The Unruly Womb in Early Modern English Drama

Plotting Women's Biology on the Stage

Ursula A. Potter

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110660500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This study provides an accessible, informative and entertaining introduction to women's sexual health as presented on the early modern stage, and how dramatists coded for it. Beginning with the rise of green sickness (the disease of virgins) from its earliest reference in drama in the 1560s, Ursula Potter traces a continuing fascination with the womb by dramatists through to the oxymoron of the chaste sex debate in the 1640s. She analyzes how playwrights employed visual and verbal clues to identify the sexual status of female characters to engage their audiences with popular concepts of women's health; and how they satirized the notion of the womb's insatiable appetite, suggesting that men who fear it have been duped. But the study also recognizes that, as these dramatists were fully aware, merely by bringing such material to the stage so frequently, they were complicit in perpetuating such theories.

Chapter 1

Troubled with the Mother

THE MAJORITY OF YOUNG women experiencing menarche today may not give too much thought to the source of the blood, concerned only with managing menstrual flow and rarely thinking of the womb itself. Their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century counterparts, on the other hand, were much more conscious of their womb or “the mother” or “matrix” as it was commonly referred to, as an active and controlling organ deep within the body. It was both their feminine center of gravity and, for religiously-inclined girls, the discomforting locus of original sin. These two contrasting concepts of the womb—either chaste treasure and the promise of healthy motherhood, or filthy dross and the threat of damnation—became particularly prominent in early modern England as the medical profession championed the womb for their own field of expertise and the reformed church increasingly represented it as the devil’s domain. Whichever view was adopted, the womb was a major player in the lives of women in Tudor and Jacobean England.

Renaissance Medicine and the Womb

In Renaissance humoral theory the body was made up of four humors (phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile) which reflected the four complexions or human temperaments (phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholy).1 These four humors needed to be kept in balance if the body was to remain in good health. Andrew Boorde explains it simply as (paraphrased):

There be four humors otherwise named the four complexions of man which be to say, phlegm, blood, choler, and melancholy. They are not evenly distributed in everyone, for each person has more of one complexion than of the other. . . . When God made man he gave him a perfect balance of humours, but through sensuality [original sin] man altered his humours or complexions, setting them out of order.2

The formal explanation of humoral theory is generally credited to Hippocrates and to Galen but Boorde provides a Christian frame, with its particular relevance to women as bearers of original sin through their reproductive bodies. Women, with their cool, wet bodies, were particularly vulnerable to humoral imbalance and their womb was the organ most at risk. Humoral theory was central to the ways in which women understood their bodies and menstruation was the means to maintaining a healthy balance either through purification (the Hippocratic cathartic model) or through reducing excess blood (the Galenic model of plethora).3 An excess of one or another humor or the inordinate influence of a particular planet affected the whole person, though the imbalance might show itself in an isolated organ or system.4 For astrological physicians who specialized in women’s health, such as Simon Forman (1552–1611), their experiences with women’s health led them to see the matrix as “a world unto itself.”5 The womb had the fearsome reputation of being the most powerful organ in the female body and, as a consequence, had earned the status of being the source of all health problems in women. Depicted as an independent and ultra-sensitive body part, it was capable of inflicting great suffering on its owner and required constant attention to maintain stability. It was endowed with powerful sensory faculties such as smell, sensitivity to heat and cold, an appetite (for hot, moist male seed), and a disturbing capacity for movement. This latter was its most feared quality for if the womb shifted even slightly from its natural position, any number of emotional and physical repercussions could ensue, including death.

The wandering womb theory can be traced back to the works of Hippocrates (ca. 460–370 BC) which held the womb responsible for virtually all female ailments. In seventeenth-century England all medical persons and many who were not medically-minded, were familiar with this piece of Hippocratic wisdom. Edward Jorden’s treatise, A Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), opens with the statement: “The passive condition of womankind is subject unto more diseases and of other sortes and natures then men are: and especially in regarde of that part from whence this disease which we speake of doth arise” and he references Hippocrates in the margin. He explains that this comes from the “community and consent which this part hath with the braine, heart, and liver, the principall seates of the three [animal, vital, and natural] functions of the body” which render the uterus extremely sensitive to motion and the senses.6 Jane Sharp, who compiled a popular midwifery manual nearly seventy years later, also relied on “the judgment of Hippocrates that womens wombs are the cause of all their diseases” and she endorsed the womb’s sensitive nature: “for let the womb be offended, all the faculties Animal, Vital, and natural; all the parts, the Brain, Heart, Liver, Kidneys, Bladder, Entrails, and bones, especially the share-bone [pubic bone] partake with it.”7 For Sharp this was cause for sympathy towards women: “The Female sex are subject to more diseases by odds than the male kind are, . . . therefore great care should be had of the care of that sex that is the weaker and most subject to infirmities.”8 Sharp drew much of her material from Nicholas Culpeper, one of the most widely-published physicians in the vernacular in the Civil War era, who agreed “it is not to be expressed what miserable diseases women are subject to; both Virgins and others from the womb, and its consent with other parts.”9 By “consent” Culpeper, like Jorden’s use of the term “community,” means the innate influence of the womb on all parts of the body and mind. Virgins were particularly at risk of disease since virginity was contrary to the womb’s reproductive function, and sex and pregnancy were the natural and best medicine for keeping the womb healthy and stable. A woman’s health was so singularly dependent upon the womb that it was even possible for Sharp to joke that to be born without a womb was an advantage: “If one womb in a woman be the cause of so many strong and violent diseases, she may be thought a happy woman of our sex that was born without a womb.”10 A similar joke appears in a 1633 play, not to express sympathy for women but to poke fun at male fears of the womb. One fearful husband maintains that were it possible to get children “by any other way then by a woman” he would do so.11 His fear leads him to equate the womb with the devil’s domain: “women may be angels above the waist, but below they are naught but hel.”12 This is a common image in drama, notably in the mouths of misogynists accusing women of insatiable lust, and not usually found in medical texts, although the womb’s association with corrupt blood and humors came close at times. The physician Abraham Zacuto (1575–1642) described the uterus as “the cloaca of the entire body, the bilge and receptacle of excrements. The weakness of innate heat in the female sex adds to this by not repelling the causes of decomposition.”13 The association with original sin lies behind such despoiled womb perceptions: “For the part wherein the Image of God ought to be conceived by the holy Spirit, became a sink of filths, and testifies the abuse, and fault of an unobliterable sin.”14 While such descriptions in drama may be understood as humor directed against credulous or powerless mal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Troubled with the Mother
• 2 The Bugbears (1566–1570)
• 3 The Taming of the Shrew (ca. 1592–1594)
• 4 Romeo and Juliet (ca. 1594–1595)
• 5 Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare
• 6 Hamlet (1601) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613)
• 7 The Maid’s Tragedy (1611–1613) and Parasitaster, or The Fawne (1604–1606)
• 8 A Fair Quarrel (1617) and The Hollander (1635)
• 9 Measure for Measure (1604) and Comus: A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634)
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Chart of a selection of plays representing women’s health in English drama 1540–1640
• Bibliography
• Index