Attracted to ill humors, or what hope for Shakespeare's cachexic couples, May 18, 2017

- [Donna Hirst] This is he History of Medicine Society, our last lecture of the year, and Kirilka Stavreva is gonna be giving us a lecture on Attracted to Ill Humors, Shakespeare. So she was born and raised in Bulgaria. She completed a combined BA and MA degree at Sophia University in Bulgaria and then completed a PhD in English at the University of Iowa. After a brief detour for a post doctoral position at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., she put down academic roots in Iowa. Her teaching and scholarship are informed by a passion for words, the material book and the lived experience of literature by writers, readers, and performers. Her students explore global adaptations of Shakespeare, write and perform their own transformations of Shakespeare's plays, follow in Dante's footsteps to study the resonances of the Divine Comedy in Italian architecture and art. They create teaching additions of early modern plays and travelogs, and composed letterpress-print broadsides and artist books. So everyone of you wants to take one of her classes, right? She is a founding member of Cornell's Foxden Press, and director of the college's center for the literary arts. Kirilka teaches medieval and renaissance literature, global Shakespeare, film and book arts, and history at Cornell College. Her award winning scholarship has appeared in essay collection and academic journals such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Borrowers and Lenders, The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, and the Journal of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies. This is a very abbreviated list of what she's accomplished because I think we all wanna hear what she has to say. - [Kirilka Stavreva] Thank you so much, thanks everybody for coming tonight to hear a Shakespeare talk with a medical twist. I hope I don't overwhelm you with the Shakespeare. - [Donna Hirst] Please overwhelm me with some Shakespeare - [Kirilka Stavreva] I cannot help myself, sometimes. And I'm thrilled to be able to present this lecture in conjunction with the National Library of Medicine's traveling exhibit and There's the Humor of It. So there are three things I'm gonna do in this lecture: I will offer you the humoral theory that held sway from the Classical period to the start of a slow and incomplete disintegration with the advent of the empirical biological sciences in the 17th century. That disintegration continued for two centuries. It was a slow death. I would also consider briefly its implications, the implications of this theory, for the well-being of the individual in the society. And then, I will counter some of the implications of the humoral theory for gender and gender relations as portrayed in Shakespeare, specifically in two of his famous couples who are featured in the exhibit: Ophelia and Hamlet, and Katherina and Petruchio. But first, a word in a way of the explicating the title of the exhibit, That's the Humor of It. That's the Humor of It, not There is the Humoring of This. I am presenting both words. That's the Humor of It is among the favorite phrases tossed around by one of Shakespeare's bumbling comic characters, Corporal Nym. He's the one in the middle of this trio. He appears in the second trilogy of Shakespeare's history plays, and the first scene of Act II can be found the thief, Nym, who is hot-blooded, what people of his era called sanguine, declares to another character, Bardolph, not on this slide, that he is keeping, I quote, "An iron as cold as another man's sword," from his ex-friend, Ancient Pistol. Ancient is another word for ensign, standard bearer, Pistol. So the iron that Nym is keeping is actually a gun, pistol. Just a little bit of nape right there. Shakespeare and, possibly, Nym, although he's not very sharp witted is pulling off a medical joke here. Not that any early modern doctor would have prescribed a cold weapon to a hot-tempered man, but it is easy to imagine Nym referencing the physiological thinking of the era, as the coldness of the weapon could be seen as beneficial for restoring thermo or humoral balance to Nym's hot-blooded condition. The reason that Nym is so upset with Pistol is because the latter has never been Nym's betrothed Nell, The hostess of The Boar's Head cafe. When Pistol enters with his wife, on the corner there by his side, the two men draw their swords before exchanging so much as a word. Nell attempts to appease them, "Good Corporal Nym, show thy valor and pull out your sword" that is, put it down. In response to which the corporal manages to pour down both lechery and anger into a one-liner, "Will you shog off? I will have your solus." At that, Nym's nemesis, Pistol, explodes. "Solus, egregious dog? O viper vile! "The solus in thy most mervailous face, "The solus in thy teeth and in thy throat "and in thy hateful lungs, yea, and in thy maw, perdy, "and which is worse, within thy nasty mouth. "I do retort the solus in thy bowels, "for I can take, and Pistol's cock is up, wink wink, "and flashing fire will follow." Pistol, of course is all fire. In terms of the humoral theory, he is choleric, in