Transgression Embodied: Medicine, Religion and Shakespeare’s Dramatized Persons

Abstract

If Shakespeare knew Aristotle’s Poetics, it was in so mediated a form that Aristotle might not have recognized it. As Sarah Dewar-Watson has observed, catharsis in the Renaissance had become a matter of comic as well as tragic drama; it had become fused with Christian notions of purgation from sin; and it had been syncretized with contemporary medical theory.¹ Modern critical wisdom often maintains that Shakespeare knew next to nothing about the Poetics, the first publication in England of which was a Latin edition of 1623 by the physician Theodore Goulston, who deferred to medical tradition in translating ‘catharsis’ as ‘purgans’: a purge.² Yet emphasizing that England was not cut off from the continent, and that the Poetics was well known if not well understood in sixteenth-century Italy scholars such as Dewar-Watson and Tanya Pollard now argue that ‘mediating sources’ might have conveyed to Shakespeare if not the Poetics itself, then at least the Renaissance’s rough approximations of some of its tenets.³ What such approximations of catharsis entailed is the subject of this chapter, for an Aristotelian ‘spirit of Greek tragedy’ has been detected in Shakespeare even by those denying more tangible connections.⁴ The chapter demonstrates that the spirit was not only one of purgation, but also one of Purgatory, finally outlawed in the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563.⁵ In recounting the history of what we might therefore term early modern, rather than Aristotelian, catharsis, a challenging new view of Shakespeare’s theatre emerges.