Drugs, medicine, and the early modern stage.(Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England; Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama)(Book review)

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 Associated University Presses

Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England, by Tanya Pollard. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. X + 211. Cloth $74.00.

Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama, by William Kerwin. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. Pp. x + 290. Cloth $34.95.

IN 1996 Keir Elam remarked on "the corporeal turn" in Renaissance studies. (1) Ten years later we can appreciate how often this turn has been directed toward the relationship between theater and medical discourse and practice. The last two years alone have seen the publication of seven books in this area offering new perspectives on mercantilism and disease, pharmaceutical culture, diagnosis and cure, mental illness, and early modern anatomy. (2) That theater serves as the medium for these studies is no surprise. From the medical underpinnings of Aristotle's theory of katharsis through the anatomy theaters of Andreas Vesalius and the influence of humoral medicine on Elizabethan and Jacobean characterization, the two disciplines demonstrated a shared preoccupation with questions of embodiment, observation, and somatic representation. If theater is etymologically a "seeing place," then the modes of attention and diagnosis it engages are inescapably entwined with medicine's "theaters" of the body.

Tanya Pollard's Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England and William Kerwin's Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama examine the impact on English Renaissance drama of a changing medical profession and its often contending regimes of treatment. Pollard's book explores the representations of drugs in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama by foregrounding the medical and cultural debates within and surrounding early modern pharmacology. Kerwin's book covers some of the same ground, but in its treatment of medical practitioners and treatments, it raises broader historical and methodological questions of how one studies the medical in history and culture. In the end, both authors carry their concern with medical developments and controversies into the nature of theater itself.

Pollard approaches the theater in terms of a series of radical shifts in the pharmaceutical field of early modern medicine. The number and uses of medical remedies expanded in the late sixteenth century as New World explorers introduced Europe to medicinal herbs, including Guiacum sanctum, a tropical plant used to treat syphilis (which they also brought with them). In direct challenge to the humoral therapeutics...

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