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Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage.

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Humoring The Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage By Gail Kern Paster Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Modern readers of early modern drama have tended to take the physical and corporeal references by which characters express emotions as metaphorical statements about inner states of being. When Hamlet says that he is "pigeon-liver'd," for example, modern readers might hear a particularly poetic way of expressing a lack of gall, but as Gaff Paster shows with wonderful erudition and detailed attention to a wide range of early modern drama, the language of the humors reveals the emotional life of early moderns to be located in the body and its material environment. Working from late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English writings on the humors and passions that include Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Crooke's Micocosmographia, and Wright's Passions of the Mind in General, Paster draws out two main theses. The first is that for the early moderns, emotions are part of a vital, material order that spans and complicates easy distinctions between an inner self and an outer world. The emotions are not abstract states of mind but are material events, part of a larger ecology of which the embodied self is a part. Paster's second over-arching thesis is that early moderns understood this vital order to be made up of affective correspondences that extend throughout the entire natural world. Not only does affective like tend toward affective like, but also, because the inner and outer worlds to a certain extent reflect one another, change in the outer world could produce change in the inner world, and vice versa. Paster argues that we must take the language of the emotions as literally as possible, as descriptions of the...

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