excess of yellow bile. This, of course, does not bode well for his marriage bed. He is hot but dry. Okay. The fight is avoided and the two men go off to the war with France when the sanguine Nym is hanged for stealing from the church. The choleric Pistol, problem being the element of maurice survives and declares his intent to become a criminal once he returns home. And back home the hostess is the reported to have died of venereal disease. The worry itself has been cast, Nym inadvertently suggests, by bad humors cast by the young, and quite disorderly king, Henry the fifth. So what are the humors? And specifically what is a bad humor? And what can be done so that physical bodies like those of Nym, Pistole, King Henry, and the political body of England can be healthy, that is free of bad humors? The early Moderns inherited and developed the Greek physiological theory of the four humors, or fluids, was balanced with belief to ensure the proper functioning of the body. The four humors, on the right, of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, arising in that order as a result of processing of nutrients in the liver. The humors function is intermediarous in the process of pepsis, or metabolism, which transforms the constitutive elements of food and drink that is air, fire, water, and earth, the basic elements of all matter according to Aristotle and is on the slide, into the tissues and organs of the body. All four humors enter the Liver into the vital organs through the bloodstream. The modern equivalent would be hemoglobin, clasmine, lymph, beto globin, in the clankets. During the long rain of humorism, which finally ended somewhere in the 19th century, the body was understood as a sort of semi-permeable container through which the four humors moved. In this dialectic model, each of the humors call response to a certain temperament. Blood, the moist and warm nourishing humor, results in a Sanguine temperament. The english language preserves this cultural concept in the meaning of sanguine as cheerful, optimistic and in phrases like in the pin of life. Phlegm, the also nourishing water element, cold and wet in quality, determines the Phlegmatic temperament. Today's meaning of phlegmatic is passive and unemotional preserves the Gelenic connotations. Yellow bile, the fire element, Pistole's, hot and dry corresponds to the Choleric temperament. The meaning of Choleric is bad tempered, impatient derives from the sharp and caustic qualities of this humor in Genetic physiology. This was a humor that was supposed to help with digestion, it disintegrated, it didn't last it disintegrated. And finally, black bile is the cold and dry Melancholic humor serving the earth element. It's heaviness is reflected today in the expression to feel down. By Shakespeare's era humorilism had become not just a physiological theory, but a way of understanding the entire world. The theory of the physics of the cosmos. The early Modern's love of correspondences matched the elements with temperaments, with seasons, ages, animals, Greek gods, and organs. I've tried to accommodate some of this information on the slide and some of this information is visible in the exhibit outside of this room. But the humorists the early Moderns believed were volatile creatures. As Gail Kern Paster explains in her trail-blazing book the body embarrassed, I quote, "Genetic physiologists proposed the body whose constituent "fluids, all reducible to blood, were in time fungicidal." Not only did blood, semen, milk, sweat, tears and other body fluids turn into one another, but the processes of elimination, excretion, menstruation, and lactation were understood as formalogous, not much a different among them. Furthermore, besides being open and fungible in it's internal workings, the humoral body was also porus and thus able to be influenced by the immediate environment. In other words, bodies were always filled with humors, but the balance of the humors depended on factors such as gender, age, emotional state, as well as on the external environment, that is in both natural and social external as well as internal conses that determined the humoral balance of the human body. The humoral body is the work of Paster, Thomas Laqueur, Ian McClean, Caroline Bynum, and Alice Hershone, is largely dependent on a calotic economy of internal and external regulation, the body responds to the heat or lack-there-of in the environment and within itself. Oops! So I wanted to explicate some of the images on this slide first. Taken from Henry Peacham's book of emblems tremendously influential in 17th century England, and parts of these images are also on the panels outside. So what we see here is an emblem of the sanguine humor, which corresponds to childhood, emblematized by the lectrus goat. That you know is kind of after everything and everybody, and is kind of green in temperament. And then next comes yellow bile, emblematized by this naked adolescent man. And it's obviously a fiery humor as we can see in the shield of this man and also the Lion is it's animal. Next up the humor of adulthood emblematized by a man trying to keep warm in the fall, in the autumn, by the fire, kind of lonely also. So this