by its nickname, Bedlam. In
King Lear
, Edgar aims to pass for a “Bedlam beggar” by smearing his face with dirt, messing up his hair, and speaking in riddles and nonsense rhymes. While Edgar is faking it, the king is terrified that he is losing his mind for real: “O let me not be mad,” he moans, “not mad, sweet heaven! / Keep me in temper, I would not be mad” (1.5.37). To add insult to injury, madness was seen not only as a medical condition but as a character flaw. Whether Hamlet's madness is real or feigned (or both) is a matter for endless debate, but either way, his uncle is ashamed of the prince's behavior, chiding him for displaying “unmanly grief”; he tells Hamlet that his disposition reflects “a will most incorrect to heaven” (1.2.94–95).

The lack of any viable treatment for madness haunts act 5 of
Macbeth
, as Lady Macbeth's condition steadily deteriorates. Already in scene 1, the doctor declares that “This disease is beyond my practice” (5.1.49), and that “More needs she the divine than the physician” (line 64). By scene 3, the end is near, and Macbeth's frustration is palpable:

MACBETH

Cure her of that.

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,

Pluck from memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain,

And with some sweet oblivious antidote

Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff

Which weighs upon the heart?

DOCTOR

Therein the patient

Must minister to himself.

MACBETH

Throw physic to the dogs, I'll none of it.

(5.3.41–48)

*   *   *

Macbeth's doctor
is just one of the physicians we meet in Shakespeare's plays. Medical men of various kinds appear frequently in the canon—more often, in fact, than workers of any other profession. We often hear their diagnoses and treatments; and they appear on stage not only in
Macbeth
but also in
King Lear
and
Two Noble Kinsmen
. We might take particular note of
All's Well That Ends Well
, in which the heroine, Helena, is the daughter of a famous doctor; she has learned many skills from her father, and uses her knowledge to save the king's life. But the medical talk does not sound forced in any of the plays; rather, it comes up naturally as the characters go about their business. It is, as Maurice Pope puts it, “unobtrusive.”

Where did Shakespeare acquire his medical knowledge? It has occasionally been suggested—especially by people who question the plays' authorship—that only someone with medical training could have written so knowledgably about medicine. But that's taking it too far: Shakespeare didn't need to be a doctor in order to write about illnesses and treatments, just as he didn't need to be a nobleman to write about courtly intrigue, or to have visited Italy to write about Italian cities and customs. All he needed to do was to keep his eyes and ears open. As John Andrews points out, Shakespeare's knowledge of medicine, while seemingly thorough, wasn't particularly unusual for the time. “The number of medical references in Shakespeare's plays … doesn't necessarily indicate that Shakespeare knew more about medicine than his contemporaries,” Andrews writes. “Most Elizabethans were very concerned with their health and were thus familiar with basic medical theories.”

A DOCTOR IN THE FAMILY

In the latter part of his career, Shakespeare had another route to medical know-how: His oldest daughter, Susanna, had married a successful doctor named John Hall in 1607. Perhaps this accounts for the respect that Shakespeare bestows on his medical men, especially in the later plays. There are, to be sure, numerous gibes—as in
Timon of Athens
, where Timon warns, “Trust not the physician; / His antidotes are poison” (4.3.433–34); and Lear's advice to “Kill thy physician, and thy fee bestow / Upon the foul disease” (
King Lear
1.1.157–58). But overall, Shakespeare's doctors, and the medical profession in general, are shown in a positive light. And as Jonathan Bate has noted, Shakespeare's portrayal of doctors seems to take on an increasingly positive tone after his daughter's marriage. In the early plays we find comic figures like Pinch in
The Comedy of Errors
and Caius in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
—but in the later works we encounter “several dignified, sympathetically portrayed medical men.”

Hall had studied at Queens' College in Cambridge, and began to practice medicine in Stratford around 1600. We don't know how often Shakespeare spoke with his son-in-law; as far as we can tell, the Halls lived in Stratford, while Shakespeare, by this point, was spending most of his time in London. Still, it's hard to imagine that Hall's work
never
came up on those occasions when the two men spoke, over the years. As it happens, we know more about John Hall than we do about most physicians of the period, because he left behind detailed notes about his cases (later published with the title
Select Observations on English Bodies of Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases
).

