Abstract
Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy is much preoccupied with ‘the borders of the human’, with depicting the type of behaviour deemed excessive, horrific, and ‘in-humane’, which aligned man with the beast and the tyrant, and woman with the antithesis of the nurturing mother — the murderous, unnatural monster. Figures like Husband in A Yorkshire Tragedy, and Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, exemplify the male type, whilst Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth and Alice Arden in Arden of Faversham are archetypal female ‘monsters’. The domestic tragedies are rendered particularly gripping through the co-mingling of the ordinary and the everyday with monstrous and demonic elements. In Arden of Faversham (1592), A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), and The Witch of Edmonton (1621),2 homely domestic settings, familiar rural gatherings and celebrations are thrown into chaos when a destructive influence enters the ‘domus’, wreaking havoc and perpetrating one ‘unnatural’ act after another. Theirs is a universe in which seeming harmony and normality give way to lust, adultery, spousal abuse, murder and even infanticide. The realistic domestic settings and the inclusion of some true details, in fact, serve to heighten the dramatic tension aroused by the spectacle of embodied evil unleashed in ‘every-man’s’ backyard: ‘Beware, this could happen to you!’, these plays simultaneously warn, and relish.
In this Chapter, is entreated of good and ill Angells which being entermingled with the humours and spirites cause sondry chaunges and mutations in mens minds.
Thomas Newton, physician, 15761
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Notes
Thomas Newton, The Touchstone of Complexions (London, 1576), f.20v. Newton’s was a free translation of a medical regimen by the Dutch physician Levinus Lemnius. Tom Coryat in his Crudities (1611) calls Lemnius an ‘admirable sweete schollar, and worthy ornament of learning’, p. 649. Lemnius is repeatedly cited as an important source of medical authority in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), ed. Holbrook Jackson (1641 edition, London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1972); all references are to this edition.
All references to the anon. Arden of Faversham, A Yorkshire Tragedy and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness are to Keith Sturgess (ed.), Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies (1969), (Reprinted Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1985). All references to William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton are to Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (eds), Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays (Manchester: The Revels Plays, Manchester University Press, 1986).
On the issue of ‘realism’ see Sturgess, ‘Introduction’, particularly pp. 7–9, 19; Rick Bowers, ‘A Woman Killed With Kindness: Plausibility on a Smaller Scale’, Studies in English Literature, 24:2 (1984), 293–306; Diana E. Henderson, ‘Many Mansions: Reconstructing A Woman Killed With Kindness’, Studies in English Literature, 26 (1986), 277–94, especially 277, 290. Henderson provides a useful summary of prior views of the play.
Henry Hitch Adams, English Domestic or Homiletic Tragedy 1575–1642 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 156–7.
Laura G. Bromley, ‘Domestic Conduct in A Woman Killed With Kindness’, Studies in English Literature, 26:2 (1986), 259–76, 259. Bromley provides a summary of earlier responses to this aspect of the play, 277. Kathleen McLuskie, Renaissance Dramatists (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) discusses the play’s ‘complete failure to explore the motivation or the process of the relationship between Wendoll and Anne’, p. 135. Catherine Belsey, ‘Desire’s Excess and the English Renaissance Theatre’ in Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (New York and London: Routledge, 1992) remarks that ‘In A Woman Killed With Kindness desire exceeds marriage in a curiously unmotivated way’, p. 96.
Henderson asserts, for example, that Heywood’s ‘adherence to contemporary notions of realism’ led to his complete exclusion of ‘all devils, spirits and gods’, ‘Many Mansions’, 279, 290.
The explanations have been remarkably ingenious: David Cook, ‘A Woman Killed With Kindness: An Unshakespearean Tragedy’, English Studies, 45 (1964), argued that Frankford’s lack of passion ‘impelled Anne into adultery’, 361. Bromley asserted that Heywood simply ‘is not interested in individual psychology’, ‘Domestic Conduct’, 261. Bowers found plausibility here but ‘on a smaller scale’ which calls for ‘simplistic’ emotional responses, ‘A Woman Killed With Kindness’, 295. Hardin Craig, The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952) argued that ‘an Elizabethan conception of psychology was behind the behaviour of Anne and Wendoll’, Wendoll’s ‘passion’ led him astray: in positivist fashion Hardin Craig elides the fact of Wendoll’s devilish powers, his being pricked on by some ‘fury’; indeed, he produces an account which lays blame firmly at Anne’s door, pp. 130–1.
On the function of myths and constructs in medicine see, Meyer Fortes, Foreword, Social Anthropology and Medicine, ed. J. B. Loudon, (London: Academic Press, 1979); and P. Wright and A. Treacher (eds), Introduction, The Problem of Medical Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982).
Thomas Paynell, Regimen Sanitatis Salerni (1528), sigs. B1r, B2r-v.
Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth (1534), f.66r and 45r.
See Charles Webster, ‘Paracelsus: medicine as popular protest’ in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, (eds), Medicine and The Reformation (London: Routledge, 1993).
R. Bostocke, Auncient and Later Phisicke (1585), pp. 80, 127.
William Bullein, Preface, Bulwarke of Defence (1562), sig.C2v.
References are to, A Preaty Interlude Called, Nice Wanton (1560) in John Manley (ed.), Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1897).
William Turner, A newe booke of Spirituall Physik for dyverse diseases of the nobilitie and gentlemen of Englande (1555), f.74–5.
Thomas Cogan, The Haven of Health (1584), f.2r.
Phillip Barrough, Method of Physick (1583), sig. A6r.
James Manning, I Am For You All Complexions Castle (1604), p. 2.
Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (California: Huntington Library Publications, 1953), pp. 256–7.
John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-craft (1616), f.26v.
William Perkins, A Discourse of Witchcraft (1608), p. 124.
Charles Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’ in Webster, (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 314.
William Vaughan, Directions For Health (1600), p. 75.
Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, translated by Edmund Jephcott (1936), (Reprinted, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 73–80.
‘These seeming beasts are men indeed’; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1596), IIxii, 85. In J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (eds), The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser (1912), (Reprinted, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924).
Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: The Cresset Press, 1970), pp. 65, 70.
See Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jordon and the Mary Glover Case (London: Routledge, 1991).
Anon., Enough is As Good as a Feast (1570), sig.D2v.
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin, (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1861), p. 119.
Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (1985), (Reprinted, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 151.
Thomas Lodge, A Treatise of the Plague (1603), sig.B2v.
James Balmford, A Short Dialogue Concerning the Plagues Infection (1603), p. 15.
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Healy, M. (1999). Bodily Regimen and Fear of the Beast: ‘Plausibility’ in Renaissance Domestic Tragedy. In: Fudge, E., Gilbert, R., Wiseman, S. (eds) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27729-2_4
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