is an emblem of the Phlegmatic humor of cold and moist, therefore this man is knelt by the fireplace trying to warm up and the patron animal of this humor is the turtle. And finally here is the silent, with a cloth over his mouth, old man ruled by melancholic cold and dry humors associated with black bile and the earth. And the animals keeping him company in his old age are the owl and the pussy cat. Okay, moving on. Maintaining the balance of the humoral body was a complex matter as elaborated in the hugely influential and absolutely beautiful book by the 11th century Baghdad physician Ibn Butlan, otherwise known as Abu-l Hasan al-Mujtar. That book is in the collection of the John Martin Rare Book Room and it's really work checking out. Ibn Butlans arabic manuscript has been lost, although scholars convected that it was translated into Latin in the 12th century by an Oxford doctor Gernatus Scrimonancus, who also translated some 70 additional words of science in medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and mathematics. The book was re-published widely throughout Europe. The John Martin collection book is a lovely two colored 1531 edition, printed in Strasbourg, with royal privilege. It included synoptic tables, they're really fascinating to uphold, with engravings, copper engravings by and these engravings illustrate both harmful effects on the body and remedies against them. Harmful effects that can affect the humoral balance and what can be done to counteract them. It is expensively bound in calf leather, those of you that are book lovers are probably salivating at this binding. The binding was done in 1637, likely by the owner who's 17th century hand signed the name of Johanus Pompeis on the title page. In 1532 the Tacuinum Sanitatis, the tables of health, was translated into German. The library also has this copy all be it this is a much cheaper, single colored addition. And what I'm getting at is the huge popularity of the humoral theory not just in Europe but also in the Arab world. And the cross-cultural interest in this theory. Ibn Butlan stipulated the six things that are necessary for every man for the daily preservation of his health, this would be her health as well. Add the idea of humoral balance up against each of them. This is: the treatment of air, which concerns the heart, the right use of foods and drinks, the correct use of movement and rest, the problem of prohibiting excessive wakefulness, very important, the correct use of elimination and retention of humors. That is not just any elimination, it's humoral elimination which would happen through the skin, through thinking, and the more regular elimination process. And the regulating of the person by moderating joy, anger, fear, and distress. Manifold instances of disturbing his balance are listed in another influential early modern medicine book, also in the John Martin collection, namely Steven Blankaart's Physical Dictionary. Now Blankaart was a physician who published the first medical journal in Holland. In the low countries Holland were really famous throughout Europe for their medical education. His lexicon medicum Graeco-Latinum was printed in Amsterdam in 1679. The Martin collection edition dates from 1684 and it is the first English translation of the dictionary also the first medical dictionary to be published in England. The preface to the courteous reader exalts the learning in forming the book as extracted out of ancient authors as Erotian, Gelen, and others, and from the more modern Scroatius, Foraceous, Costellus, and others. It also expresses the economic rendering of the book by author and book-seller. Here I quote, "in that if mind could "make a book of three-times the price "and the matter spun out should break the bulk, "but in things of this nature the biased interest "ought to be and has been consulted." Between authoritative sources, reliance on empirical observations, and economy of expression, Blankaart's dictionary proved immensely popular. So popular that it underwent at least 20 additions and translation and remained in print until the early 19th century. Meaning that it was in use for more than 150 years. This was one authoritative book, and also well used. Now here's a brief sampling of the instances recorded in the physic dictionary of humoral imbalances affecting the complexion. And if today we think of complexion as the skin tones, the skin color, in the early modern era complexion referred to the general state of the body, to which the skin tone could give some signal but no necessarily. So here are some of these humoral imbalances, just a few of them: Intermperies, is a disease which consists in inconvenient qualities of the body and these are either manifest or caught. So we have the Aristotelian bifurcation of the description. So either manifest or caught. The manifest are either simple or compound. The simple is when one quality is pecanned, that is faulty or diseased, as a hot, thin, hard, acid, salt disposition and such. An accounting of this disposition or this temper is such as precise from such poisonous qualities that's from the air, from poisonous animals, etc. It comes from the air when the night you're in it becomes