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Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage Reviews Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. By Gail Kern Paster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xv + 274 pp. In 1993 Gail Kern Paster’s Body Embarrassed reimagined a historicized way into the early modern psyche.1 This was a path charted through humoral theory, the bewildering and exhaustive manner by which most early modern subjects understood their own bodies to work. Humoral theory posited different seats of the passions, with an emphasis on the fluid balance or imbalance of four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). As Paster’s work has always emphasized, however, it also posited caloric difference as essential, regarding the bodies of men as warmer than those of women and in fact predicating gender difference as much on this presumed difference in temperature as on any difference in genitalia. When The Body Embarrassed first appeared, histories of subjectivity had been attacked from various perspectives. New Historicists regarded the psychoanalytic paradigms that had been applied frequently in the 1970s and early 1980s to literary personages as belated and anachronistic, while the hostility toward character-centered criticism evinced itself in the work of people like Francis Barker, who — eager to empty out the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History Duke University Press

Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage

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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
© 2007 by Duke University Press
ISSN
0026-7929
eISSN
0026-7929
DOI
10.1215/00267929-2006-026
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Reviews Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. By Gail Kern Paster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xv + 274 pp. In 1993 Gail Kern Paster’s Body Embarrassed reimagined a historicized way into the early modern psyche.1 This was a path charted through humoral theory, the bewildering and exhaustive manner by which most early modern subjects understood their own bodies to work. Humoral theory posited different seats of the passions, with an emphasis on the fluid balance or imbalance of four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile). As Paster’s work has always emphasized, however, it also posited caloric difference as essential, regarding the bodies of men as warmer than those of women and in fact predicating gender difference as much on this presumed difference in temperature as on any difference in genitalia. When The Body Embarrassed first appeared, histories of subjectivity had been attacked from various perspectives. New Historicists regarded the psychoanalytic paradigms that had been applied frequently in the 1970s and early 1980s to literary personages as belated and anachronistic, while the hostility toward character-centered criticism evinced itself in the work of people like Francis Barker, who — eager to empty out the

Journal

Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary HistoryDuke University Press

Published: Mar 1, 2007

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