ISSN 2279-7149 (online) 2013 Firenze University Press Shakespeare and the Words of Early Modern Physic: Between Academic and Popular Medicine. A Lexicographical Approach to the Plays Roberta Mullini University of Urbino ‘Carlo Bo’ () Abstract The article aims at showing how Shakespeare relied on the medical vocabulary shared by his coeval society, which had, for centuries, been witnessing the continuous process of vernacu- larization of ancient and medieval scientific texts. After outlining the state of early modern medicine, the author presents and discusses the results of her search for relevant medical terms in nine plays by Shakespeare. In order to do this, a wide range of medical treatises has been analysed (either directly or through specific corpora such as Medieval English Medical Texts, MEMT 2005, and Early Modern English Medical Texts, EMEMT 2010), so as to verify the ancestry or the novelty of Shakespearean medical words. In addition to this, the author has also built a corpus of word types derived from seventeenth-century quack doctors’ handbills, with the purpose of creating a word list of medical terms connected to popular rather than university medicine, comparable with the list drawn out of the Shakespearean plays. The results most stressed in the article concern Shakespeare’s use of medical terminology already well known to his contemporary society (thus confuting the Oxfordian thesis about the impossibility for William Shakespeare the actor to master so many medical words) and the playwright’s skill in transforming – rather than inventing – old popular terms. The article is accompanied by five tables that collect the results of the various lexicographical searches. Keywords: Drama, Medicine, Popular Culture, Shakespeare. Healing was, and in some parts of the world still is, a social drama, a public performance involving elaborate rituals. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, 2006 Pray you, sir, was ’t not the wise woman of Brentford? William Shakespeare,The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602 1. Introduction 1.1 Words, Words, Words Strangely enough, no panel devoted to medicine is included in Shakespeare’s Words. A Glossary and Language Companion (Crystal and Crystal 2002), while Journal of Early Modern Studies, n. 2 (2013), pp. 63-89 http://www.fupress.com/bsfm-jems 64 roberta mullini so many others are present in the volume (such as ‘Archaisms’, ‘Exclamations’, ‘Politeness’ and ‘Responses’ plus a further 42). Actually there is a glossary panel for ‘Plants’ (330-333), but this – as its title implies – deals with medicine only very indirectly, since the ‘Comment’ column seldom highlights a particular plant’s connection with medicine. The omission of a medicine panel, which might have listed all the relevant terms interspersed in Shakespeare’s works, could be justified by the authors’ choice not to distinguish between metaphori- cal and plain meanings of many medical words, but no explanation is given. My article does not claim to fill this gap,1 but will try to identify which words used by Shakespeare in his plays were already known at the level of popular ‘physic’ and which, if any, he took from his coeval scientific treatises. The final purpose of my intervention is to estimate the role played in Shakespeare by popular and widespread medical knowledge (also derived from the herbal tradition of wise women)2 vs the contribution of the regular practitioners and their documents (see Pelling 2003 for the distinction between ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ practitioners). 1.2 Methodological Premises (and Limits) Since the nineteenth century various scholars have studied the presence of physicians, apothecaries and surgeons not only on the Elizabethan and Jaco- bean stage at large, but particularly in Shakespeare’s plays, deftly highlighting the role played by these characters and by medicine, collecting quotations from the plays and emphasising the function of medical practitioners in the texts (see Stearns 1865; Chesney 1884; Silvette 1967). Recently scholars have analysed various Elizabethan and Stuart plays foregrounding ‘[t]he perilous and shifting conjunctions of nature, disease, the patient, the practitioner’s art, performance, and the representations of these conjunctions in early modern drama’ (Moss and Peterson 2004, xi),3 and Pettigrew (2007), via an even more comprehensive cultural approach, has studied how Shakespeare uses medical discourse and displays medical practice. The close relationship between the playwright and Dr. John Hall, one of his sons-in-law, has also been stressed, in order to explain Shakespeare’s medical knowledge (Tierra 2008), while precisely this knowledge has been used by Oxfordians to deny ‘William of Stradford’ authorship of the plays (Davis 2000, 55). While grounding my research on previous critical results, in my article I would like to search the plays for medical terms hinting at the influence of popular medicine, at a time when scientific medicine was still