contagious by reason of standing, stinking waters, daily droughts, earthquakes, etc. Whence malignant, pestilent fevers and plagues themselves arrive, etc, etc. A more troublesome condition was Carcinoma, Carsinous, or Cancer. A tumor that arises from a salinal, sulfurous and sharp wad. They really new the origin of Cancer. It is round, hard, livid, painful, and in the beginning as big as a pea but afterwards it is surrounded with great swelling veins which resemble the feet of a crab done up all ways. Moving on to Condyloma, the knitting or joining of joints. Also certain tumor in the skin of the Fundament, an hard and callous swelling growing from black humors, the heavy stuff, that flow thither downwards towards the fundament. And rather troublesome than painful sometimes also it is accompanied by an inflammation. By the late 17th century, medicine had moved on from ascribing all my body processes to the liver. Which is what the Greeks did. With anatomical discoveries, physicians considered the function of other organs in the Humoral economy of the body, as illustrated in the next slide on Conarium for the penial gland. This is a fascinating entry because it kind of testifies to the research that has gone into making the dictionary. It hangs in the folding of the conerides in the brain so called for the shape of a cone. It is seated between two beds of the optic nerves, and the prominences of the napes. Anybody who's familiar with the brain anatomy can calculate that this correct? It sounds correct to me. We can scarce believe that this land delay is the seat of the soul or that the principles faculties in a man arise hence. It out there for to be looked upon rather as a sensory whence the nerves arise. To whip above the beginning of the alongated manner, it's uses to receive and contain the service humors, that is phlegm, which are externed from the ulterious blood till either the veins being emptied suck them again, or else the lymph gaurds, if there be any at hand, convey them away. Yet the learned F--probably are, Robert Boyle who published his book on blood circulation in the same year 1584, so he hadn't quite yet made a huge name, and he did have a brother called Francis, So the learned F. Boyle doubts of its use when he says that it is not so easy to determine what it's use is since I have observed this glandule to be always impregnated with an apparent and pretty sharp saltiness in several brains of man, oxen, and sheep, I cannot but imagine that it separates some volatile humor from the blood. It serves as a sieve to keep out some volatile humor that end up blood is empty. In general, the persistence dis balance of the humors, according to Blankaart, would result in Cachexia. Which is, for those of you who were wondering about my title and ill habit of the body preceding from an ill disposition of the humors of the body, whence lingering fevers, consumptions and dropsies are contracted. In this disease the face is often pale and discolored, and the body big and swollen. Cachexia taken in a large sense is opposed to Euexia, and as a good habit of body is common to all sound parts, so an ill one is propagated by all the ill parts. Strictly, Cachexia is only taken from an ill disposition of the habit of the body, and Euexia on the the contrary, for good disposition of the humors, or blood, and body. So just like an imperfectly tuned musical instrument would yield cacophony, Cachexia would be the result of ill tuning the humors of the body. Obviously humoral physiology is passe, but the English language bears testimony to the sway that it held in the standing of the body and of the world by patients and physicians a like, but you'll wait. Thus one mediates sanguine about the political situation, if the blood-balance of the humors is good. You can hate it with a purple passion, the color indicating an over abundance of blood. Survivors of the cold war maintain a jaundiced outlook of the current political situation. While those who experience it for the first time maybe prone to bilious outburst. The press is not reporting anyone being green with envy about White house positions, though it is not clear how many actually have the gal to apply for these positions. In any case, a few of us of are Phlegmatic, that is passive and unemotional about the situation, but a good number report feeling melancholic, depressed, feeling down, or even being in a deep depression. These are all humoral terms. And then there's a few more in the right hand side column, hot-headed, cold blooded, catch a cold, to be in no humor to argue, to be be in a good or a bad humor, to be filled with emotions, out of temper, in one's element, or hypochondriac. So how do persistent humor imbalances form Cachexia, in Blankaart's understanding of this concept, manifest in Shakespeare's characters? Apparently those of the same humoral disposition attract each other. Not opposites, sameness attracts. As each of the pairs I discuss in the time remaining, of Ophelia and Hamlet, and Katherina and Petruchio, is marked by the same Cachexia. Hamlet and Ophelia, on the left, are afflicted with melancholia, an excess of black bile, the heavy humor of the earth. A condition that they