Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005

Special Issue: Literary Universals

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Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2004, 288p., ISBN 0-226-64847-8, Cloth $35.00, £25.50

Reviewed by 

Siobhán Collins

University College Cork

Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage is an important and timely addition to the ongoing evaluation of how early modern notions of the body impact on subjectivity. Crafted with attentive wonder and respect for the depth and curiousness of its subject, Paster’s book is an enlightening and engaging read for any scholar interested in the complex interaction between mind and body, emotion and reason, in the early modern period. It is poignant in its achievement of fleshing out the early modern emotional self, as Paster encounters a past ontology on its own humoral terms.

The “Introduction” draws from a rich range of primary texts in order to emphasize historical differences in the understanding and expression of passions. Early modern thought did not create a distinct line between the mind and the body the way post-enlightenment ontological thought does. In early modern humoral psychology the passions are embodied. Physiological and psychological experience is inseparable. The psycho-physiological self that Paster identifies is contiguous with the world it inhabits. The passions, closely aligned to the fluidity and porous boundaries of the humoral body, are experienced as elements, such as wind and water, that have the power to rage and literally force changes to occur both inside and outside the early modern subject. Paster compels us to marvel at a past ontology that is now alien to us, persuading us that the emotions are indeed culturally constructed, and in the early modern period both physiological and psychological. By focusing on the crucially important role of the emotions as part of how early modern individuals experienced and constituted the world, Humoring the Body offers a dense and appealing study that aims to recover a historical phenomenon, and seeks to shed light (successfully, I think) on our understanding of the period’s literature.

Shakespeare’s language of affect, Paster argues, embodies emotion in a way that is richly representative of his period. In Chapter One, “Roasted in Wrath and Fire”, Paster concentrates on contextualising key moments in Hamlet and Othello in terms of early modern materialism. The phrase in Hamlet, from which this chapter takes its title, represents how wrath, as a material substance, diffuses into the natural order. Paster’s focus on Desdemona’s fear that something “hath puddled” Othello’s “clear spirit” (3.4.143), on the other hand, illustrates how substances from nature were felt to penetrate the early modern embodied self. Paster thus highlights the historical embeddedness of these plays in a post-medieval, pre-Cartesian understanding of the reciprocity of subject-object, self-world, relations.

     In Chapter Two, “Love Will Have Heat”, Paster expands on her earlier argument in “The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being” that in Galenic discourse sexual identity was not limited to an individual’s genitalia but extended throughout their entire physical and mental being.[1] While the temperature of a body determined its sex, it also determined the mental attributes associated with that sex. Paster reads Galenic physiology as a  “totalizing” theory of human temperaments, which explained the female sex’s “limited capacity for productive agency” (79). This argument serves to modify Schoenfeldt’s recent claim that humoral theory was relational rather than absolute and could in fact be used to undermine patriarchal discourse.[2] In this chapter Paster focuses on representations of female affectivity in some textual instances in Shakespeare’s As you Like it, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew, to argue convincingly that the female, due to her lack of heat, was not accorded the control deemed necessary for the regulation of desire.  Although, in tracing Rosalind’s and Desdemona’s journey from maidenhood to marriage Paster notes their significant increase in both bodily heat and agency, this transformation, she argues, occurs within a “natural” paradigm of femaleness. Rosalind’s and Desdemona’s increase in heat “registers not as a masculinizing threat to sexual difference but rather as their powerful emergence from a condition of physical and emotional lassitude, understood not quite as, but in terms of female—indeed virgin—melancholia” (88).

    Chapter Three, “Melancholy Cats, Lugged bears, and Other Passionate Animals”, closely analyses Shakespeare’s representation of how the embodied passions are commonly shared by both animal and human alike by focussing microcosmically on the opening scene from Henry IV, and scene one, act five, from Anthony and Cleopatra. (136). This chapter demonstrates how the individual subject’s humoral body corresponded analogously with higher animals, revealing in the process how easily apparently unbiased biological discourse merges with the over-determinations of moral discourse. At the same time, Paster’s detailed analysis of these two scenes from Henry IV and Anthony and Cleopatra highlights how the embodied self was positioned “within a universe understood to be filled with desire and moved by the strivings of appetite” (187). That is to say, the unruly emotion of desire itself is expressed as an intimate part of the natural order.

     Chapter Four, “Belching Quarrels”, moves from this premise to investigate how an early modern hierarchical society attempted to enforce the disciplines of scrutiny and regulation on the appetitive body by encouraging (normatively male) self-control over the embodied emotions.  By following “the trail of male humors in and out of several play texts, Shakespearean and not”, Paster illustrates how this “lure of autonomy” involved, paradoxically, both the regularization and utilization of bodily forces. However, Paster points out with reference to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, that the power of the self’s embodied emotion is of value only when yoked to the civilising process of larger political interests, as Hal’s early portrayal of his own humor as “unyok’d” (1.2.196) indicates. The psycho-physiological and the social intermingle as “an unstable but necessary instrumentation of complex social performances” (200). Although Christ served as the supreme example of the positive possibilities of passion once moderated through the use of perfect reason, this theological significance, as Paster makes particularly clear in this chapter, does not cancel the overriding practical importance of the passions for personal and political rule, but rather highlights their functionality in determining well-being in both body and body-politic.

It is the empowering aspect of embodied emotion that Paster emphasises, and it is this characteristic of her book that sets it apart from others in this field. However, if there is one limitation to this book it is the lack of emphasis given to religion in the construction of the early modern embodied self, male and female, despite Paster’s recognition of theology’s key role in validating the emotions.

   I cannot end without mentioning the many beautiful medieval and early modern illustrations in Humoring the Body, which serve to add a certain tactile quality to a subject already couched in the language of corporeality. Also, Paster’s impressive bibliography of both primary and secondary works is a valuable resource for scholars interested in this period, while her detailed index secures the book’s promise as a reference guide as well as a very engaging read.