lagging behind. And this by means of a computer-aided and corpus-based lexicographical analysis. In order to ground my research on reliable data, after outlining the state of early modern medicine, I’ll make use of a corpus of seventeenth-century quacks’ handbills, which I have built up myself by transcribing one third of the two British Library collections containing them (A Collection of 185 advertise- 65shakespeare and the words of early modern physic ments; A Collection of 231 advertisements). Of course, this corpus displays the language used in its historical context, i.e. later than Shakespeare’s times, but I consider it useful because it contains a rich medical lexicon deriving mainly from popular use, rather than from university knowledge.4 From this corpus a list of keywords will be extracted as resulting from the concordancer Ant- Conc 3.2.1 (Anthony 2009). Secondly – with the help of the MEMT corpus (which also includes some texts of the early sixteenth century, Taavitsainen, Pahta, and Mäkinen 2005) – another list of keywords relating to the field of medicine and remedy books will be built, and compared with the previous one, in order to verify the permanence of the older terms in seventeenth-century language. What proves to have a long duration and words of a high ranking will be searched, later, throughout Shakespeare’s plays, so as to verify their durability and/or variation in the Shakespearean vocabulary.5 A subsequent phase will be devoted to checking, on the basis of some early modern medical texts, to what extent Shakespeare drew on contempo- rary terminology, or to what extent he still relied on the previous medical lexicon, which, in his times, had already become part of Elizabethan shared knowledge. This phase will also take advantage of the recently issued EMEMT corpus (2010). Finally, the labels of ‘popular’ and/or ‘elite’ medicine will also be discussed according to the results of the previous sections, in order to see whether, and how far, the language of ‘physic’ in Shakespearean plays was permeated with words coming from the social margins, or rather adhered to the lexicon ap- proved by the Royal College of Physicians. From the steps outlined above, it is evident that such a project would require more space than allotted for this contribution. Therefore, since a large amount of data is expected, on this occasion my lexicographical results will be verified in a limited number of plays, leaving further in-depth exploration to future research. 2. Physicians, Surgeons, and Empirics in the Sixteenth Century 2.1 Henry VIII and Physic In 1421, nearly a century before Henry VIII founded the College of Physi- cians (1518), a petition was written by some members of the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, who asked that no man, of no maner estate, degree or condicion, practise in Fisik from this tyme forward bot he have long tyme y-used the scoles of fisik withynne som universitee, and be graduated in the same. … Undur peyne of long emprisonement, and paynge xl li … to the Kyng: and that no woman use the practise of fisik under the same payne. (Rotuli Parliamentorum, IV, 158, quoted in Rawcliffe 1997, 120) 66 roberta mullini Only during the third year of Henry VIII’s reign did Parliament issue a law which observed that the science and cunning of Physick and Surgery (to the perfect knowledge whereof be requisite both great learning and ripe experience) is daily within this Realm exercised by a great multitude of ignorant persons, of whom the greater part have no manner of insight in the same, nor in any other kind of learning. Some also can no letters on the Book, so far forth that common Artificers, as Smiths, Weavers, and Women boldly and accustomably take upon them great Cures, and things of great difficulty; in the which they partly use Sorcery and Witchcraft, partly apply such Medicines unto the disease, as be very noyous, and nothing meet … (3 H. VIII. C11, in Merret 1660, 1-2) Non-licensed people were consequently prohibited from practising medicine and surgery within the city of London and ‘within seven miles of the same’. The licence had to be obtained from religious authorities who availed themselves of university physicians. Some years after that (in the tenth year of Henry’s reign), the College of Physicians was created via a royal letter patent, giving Thomas Linacre and other royal physicians – all of them university graduates – the privilege to constitute a corporation in charge of testing would-be physicians. As a consequence only after obtaining the College’s approbation was a physi- cian allowed to practice in London (14. 