retain throughout the play. They're both cold and dry, weighed down by both temperature and earthiness. They may be young in age, but they're marked by the humor of old age. These are old children. While we can only speculate about the physiological causes of their Cachexia, the social factors are clear. There is coldness and rottenness in both their families, and famously in Denmark. Now onto Hamlet's symptoms. There of course are customary dark clothes and the persistent mourning on which he remarks and in which draw the mockery of his uncle/stepfather. More disturbingly there are the suicidal thoughts, manifested as soon as Hamlet is left alone at the outcome of the first scene with the entire port. He says, opening his heart to the audience, "Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, "thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, "Or that the Everlasting had not fixed "his canon 'gainst self-slaughter." Not only is he yearning to be gone, but he's also yearning for water to resolve itself into a dew, à dieu. There's his taunting confession to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, once they disclose that the queen and the king have sent them to inquire into Hamlet's state, and they have not just shown up because they are his good friends from Wittenberg, says Hamlet, "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, "lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, "and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition "that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me "a most sterile promontory. "This most excellent canopy, the air-look you, "this brave o'erhanging firmament, "this majestical roof fretted with golden fire-why, "it appears nothing to me than a foul "and pestilent congregation of vapors. "Man delights not me. Nor, not woman either." when he visits Ophelia in her closet he's fearful and trembling as she reports. Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other. It seems to her that he's afraid of everything, and she reports that he have, "a look so piteous in purport "as if he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors." Ophelia's symptoms: she is adept at giving the icy treatment when returning Hamlet's letters a gifts. After he suggests, "I never gave you aught," Ophelia responds dejectedly, "My honored lord, "I know right well you did "and with them words of so sweet breath composed "as made the things more rich. "Their perfume left, take these again or to the noble mind "rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. "There my lord." In the pithy to analogous scene that follows quickly after Hamlet berates Ophelia, women in general, and the institution of marriage, Ophelia starts spiraling down into the darkness, commenting on her own state of mind and that of Hamlet's in the same breath, "and I, of ladies most deject and wretched, "that sucked the honey of his music vows "now see that noble and most sovereign reason "like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh "that unmatched form and feature of blown youth "blasted with ecstasy" She sees Cacophony in both her and in Hamlet. And if we have doubts regarding the capacity of Hamlet's sovereign reason to hold his humors into balance, that famous question as to whether Hamlet is mad or not, no one suspects Ophelia of feigning madness. That her madness is an instance of, a melancholic surflict of black bile, whether than some different humoric imbalance, is evident in the imagery in the speech in her mad scene. The king addresses her, "how do you pretty lady?" and Ophelia answers, "Well, God'ield you! "They say the owl was a baker's daughter Lord, "we know what we are, but know not what we may be." The fable of the owl and the bakers daughter has been lost, we don't know what she's referring to, but the knowledge that the owl was the bird of the solitary, melancholic old age is not lost. We have the visual evidence, remember Peacham's emblem of the Melancholic old man with an owl and a pussy cat. Ophelia sinks to her cold, watery death, heavy as a clot of earth. And what could have been done for the Cachexia of this couple? Clearly, Hamlet and Ophelia were not good for each other, they needed a different partner but such is love. Nor was their lifestyle good for them. Spending many days indoors studying and embroidering, the Danish climate was also a downer, both physically and politically. Perhaps a trip to Paris, definitely not Wittenberg, and passionate romance, aromatherapy the violets that Ophelia had all withered away when her father was killed, this is what she really needed. Dancing and some other vigorous physical activity may have helped! What is interesting is that Ophelia actually tries to self-medicate with the song that she's singing. A body song about the green gowns of midday maidens. Hamlet too starts fencing towards the end of the play, but by that point his Cachexia is beyond hope. Katherina and Petruchio from the taming of the shrew. Their Cachexia is the stuff of airy color, the excess of yellow bile that produces heat and dryness. In Petruchio words, they're two raging fires. Their behavior is destructive in the way that empablo's tantrum is