And make two pasties of your shameful heads: Medicinal cannibalism and healing the body politic in Titus Andronicus

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 70, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 677-708

  Noble, Louise ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33747890175     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2003.0029     Document Type: Review

References (138)

1. Oswald Croll, Bazilica Chymica and Praxis Chymiatricae or Royal and Practical Chymistry (1609), trans. John Hartman (London, 1670), 156.
2. A similar recipe for embalming is offered by the distinguished English physician, Dr. Alexander Read. See Chirurgorum Comes: or the Whole Practice of Chirurgery Begun by the Learned Dr. Read (London: 1687), 710.
3. William Shakespeare, The New Cambridge Shakespeare Titus Andronicus, ed. Alan Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 5. 2. 186-89. Hereafter cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.
4. Titus's recipe resembles the definition of "mummy" in Samuel Johnson's dictionary: "What our druggists are supplied with is the flesh of executed criminals, or of any other bodies the [makers of mummy] can get, who . . . send them to be baked in an oven till the juices are exhaled. " Johnson's Dictionary: A Modern Selection, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr. , and George Milne (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963).
5. There are, however, many fine analyses of the extraordinary violence in the play. See, for example, Eugene M. Waith, "The Metamorphosis of Violence in Titus Andronicus";
6. David Willbern, "Rape and Revenge in Titus Andronicus";
7. Heather James, "Cultural Disintegration in Titus Andronicus: Mutilating Titus, Vergil, and Rome";
8. and Philip C. Kolin "Come down and welcome me to this world's light: Titus Andronicus and the Canon of Contemporary Violence," all in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995) 99-113, 171-94, 285-303, 305-16.
9. See also Albert H. Tricomi, "The Aesthetics of Mutilation," in Shakespeare's Early Tragedies: Richard III, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, ed. Neil Taylor and Bryan Loughrey (London, MacMillan, 1990), 99-113;
10. and Katherine A. Rowe, "Dismembering and Forgetting in Titus Andronicus," Shakespeare Quarterly 45. 3 (1994): 279-303.
11. In The Culture of Violence: Tragedy and History (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993), Francis Barker argues that in Titus Andronicus any real representation of "systematic violence" in early modern English culture is elided by the emphasis on cannibalism (190). However, I argue that the play registers the early modern ingestions of corpses made possible by such violence.
12. Ben Jonson also plays with the themes of cannibalism and corpse therapeutics in Volpone, when Mosca says: "Sell him for mummia, he's half dust already. " This image, as Brian Parker's note reminds us, "combines the play's 'cannibal' motif with its theme of ambiguous 'disease/cure,' " Volpone, or the Fox, ed. Parker (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1983), 4. 4. 14, 228 n. 14.
13. Copellia Kahn also argues that the Roman past was "legendarily linked to the moment in which Britain itself emerged into history. " Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds and Women (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
14. William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), 145.
15. Michel de Montaigne, "On Cannibals," Essays, trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1993), 114.
16. For an excellent exposé of the history and current status of the debate, see Peter Hulme's introduction to Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Barker, Hulme and Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).
17. Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 86.
18. Myra Jehlen, "Response to Peter Hulme," Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 188.
19. Hulme, Colonial Encounters, 86.
20. In his discussion of ritual cannibalism, René Girard similarly argues that "the victim is eaten only after he has been killed, after the maleficent violence has been completely transformed into a beneficent substance. " Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), 277.
21. Barker identifies early modern English culture as a "culture of violence," as his title makes clear; and Jonathan Sawday describes the public punishment and mutilation of human bodies as "spectacles of suffering," in The Body Emblazoned: Dissections and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 81.
22. Sara Mills is drawing on the work of Michel Pecheux. See Mills, Discourse (London: Routledge, 1997), 14.
23. As part of a larger study, The Healing Corpse: Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Culture, I also discuss another discourse of cannibalism: the vehement antipapal polemic that reformulated the belief in the ingestion of divine matter in the Eucharistic sacrament as a barbaric and depraved act of cannibalism.
24. Heinrich von Staden, "Women and Dirt," Helios 19 (1992): 7. A special thanks is due to Dana Medoro for bringing this article to my attention.
25. Owsei Temkin, The Falling Sickness, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), 22.
26. For useful discussions of Paracelsian doctrine, see P. M. Rattansi, "Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution," Ambix 11 (1963): 24-32;
27. Karen Gordon-Grube, "Evidence of Medicinal Cannibalism in Puritan New England: 'Mummy' and Related Remedies in Edward Taylor's 'Dispensatory,' " Early American Literature 28 (1993): 185-221;
28. Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York: Karger, 1982);
29. The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohnheim, Called Paracelsus the Great, ed. Arthur Edward Waite (London: James Elliott and Co, 1894), 168-69.