Remarkably, Hall has even left us with the details of a treatment he applied to Susanna herself:

Mrs
Hall of Stratford
, my Wife, being miserably tormented with the Colic, was cured as followeth. R.
Diaphen. Diacatholic
. Ana 3i.
Pul. Holand
3ii.
Ol. Rute
3i.
Lact. Q.s.f. Clyt
. This injected gave her two Stools, yet the pain continued, being but little mitigated; therefore I appointed to inject a Pint of Sack made hot. This presently brought forth a great deal of Wind, and freed her from all Pain. To her stomach was applied a Plaister
de Labd. Crat. Cum Caran. & ol. Macis
. With one of these Clysters I delivered the Earl of
Northampton
from a grievous Colic.

Dr. Hall is describing an enema (“clyster”), and even if the casual reader isn't quite sure what all those ingredients are, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives of Shakespeare's daughter and her doctor husband. As Bate notes, Dr. Hall likely procured his various ingredients from Philip Rogers, the apothecary who ran a shop on High Street in Stratford (and who was once sued by Shakespeare over an unpaid debt); other medicinal plants and herbs could have come from his own garden at New Place. Visitors to the Halls' home can still see the garden—now purely decorative in function. As Bate points out, it has become difficult to sense “the intimate relationship between plants and medicine in Shakespeare's time.”

Hall's notes also reveal interesting correlations with the records at St. Thomas's Hospital. For example, Kevin Flude has noted that in 1612 the hospital paid nine pence for a pigeon to “lay at the feet of a patient.” This may sound like straight-ahead quackery, but Dr. Hall himself prescribed the very same remedy for himself in 1632: “Then was a pigeon cut open alive, and applied to my feet, to draw down the vapours; for I was often afflicted with a light Delirium.” The pigeon-at-the-feet treatment “seems fairly weird,” Flude admits. “And yet that was a very well-educated, mainstream doctor—Dr. John Hall—who prescribed that. So the difference between a mountebank and a proper doctor is difficult to tell at this particular stage.”

On other occasions, Flude has found, Hall prescribed treatments involving such ingredients as hart's horn, shavings of ivory, spiderwebs, dried windpipes of roosters, and a cosmetic known as virgin's milk.
*
More benign herbal remedies were more typically prescribed, and some of the more common “cures”—including wormwood, plantains, and egg whites, for example—can be found both in the records of St. Thomas's Hospital and throughout Shakespeare's plays. The witches' brew in
Macbeth
, containing such appetizing ingredients as “eye of newt, and toe of frog / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog” (4.1.13–14), sounds rather alarming today; but in Shakespeare's time, Flude notes, it was “not so very far from the reality.”

 

13.     “Drawn with a team of little atomi…”

LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

“Ocursed, cursed slave!,” moans Othello, as he comes to grip with the fact that he has just murdered his wife:

Whip me, ye devils,

From the possession of this heavenly sight,

Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur,

Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire—

(5.2.275–79)

Throughout Shakespeare's works, there is remarkably little talk of heavenly rewards and hellish punishments—but here we at least have a vivid description of the imagined fate that awaits the sinner after death. (Though such treatment is normally a thing to be feared, in this case Othello yearns for it in the aftermath of his vile act.) But what if there are no angels and harps to reward the virtuous, and no pools of sulfur to torment the wicked? In fact, a forward-thinking Greek philosopher had imagined this very scenario some sixteen centuries earlier. In Shakespeare's time, that philosopher's message—lost for more than a millennium—was slowly finding its way back into the cultural life of Renaissance Europe.

The Roman poet Lucretius (99–55 B.C.) left us only one extant piece of writing—but what a piece it is. Spanning some 7,400 lines of rhyming Latin hexameter, his poem
De rerum natura
(
On the Nature of Things
) presents a radical description of the natural world. It is reductionist, materialist, and virtually godless. For Lucretius, the universe and all the wondrous diversity within it came about not because of God (or the gods), but because of the unthinking, random jostling of atoms, tiny particles that “Fly all around in countless different ways … Perpetually driven by an everlasting motion.” Lucretius didn't invent the atomic theory, which had in fact been circulating for some five hundred years. It is generally credited to the Greek thinker Leucippus and his pupil, Democritus, and it was later expounded on by the philosopher Epicurus, who attracted many followers.
*
The school of thought Epicurus gave rise to, built around materialism and the legitimacy of valuing pleasure for its own sake, became known as Epicureanism—and we might note that variations of the word “epicure” crop up at least four times in Shakespeare's plays. Epicureanism, while not quite synonymous with atheism, was the next-worst thing; its practitioners, as Benjamin Bertram writes, did not necessarily reject God outright, but “they were dangerously close to doing so and were risking eternal damnation.” While various writers made note of the atomic theory, it was Lucretius who, more than any other ancient thinker, explored its philosophical implications—and who gave the theory its most eloquent expression. The world, Lucretius says, is self-made; it is brought into existence by nature herself,