destructive, or can be. So theirs is the humor of childhood. Katherina attacks Hortensio, her sister's suitor, with a three-legged stool. She breaks a lute over his head, when he's disguised as Licio the music tutor, ties up his sister, strikes her own beats Petruchio's servant Gremio when he taunts her. In turn, Petruchio, her partner, is also in the habit of abusing his servant Gremio, both physically and verbally, "Villain, I say, knock me at this gate "and rap me well, and I'll knock your knave's part." And as early as the first courtship scene he abuses Katherina verbally, threatening to pluck out her sting, which is in her tongue. And after the marriage he resorts to physical abuse of his wife by isolating her, depriving her of warmth, comfort, food and sleep, all that after a horrific journey to his house. Challenged by his friend Hortensio that it's possible for Katherina to prove the better of him Petruchio builds himself up through lion imagery. "Have I not in my time heard lions roar?" and of course the lion is the animal of his humor. The proper cure for Petruchio and Katherina's condition would be music, which is generally helpful for any humoral dis balance, all be it with some caveats. And also intellectual pursuit, if the coneitus can be induced to try an intellectual pursuit. Walks on the rocky beaches of the near-by Adriatic coast might also be good to cool off the disposition of this couple. Petruchio suggests that, I quote, "where two raging fires meet together "they do consume the thing that feeds their fury." He is, however, wrong. What is worth pondering at the end of the play is whether the Choleric condition of these two characters is ameliorated and if so, how? Now I would suggest that Katherina's condition indeed has improved, although probably only temporarily. Another character from the play also suspects that this is not a permanent improvement. Petruchio credits Kate's cooling to keep in the cold and hungry at his house and perhaps to the dying king in the cold mob that she endured when the diseased horse that he brought to her home on the wedding day collapsed to its death as it was carrying Katherina back to Petruchio's house. I would suggest here, however, that Katherina's condition gets under control thanks to an intellectual pursuit. Namely mastering the art rhetoric in order to save both her life and her sanity, and to gain social respectability including respectability over and above her husband. As I argue in my book, Words Like Daggers, what Katherina does in the final scene of the Taming of the Shrew, which is one painful scene to watch for anybody with even faint feminist ideas, what she does in that final scene is an appropriation sentence that church courts prescribed to scold in defamers. An appropriation with a twist, the sentence for scolding women in the early modern era was a public penance in the church on Sunday, and here's how Katherina appropriates it: most likely when she's summoned by her husband she enters wearing the, I quote, "honest mean habiliments," vi cements, clothes, that Petruchio deemed best for the occasion. He would not give her-- they're going back to celebrate the wedding of her sister and to also have a much delayed wedding party for themselves. She wants to wear appropriate clothing, he tears the clothes apart. And so they make an entrance dressed like beggars. So given the contrast with the festive attire of the other wedding guests such costuming would be functional paradote of the penitence white sheet that the penitent women sentenced by a church court would wear to the service where she would enact her penitence. However, Katherina also wears a hat, covered with the very same buckle which Petruchio mocked earlier in front of the Habidashens, and which she clutched as she declared, "love me or love me not, I like the cap "and it I will have or I will have not!" Now, confusing the humiliation effect of a penitence costume such mixture of styles, fancy hat, shredded or at least worn out dress, such mixture of styles recalls the matted hire which Petruchio himself wore when he came to wed Katherina. Especially given the association of bobbles, which is what her cap is called, with class. Quick to forestall ideas about the possible significance of Katherina's mixed-up costume Petruchio demands, "off with that bobble! Throw it underfoot." Katherina, that corrected penitent complies but the performance genre of the penitence has already been muddled. If wearing the bobble may have been Katherina's choice, the over zealous Petruchio introduces an additional incongruous component to the penitence ritual. His prompt asks him to come bound repentance for her offenses and her failings to live up to the model of the dutiful wife, and judgment of his sister Bianca and especially the widow and falling short of the model of the dutiful wife. When Katherina is given her cue to speak the stage direction, "enter Kate, Bianca, and widow," implies that she does not face the onstage audience by herself but is flanked by Bianca and the widow, whom she had been commanded to bring forth from the parlor and if necessary to swing, that is flash them sounding. Petruchio's fount and the broking that this