30. For a discussion of the differences between Galenic and Paracelsian pharmacology and early modern medical doctrine, in general, see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990);
31. and Lawrence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
32. Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), 197.
33. Dr. Christopher Merrett, A Short View of the Frauds, and Abuses Committed by Apothecaries; As well in Relation to Patients, as Physicians: and of only Remedy thereof by Physicians making their own Medicines (London: 1670), 38.
34. The 7 December 1618 edition offers a survey of the entire materia medica simplicium, cites a large number of medical sources, and lists various human excrements, grease of men, milk of women, mummy, and blood as pharmacological ingredients. In his introduction, George Urdang notes that the Pharmacopoeia, incorporating medicine as practiced by Galen and Hippocrates, which had been modified by the Arabians and revolutionized by Paracelsus and his followers, was conceived from the necessities of the sixteenth century but did not see the light of day until 1618: Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, 1618, ed. Urdang (Milwaukee: Hammersmith-Kortmeyer, 1944), 19.
35. von Staden, 16.
36. For example, John Hartman includes, with his translation of Croll, his own recipe for treating the "[o]bstruction of the Menses": a goose dung vapour "which will ascend through a chair (the Diseased sitting in a chair) to the Natural parts" (101). This treatment is consistent with Hippocratic vapour treatments for the removal of female impurities. See von Staden's excellent discussion of Hippocratic dirt therapy (7-30).
37. von Staden, 16, 8.
38. Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), 11.
39. von Staden, 9.
40. Gordon-Grube, "Evidence," 194.
41. Karl H. Dannenfeldt, "Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate," The Sixteenth Century Journal 16. 2 (1985): 164.
42. Dannenfeldt presents a comprehensive picture of the history of mummy and its role in early modern medicine. It is also interesting to note that Dioscorides includes women's milk, menstrual blood, and man's urine as remedies in his Herbal. See The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides, ed. Robert T. Gunther (New York: Hafner Publishing Co. , 1968).
43. Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, History of Egyptian Mummies (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Green and Longman, 1834), 9.
44. In his article, Dannenfeldt carefully maps this process of transference from an ancient to a sixteenth-century understanding of the pharmacological benefits of mummy.
45. Plinio Prioreschi, A History of Medicine (Omaha: Horatius, 1995), 380.
46. Warren R. Dawson situates the popularity of mummy from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, but I argue that the pharmacological use of mummy continued well into the eighteenth century, and occasionally beyond. See Dawson, "Mummy as a Drug," Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1927): 34.
47. Gordon-Grube, "Anthropophagy in Post-Renaissance Europe: The Tradition of Medicinal Cannibalism," American Anthropologist 90 (1988): 406.
48. John Schroder, The Compleate Chymical Dispensatory, in Five Books, trans. Dr. William Rowland (London, 1669), 506.
49. Dannenfeldt, 173.
50. Francis Bacon agrees: "any part taken from a Living Creature newly slain, may be of greater force, then if it were taken from the like creature dying of it self; because it is fuller of Spirit," in Sylva Sylvarum: or A Natural History, in Ten Centuries (London, 1676), 213. Bacon also advocates mummy and the moss from an unburied man's skull for staunching blood (210, 213).
51. Pettigrew, 7.
52. Robert James, Pharmacopoeia Universalis: or, A New Universal English Dispensatory (London: 1747), 511-12.
53. Quoted in Lynn Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 4th ed. , 8 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1923-1958), 5:502.
54. Jonson, Volpone, 2. 2. 118, 133-34.
55. Barker notes that "the record of death by hanging suggests there was an extensive, ruthless and effective coercive apparatus that was putting to death vast numbers of the people, overwhelmingly the low-born and the poor" (201).
56. Sidney Young, The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London (London: Blades, East and Blades, 1890), 112.
57. There are numerous texts attesting to the dubious qualifications of many medical practitioners. For example, A Detection of Some Faults in Unskilful Physitians, and Unknowing Running Chirurgians (London, 1662), "Written by a Doctor of Physick in Queen Elizabeths Daye," offers scathing descriptions of the incompetencies of many physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries and attests to the frequency of unskilled usurpers.
58. Young, 320, 346.
59. Jessie Dobson, "The 'Anatomizing' of Criminals," Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 9 (1951): 112-20.
60. See also Sawday, 56;
61. and Young, 321, 362.
62. Young, 218. In general, there was a great distrust of apothecaries. For example, Merrett accuses them of falsifying medicines, using inferior ingredients, incorrect amounts, overcharging and, even, poisoning patients because more money could be made from embalming than from prescribing (72).
