Shakespeare’s Medical Imagination

Summary

Shakespeare, unlike Chaucer, is still intelligible to us directly. But though his language in general needs no translation for speakers of modern English, his ideas often do. In particular his ideas about the hidden workings of our body were quite different from our own. For instance, he thought that sighing caused loss of blood, that tears were an overflow from the brain, and that falling in love was caused by the liver. The temptation is to hurry over these oddities, understanding statements of fact in a metaphorical sense, or, where this won’t do, glossing them with a synonym. So we may be told that ‘spirits’ means ‘energy’ or ‘character’ or ‘resolve’ as the context demands. The deception works if the cases are far enough apart. But if allegedly different meanings for the same word come in the same line we lose confidence. Another kind of confusion can be caused by the gloss itself. For instance on one occasion we are told by Dover Wilson that ‘blood’ means ‘spirit’. But it does not. Blood was a kind of liquid in the veins and spirit was a kind of air in the arteries. It cannot be right to explain them as if they were interchangeable, even if in some situations they perform equivalent functions. We would hardly approve a glossator in the microwave future who explained to his readers a point that was obscure to them in a twentieth-century kitchen scene by cheerfully writing ‘gas = electricity’.