entails allows for one of two performance options: either Katherina is speaking for the group of female penitents or else, like a minister, she's giving the lives of the penance to the women by her side. In the first case, the speech pointedly renders her as the only woman worthy of social reintegration, given that the other women are unwilling to face the wedding guests and moreover Bianca, Katherina's sister, publicly affronts her husband as a fool. While the widow refuses to heed to the script of wifely obedience. In the second scenario we witness Katherina Minola renouncing Padua for her scolding time, reading a penance script to women who have never been published that is, prosecuted as scolds. This is folly in ministry, far exceeding the leading role in a column assigned to penitents. If the intellectual challenge of the performance takes away some of Katherina's finesse, neither of these options bodes well for extinguishing the fire of contentious fire in Padua, nor for the eagerly awaited social reconciliation there. The major deviation from the historic model of the public penance of the convicted scold, of course, is the loosely scripted nature of Katherina's performance. All she has available to construct her ceremonial penance is knowledge of conductible preppery on domestic duties and her practice offering Petruchio's rhetorical strategies in the earlier sun and the moon scene. All of the components of penance are present in Katherina's speech. That acknowledgement of offenses, her personal apology, the appeal to the righteousness of the godly community. But the curiously delayed, strangely sequence, and shifted into dizzying perspectives. Instead of an apology, Katherina opens with a dripe personal attack on the widow, "Fie, fie! unknit that threatening unkind brow, "and dart not scornful glances from those eyes "to wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor, "It blots thy beauty." You're ugly she tells her publicly. To the references to the widow as being past her sun seasoned prime, Katherina adds an offensive simile of a muddy, contaminated fountain, one that, " none so dry or thirsty "will deign to sip or touch one drop of it." She goes on to sermonize on the relationship of husband and wife as modeled after the relationship of the self sacrificing, caring monarch and his obedient subject, "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, "thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee." Petruchio is none of these things, everybody knows that. It is after delivering the sermon on marriage hierarchy and curiously before listing her offenses, that Katherina utters an apology, "I am asham'd that women are so simple "to offer war where they should kneel for peace," says she. Yet this is not a personal apology. It is far from clear that she is aligning herself with the simple women on whom she's ashamed given the use of they in the second part of the sentence. Attending to Katerina's shifty rhetoric in this section Megan Little raises the provocative question, "has Kate perfectly tame, becoming a puppet "that even persuades other women in to subjugation? "Or is Kate instructing women that they're simple "when they employee inexpedient rhetoric "launching a Ciseronian war instead of mere "ornamental and feminine tribute with true obedience?" It appears to me that the boxed final script of Kate's final speech calls for performance in which she wages a very smart war of words. The mechanical weapons she deploys against the women who have ridiculed and shamed her are simple in the sense of direct. Against the men who have constrained her into performing a penance she deploys subtler weapons. Fragmentation of the implied script of the penance, punning, and piled up, periodic hyperbole. Kate's choice of body action at the end of the speech, going down on her knees to place her hand below her husbands foot, certainly exceeds the requirements listed in penance scripts for convicted scolds. In fact, it was something that was outlawed by the time that Shakespeare's play was performed on stage. Kneeling for forgiveness, bareheaded and barefooted, was reserved for penitent fornicators and adulterers, not for penitent scolds. Now, is this a preemptive penance of sorts-- for some possible adultery in the future? Is she playing upon Petruchio's insecurities? Katerina's hyperbolic body language appears Petruchio aback, "Why there's a Wench!" Exclaims he and ends her public performance with a kiss required both by the comedic genre and by his fiery lover disposition. The rest of the male spectators' responses indicate bewilderment. Lucentio's comment that it is a, "harsh hearing when women are toward," may well apply to both his toward bride and to the qualities of Katerina's performance. He is, after all, the male character who happens to be most widely read in the liberal arts, including rhetoric, and should have no trouble identifying parody. Hortensio, never particularly insightful, takes Katerina's kneeling to be the culmination of of his submissive penance, but Lucentio, in the play's last line, suspends judgment calling such taming, "a wonder." Even in Kate's tame, or cool down phase I suggest, her tongue is as