15. H 8. C 5, in Merret 1660, 9-10). In spite of these restrictions, though, some time afterwards, in 1542, the king issued what goes under the label of ‘Quacks’ charter’ (34, 35 H.8. C 8). This law, probably due to the small number of university doctors in the country and – as the document declares – because of the Chirurgeons’ ‘minding only their own lucres’, gave permission to practice to everyone ‘as well men as women, whom God hath endued with the knowledge of the nature, kind and operation of certain herbs, roots and waters, and the using and ministering of them, to such as been pained with customable diseases’. These people were allowed to work ‘within any part of the Realm of England, or within any other of the Kings Dominions’, provided that their healing remedies were limited to ‘outward sore[s]’ (Merret 1660, 27-29). In other words, the College’s power resulted hedged and limited and the role of empirics was recognized and tolerated by law. 2.2 Women Healers It is evident from these historical notes that so far physicians and surgeons were considered as one single body. However, later a distinction was made accord- ing to which surgeons, not to mention apothecaries, were considered separate ‘mysteries’ (actually surgeons were grouped with the Barbers in a single company in 1540, while apothecaries had to wait longer in order to see their profession officially recognized in 1617). What appears very interesting in the above mentioned royal documents are the words they use for women: the earliest bill indirectly (but not excessively so!) accuses women of witchcraft and illiteracy, 67shakespeare and the words of early modern physic while the latest acknowledges women’s expertise in traditional herbal cunning, and does not touch the problem of literacy. All these aspects – the role of women in health care, together with limited female literacy when compared with men’s – will continue to be at the basis of the social condemnation of women healers: suffice it to remember the Countess’s words to Helena in AWW: But think you, Helen, If you should tender your supposed aid, He would receive it? He and his physicians Are of a mind; he, that they cannot help him, They, that they cannot help: how shall they credit A poor unlearned virgin, when the schools, Embowell’d of their doctrine, have left off The danger to itself? (1.3.233-40) On a non-fictional level, the learned reproval of women healers is witnessed, as late as 1651, by the engraving on the frontispiece of James Primerose’s Popular Errours showing a woman being prevented by an angel from getting near a sick man’s bed.6 Women, together with unlicensed practitioners, were considered ‘empirics’, then, and as such – in spite of Henry’s 1542 statute – dangerous to the public health. A specific historical process mustn’t be overlooked, i.e. the dissolution of monasteries in the late 1530s, which ‘released’ throughout the country many friars, monks and nuns. Most of them – according to a century-long tradition – were well-trained in growing, collecting and using herbs both as simples and compounds not only for their communities’ necessities but also to relieve the poor who crowded in for help (see Maple 1968, 66-67). Many empirics, then, were available around England, and administered remedies to the sick, especially administering external cures (thus leaving the cure of internal diseases to university physicians), so much so that Thomas Gale at- tacked the ‘rude Emperikes’ and those ‘who, under the name of Chirurgians be nothing els but open murtherers’ (Gale 1563, iiv), they being favoured because ‘without penaltie and correction of lawes frelye [they] take on them the practise of Chirurgerie’ (Ciir). Women, though, had always been the ‘family doctors’, those in charge of caring for the health of whole households (and more besides), as it clearly appears from the letter John Paston III sent to his wife, Margery, around 1487: Mastress Margery, I recomand me to yow, and I prey yow in all hast possybyll to send me by the next swer messenger that ye can gete a large playster of your flose vngwen- torum for the Kynges Attorney Jamys Hobart; for all hys dysease is but an ache in hys knee. He is the man that brought yow and me togedyrs, and I had lever then xl li. ye koud wyth your playster depart hym and hys peyne. But when ye send me the playster ye must send me wryghtyng hough it shold be leyd to and takyn fro hys knee, and 68 roberta mullini hough longe it shold abyd on hys kne vnremevyd, and hough longe the playster wyll laste good, and whethyr he must lape eny more clothys a-bowte the playster to kepe it warme or nought. And God be wyth yow. Your John Paston (italics and emphasis mine)7 John Paston asks his wife not only to send him a balm used by the family at home, but also to let him have all the necessary information for the dosage and the whole curing process, thus showing himself to be completely in the dark as for health-care procedures. From the rich correspondence between the male and female members of the Paston family in the fifteenth century it is clear that those women could at least read, but for them and for many other women from social lower classes reading was not strictly necessary in order to possess the knowledge transferred from mothers to daughters, i.e. that mentioned in Henry VIII’s ‘Quacks’ Charter’.8 However, in Elizabethan London female practitioners themselves, far from collecting their own