Taking their inspiration from Albrecht Dürer's depiction of melancholy in Melancholia 1 as a “multivalent . . . embodied experience” (1), the editors and contributors of this volume turn their attention to “quotidian humoral experiences” (3) in the early modern period and focus on the humoral qualities of everyday items, objects, and experiences. The volume's broader concern with the humoral qualities of elements beyond the human body allows for novel understandings of the ways in which the items surrounding the human body are imbued with humoral significance.
The essays in the first half of the collection examine the (frequently) performed and performative interactions of the human body with the humoral elements around it. Robert Stagg's “Humoural Versification” and Darryl Chalk's “Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage” focus on the complex relationships between actor and performance. Just as the caesura is an involuntary inhale prompted by the body that needs a break before it may continue reciting a line (Stagg), a sigh performed by the actor is the body's demand for a break to handle the emotions that it is performing (Chalk). The body's reaction to external forces is also the topic of “‘Great Annoyance to Their Mindes’: Humours, Intoxication, and Addiction in English Medical and Moral Discourses, 1550–1730” by David Clemis. Clemis argues that drunkenness is not merely the impact of alcohol on the human body; rather, the alcohol is said to activate the “animal spirits” (55) within the subject.
The last two chapters in this section—“Performing Pain,” by Michael Schoenfeldt, and “A ‘Dummy Corpse Full of Bones and Entrails’: Staging Dismemberment in the Early Modern Playhouse,” by Amy Kenny—turn their attention to the impact of elements of performance on the actor's body. Focusing on the suffering body on the stage, Schoenfeldt traces the establishment of a vocabulary of pain and suffering to early modern medical literature and questions the impact of performing pain on the body of the actor. Kenny examines stage props that would be used to stage dismemberment and traces the humoral experiences that such props accumulate over their use. The humoral life of the prop is not only central to its “dramaturgical agency” (88) but also leaves an impact on the actor interacting with it.
The latter half of the volume begins with Kaara L. Peterson's “Elizabeth I's Mettle: Metallic/Medalic Portraits,” which examines the use of metalwork (such as coins) as a part of Elizabeth I's public image and argues that the stability of the metal serves as a corrective to the fungibility and instability of the humoral body. Reading Shakespeare as an “art historian” (128), Kimberly Rhodes situates As You Like It's representation of melancholy in the context of Jaques in broader artistic representations of the wounded stag and its humoral significance, including artistic representations of Saint Eustace and Saint Hubert.
The final two chapters in the volume demonstrate how external objects can accumulate humoral qualities stemming from human fears and anxieties. In “Humours, Fruit, and Botanical Art in Early Modern England,” Amy L. Tigner traces a paradigm shift in early modern attitudes to fruits (and their respective humoral charges), from the banning of fresh fruit during outbreaks of the plague to widespread acceptance and the development of horticultural arts. Similarly, gameplay and toys become signifiers for the physical and emotional well-being of characters in early modern domestic tragedies, as demonstrated by Ariane Balizet in “The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern English Domestic Tragedy.”
In the afterword to the volume, Gail Kern Paster reminds us of the mental acrobatics that a modern reader needs to do to fully grasp the humoral qualities of everyday objects as our early modern predecessors would have understood them (such as the desire of glue to stick to things in addition to sticking being its innate quality). The range of objects and ideas in this volume is a testament to the pervasive and universal nature of humorality in early modern lived experiences.