63. James Shirley, The Bird Cage, ed. Frances Frazier Senescu (Garland: New York, 1980), 1. 1. 319.
64. Mabel Peacock, quoted in Gordon-Grube, "Anthropophagy," 407.
65. This method of collecting blood also seems consistent with the cure Paracelsus advocates in his doctrine of epilepsy - Paracelsus prescribes blood from a decapitated man, administered according to certain astrological rules, as a remedy for epilepsy. See Temkin, 176.
66. Thorndike, 8:536.
67. S. Johnson, Johnson's Dictionary, 258-59.
68. Dannendfeldt, 179;
69. Gordon-Grube, "Anthropophagy," 407.
70. Thorndike, 8:414, 7:246.
71. This anonymous account is quoted by Richard Hakluyt, in The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 3 vols. (London: 1599), 2:201.
72. Ambroise Paré, The Apologie and Treatise of Ambroise Paré, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), 145. Paré is referring to new mummy here.
73. Thorndike, 8:414.
74. Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. , 1974), 3. 5. 16-18;
75. Shakespeare, Othello, in Riverside, 3. 4. 74-75;
76. John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in The Works of John Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 4. 2. 117;
77. John Donne, "Love's Alchemy," John Donne: The Complete English Poems (London: Penguin, 1986), 23-24;
78. Sir Thomas Browne, "Hydriotaphia: Urne-Burial," Selected Writings, ed. Sir Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 152. With the exception of Titus, citations of all Shakespeare plays refer to The Riverside edition.
79. Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1975), 117. 34-35, 16-27.
80. I disagree with Tricomi's argument that the figurative language of the play is limited to the "gruesome circumstances of the plot," and fails to extend beyond the limits of the stage (99-113).
81. Girard, 33.
82. In his chapter, "Stoicism and Empire," Gordon Braden offers a fascinating analysis of the political critique of the "torment of Neronian Rome" in Senecan tragedy. See Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 8.
83. Andrew V. Ettin argues that the literary sources for the violence in the play are products of the "Roman" imaginations of Ovid and Seneca, in "Shakespeare's First Roman Tragedy," ELH 37 (1970): 326.
84. Braden, 8.
85. Kahn also argues that Shakespeare makes Titus a "serious critique of Roman ideology, institutions, and mores" (47).
86. Emily C. Bartels, "Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race," in Critical Essays, 265-66.
87. See also Anthony Pagden's useful discussion of the image of the barbarian in The Fall of Natural Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 15-26;
88. and Hulme, in Colonial Encounters, for a discussion of the ideological role for early modern Europeans of descriptions of outsiders as eaters of human flesh (esp. 86-87).
89. For example, in This Worlds Folly, as Michael Neill has shown, "I. H. " locates the corrupted source of the plague - the "Bawdy Players" - in the "feminized body politic of the city, where a literal disease is produced by the taint of metaphoric uncleanness. See Neill's Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997), 25.
90. Neill is quoting from I. H. , This Worlds Folly; or, A Warning-Peece Discharged Upon the Wickedness Thereof (London, 1615), sig. B3.
91. Linda Woodbridge also makes this point, in her description of the tomb as the "dominant stage image . . . that keeps swallowing Andronici. " See The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994), 172;
92. and Maurice Charney writes that the tomb offers "an implicit metaphor of the earth swallowing its own increase in burial. " See Charney's "Titus Andronicus," Harvester New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare (Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 96. Willbern also notes that in these lines, Titus associates Rome with the mother's womb (173).
93. See The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993), under "Headless. " Willbern also notes that the restoration of Rome is the goal that underpins the play (188).
94. Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 35.
95. Gail Kern Paster identifies Rome's dependence on these "sacrificial victim[s]" who allow "the city, once again, to live" ("To Starve With Feeding," in Critical Essays, 229).
96. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985), 121-22.
97. Kirby Farrell, Play, Death and Heroism in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1989), 10.
98. This situation of external peace and internal violence can also be seen in Cicero: "all the outside is pacified on land and sea by the virtus of one man: home-grown war remains, the threats are inside, the hidden danger is inside, the enemy is inside" (quoted in Braden, 13).
99. See Girard, 7, 18.
100. See also his discussion of the role of the pharmakos in Greek tragedy (94-98).
101. Jacques Derrida offers a complex discussion of the implications of the translation of pharmakon, as either remedy or poison, in Plato's Phaedras and the impact of this on the tradition of Western Philosophy, esp. "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981).
102. See also Girard, 95.
103. Girard, 21 ("curative procedures").
104. Neill offers an insightful understanding of revenge as an anxious response to death and the psychological state of the revenger. See his discussion of Hamlet, in Issues, 243-61.
105. Lavinia and Bassianus are not entirely blameless, and their malicious tauntings of Tamora further illustrate Roman malevolence and reinforce Tamora's refusal of Lavinia's pleas, just as Titus had refused hers.
