Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism—blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm—early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In Humoring the Body, Gail Kern Paster proposes a new way to read the emotions of the early modern stage so that contemporary readers may recover some of the historical particularity in early modern expressions of emotional self-experience.

Using notions drawn from humoral medical theory to untangle passages from important moral treatises, medical texts, natural histories, and major plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Paster identifies a historical phenomenology in the language of affect by reconciling the significance of the four humors as the language of embodied emotion. She urges modern readers to resist the influence of post-Cartesian abstraction and the disembodiment of human psychology lest they miss the body-mind connection that still existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and constrained them to think differently about how their emotions were embodied in a premodern world.

• The Norton Shakespeare (Third Edition)
• Bodies & Selves Early Mod England (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture)
• The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (Winner, Beatrice White Book Prize, English Association 1999)
• The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England
• Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion
• A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture
• Belinda (Oxford World's Classics)
• A Sentimental Journey
• Evelina (Oxford World's Classics)
• Petals of Blood