Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean StageThough 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. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Roasted in Wrath and Fire The Ecology of the Passions in Hamlet and Othello | 25 |
Love Will Have Heat Shakespeares Maidens and the Caloric Economy | 77 |
Melancholy Cats Lugged Bears and Other Passionate Animals Reading Shakespeares Psychological Materialism across the Species Barrier | 135 |
Belching Quarrels Male Passions and the Problem of Individuation | 189 |
Epilogue | 243 |
| 247 | |
| 261 | |
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Common terms and phrases
affective analogy anger animal Antony's appetite argues beasts becomes behavior blood bodily Body without Organs body's brain Burton Cambridge University Press chapter character choler Cleopatra cognitive cold comedy cosmology cultural describes Desdemona desire difference discourse disease Duchess of Malfi early modern embodied emotional environment especially expression Falstaff fear female flesh fluids Folger Shakespeare Library four humors function Galenic gender green sickness Hamlet hath heart heat Henry Peacham horse humoral subject Iago imagined individual Jonson language London male Malvolio marriage means melancholy metaphorical metonymically mind mood narrative natural Nym's ODEP organs Othello passions Paster Petruchio physical physiological play play's pneumatic psychological psychophysiological puddle Pyrochles Pyrrhus Pyrrhus's quoted reciprocal recognize relation Renaissance Rosalind sense sexual Shakespeare Shylock social spirits suggest temper temperature texts things thinking Thomas Wright thou thought tion Topsell transformation tropes Twelfth Night vapors virgins Wellbred wind wolf women wrath Yellowhammer