106. Much has been written about this reference to female genitalia, which ominously signals the rape of Lavinia, and the connection between the Andronici tomb and the hungry womb of feminized Rome. In particular see Marion Wynn-Davies for a persuasive discussion of the gynecological imagery of the cannibalistic feminine earth, in '"The swallowing womb': Consumed and Consuming Women in Titus Andronicus," in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991) 129-51.
107. Fioravanti, quoted in Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood, trans. Robert R. Barr (New York: Continuum, 1995), 31.
108. See also Paster's inspiring discussion of "laudable blood," in which she maps the complex "cultural symbology" of blood in early modern England.
109. See Paster's The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993), 64.
110. Paster, The Body, 66.
111. Girard, 34.
112. von Staden, 20.
113. See also his analysis of the tradition of a belief in female impurity, (13-14), and Paster's discussion of the early modern understanding of the "plethoric" nature of women (The Body, 79).
114. Girard, 36.
115. See, for example, Helkiah Crooke's Microkosmografia: A Description of the Body of Man, 1615 (London, 1631).
116. Paster also identifies Lavinia's blood as vaginal or menstrual (The Body, 98).
117. See von Staden's article for a discussion of the gendering of Hippocratic dirt therapy. In general, this therapy is consistent with the homeopathic nature of Paracelsian medicine and, also, as Urdang writes in his introduction to the Pharmacopoeia Londinensis, with the trend away from the polypharmacy of the Galenists towards "Hippocratic simplicity," evident in the Pharmacopoeia (32). Menses, used both externally and internally, is a frequently mentioned ingredient in the early modern pharmacological reserve.
118. von Staden, 14-15.
119. Further, in this ideology of bodily disintegration, by representing the live dismemberment of Lavinia, Shakespeare also gives form to the idea of live dissection. As Sawday notes, "The charge that anatomists were also vivisectionists was to haunt the theatres of dissection throughout the early-modern period" (80).
120. See also Crooke's objection to living dissections: "it is not Anatomy but butchery, to mangle the trembling members of a mans body, and under I know not what slender idle pretence of profit, or behoose, to violate the sacred Law of nature, and of religion" (18).
121. Titus Andronicus, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), 148n.
122. Titus, ed. Hughes, 127n.
123. In his discussion of Othello, Walter Cohen makes the similar point that "Shakespeare's humour shatters the norms of dramatic and moral suitability, implying the artificiality of what is conventionally considered normal or proper," in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 377.
124. Also there are other places in the play that are played for laughs, for example 2. 3. 110, 3. 1. 91, 3. 2. 29, which Alan Hughes identifies as puns, albeit "atrocious" ones, (127 n. 97).
125. Dobson, 15.
126. Young, 318.
127. Numerous complaints were published against unskilled surgeons and imposters. Two examples are: surgeon Daniel Turner's Apologia Chyururgica. A Vindication of the Noble Art of Chyrurgery, from the Gross Abuses Offer'd Thereunto by Mountebanks, Quacks, Barbers, Pretending Bone-Setters, with Other Ignorant Undertakers (London, 1695);
128. and [Anonymous], A Detection of some Faults in Unskilful Physitians, and Unknowing Running Chirurgians: Written by a Doctor of Physick in Queen Elizabeths Daye (London, 1662).
129. Braden, 43.
130. Essential to this reading is the pharmacological recommendation that "the Cranium is found by Experience to be good for Diseases of the Head" (R. James, 53).
131. At this moment, we can also hear Hamlet's words as he battles the contagion of Denmark: "Now I could drink hot blood" (3. 2. 390). Ironically, we also witness in Titus the performance of a phlebotomy, in which the bad humours, Chiron's and Demitrius's "guilty blood" (5. 2. 183), are released and saved.
132. For example, Paracelsus's method for fusing bones: "Take any quantities of bones and burn them into lime. Having done this, carefully pound it. Take of this [a portion]; of quicklime [a portion]. Mix them together in a powder. Afterwards dissolve some bitumen in a moderate quantity of wine, until the whole of it is melted away then place the bones therein, and stir briskly into a thick pulp. Afterwards pour into a mould made of paper" (Waite, 1. 365).
133. See also Johnson's definition, quoted in Waite, 3n.
134. It had become customary to provide a dinner after the demonstrations, as it was considered exhausting either to give or to listen to the lecture. These dinners tended to become larger, more elaborate and costly, and from time to time restrictions were introduced. Young, 334.
135. We also see this distinction collapsed in Twelfth Night, when Sir Toby threatens to "eat the rest of th' anatomy" (3. 2. 62-63).
136. It comes as no surprise, then, that we see a rhetorical slippage of the term "mummy" into cookery: "It must be very thick and dry, and the rice not boiled to mummy. " From Mrs. Glasse, Cookery (1733)
137. quoted in Dawson, 38.
138. R. James, 512.