fiery as ever and this does not bode well for the communal case. One last point we're making is that Petruchio's condition remains untreated except perhaps for the counter-treatment of the sleepless hours that he spends terrorizing Kate at his house. He would have to wait for the regime of his second wife, Maria, the main character in the play called The Tamer Tame, the women's response, by Shakespeare's and the kings men John Fletchers. Thank you. And I'd love to take questions, yes. - [Audience Member] I was thinking of another humoral couple who was definitely out of their league in many ways and that would be the Macbeth's. After all Macbeth after he kills the king and he has his mind filled with scorpions. And of course Lady Macbeth is either in mourning of a lost child or is unable to conceive a child, and I'm certain this all fits in certainly with Melancholic and the biles, not to mention that they're filled with all this hot bile and are in the middle of very sunny Scotland So I'm just wondering how that would all fit in how this would work with that? - [Kirilka Stavreva] I'm looking at this table and I would think that lady, well Lady Macbeth begs to be dried up. Right? Infernal prayer calls for basically menopause so that she no longer has the milk of human kindness. So cessation of the menses, cessation of any possible lactation, she wants to be hot and dry I think. So does she get it? Does she get what she asks for? I think so, it's interesting that this is the humor associated with adolescence rather that old age but I think that's what she gets. - [Audience Member] Because the reason I'm thinking that is because I don't know but I think she's torn between more than one of those. Because at that point she says unsex me! That means either don't make me a woman, just take it all out, or there's something else that's going on at the same time. I've read this play several times and I've actually written on it but that always is, well the troubling aspect and I haven't been able to address that. - [Kirilka Stavreva] So yeah, so if Lady Macbeth is indeed Choleric she would be standing at this faint possibility of not just... Not just loosing her powers to bare a child, but actually getting transformed into a man. So that's a theory that's discussed by Thomas Lacqeur in the famously titled Making Sex, right, where given the right Choleric degree any woman can turn into a man because the female genitalia is inverted male genitalia and once you heave them around then testicles descend. But I don't think that's what she is asking - [Audience Member] I don't think so either - [Kirilka Stavreva] I'm not convinced that that's what she's asking I think she just doesn't want to deal with womanly stuff I don't think she's all into the sexual transformation. But in both cases the choleric disposition would fit her. As for Macbeth himself, and it's interesting that she manages to back to Lady Macbeth, it's interesting that she manages to maintain this Choleric disposition in sunny Scotland as you said. So it must be really really a severe humoral imbalance that she's suffering from. As for, I don't know do you guys have any hypothesis about what Macbeth may be suffering from? - [Audience Member] I think it's more melancholic - [Kirilka Stavreva] That's my, yeah that would be my hunch too. Cold and dry, maybe that's why they never had a kid. - [Audience Member 2] I almost don't think of Macbeth as having any kind of personality, he's so dominated by, I mean I don't think I have any sense of what he could be like without his-- thinking about Othello, because somebody pointed it out to me that there's no indication at all that Othello and Desdemona every consummate their marriage, but they're just constantly, - [Kirilka Stavreva] Interrupted, yeah - [Audience Member] Interrupted yeah, and I wonder if Katherina and Petruchio is there anything in the text to suggest that that marriage has been consummated - [Kirilka Stavreva] No in fact I think withdrawal of sex is one of the mans that Petruchio uses to tame her. - [Audience Member] My main experience with the play is that Elizabeth Taylor Richard Burton film version and I know at the end of that even though it is very difficult as a woman to watch what she's willing to do and say, there's that moment where you see Elizabeth Taylor watching two children play, and that becomes kind of her motivation of I want that I think I've just figured you how-- - [Kirilka Stavreva] It's so fifties - [Audience Member] How does she get that. So I would see that kiss at the end, you brought up Hamlet and Ophelia who I don't think they're any good for each other and should go their separate ways, and they do. But with Katherina and Petruchio there's all really that sensual tension in theaspect of it. You know I think the kiss the at the end, it's kind of girly isn't it? - [Kirilka Stavreva] Yeah, yeah, I mean... - [Audience Member] In a rape fantasy kind of way. - [Kirilka Stavreva] Yeah I mean look at that, they're two goats, you know they just can't help it. I'm sorry I mean this is of course in the mindset of the early moderns. Any other questions? - [Donna Hirst] Thank you very much - [Kirilka Stavreva] Thank you so much.