herbs, ‘were just as likely to buy their medicines, or at least their ingredients, from apothecaries’ (Pelling 1997, 76), i.e. the ‘mythical’ figure of the herb-woman seems to belong to the romance landscape of Pericles, for which Shakespeare built the word, and to the coun- tryside, rather than to the reality of the city.9 2.3 Medicine, English, and Print In the sixteenth century both lay and university-trained medical practitioners started to have access to more and more medical treatises written in English, a quantity which increased during the century and which continued the trend of vernacularization begun as early as the last quarter of the fourteenth century (see Taavitsainen 2004). Instead of studying Latin volumes, they could rely on a certain variety of English books, the spread and relatively easy availability of which was promoted by print. These books were both translations of the classical texts (Galenic medicine still held the floor till late in the seventeenth century), and books of remedies published for family use, when sickness was cared for by the household women, and also for a wider and wider readership: ‘[b]ooksellers and printers financed, created, and disseminated popular health manuals to a new body of readers’ (Furdell 2002, 29). If Sir Thomas Elyot found it necessary to preface the second edition of his The Castel of Helthe to justify the use of English in a book dealing with ‘herbes and medicines’ (1541, Aiiiv), by protesting that ‘if phisitions be angry, that I have wryten phisike in englyshe, let theym remembre, that the grekes wrate in greke, the Romanes in latyne, Auicena, and the other in Arabike, whiche were their owne propre maternal tonges’ (Aivv), later authors as well were compelled to defend their writing in their own language.10 Students’ fatigue is diminished and shortened by works in English, says Thomas Gale in his preface addressed to his ‘Frindly [sic] readers’, because otherwise ‘my Brethren Chirurgians who althoughe they are desirous to attayne ther arte, yet both 69shakespeare and the words of early modern physic because it is so long, and not set out in our usuall language, they are frustrat of ther desire’ (1563, *i). However, in spite of the process of vernacularization and of the continuous publishing of English medical books, some words were certainly still either unknown to most, or of difficult understanding. In The Book of Compoundes – a dialogue between Sicknes and Health, which is a part of William Bullein’s Bulleins bulwarke of defence (1562) – Sicknes laments that ‘Now you haue ended your Table, with the names of compoundes. There are certain wordes, very harde for me to understand as when you name Apophleg- matismus, … I knowe not what they doe meane, by their proper names, I praie you tell me the significacions’ (1562, Iiiv). Health, of course, soon afterwards starts explaining the tough terms to Sicknes (and to the reader). But the ‘words of medicine’, especially those derived from Greek and Latin, certainly continued to be considered among the ‘hard words’, so that glossaries were printed in order to help readers – the common ones, therefore, and not specifically the students of the university schools of ‘physic’ – to understand new terms (which also served to unify medical terminology all over the country). In 1598 Jacob Mosan published his translation of Chris- toph Wirsung’s Arzney Buch (1568), entitled Praxis medicinae vniuersalis, or, A generall practise of physicke, with the addition of a glossary of 574 lemmas concerning ‘Apothecaries’ “simples”, mainly herbs’ (Schäfer 1989, I, 44), a medical book ‘very meete and profitable, not only for all phisitions, chirurgions, apothecaries, and midwiues, but for all other estates whatsoeuer’ (Wirsung 1598, for the complete title). Some years later Robert Cawdrey issued A Table Al- phabeticall, contayning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes […] With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull person […] (1604), addressed specifically to a female readership, with a wider variety of lexical fields and including 2543 lemmas (Schäfer 1989, I, 51). The long title of Cawdrey’s ‘Table’ is particularly revealing, since on the one hand it still groups women – even belonging to high social classes – with the unlearned, but – on the other – it shows the advancement of literacy among women, who – at least – are considered capable of reading the ‘dictionary’.11 From all this, it is not difficult to perceive that Elizabethan and early Stuart society had all the instruments they needed to understand not only ‘hard words’ at large, but also medical ones. These works were easily readable by whoever wanted to learn (and could afford them), or wished to acquire an in-depth knowledge of a certain subject. Why couldn’t Shakespeare, then, have been one of those readers, especially if we consider that the volumes mentioned (and many similar others) were all printed in London? After all, ‘If medical books did not force themselves on the attention of the literate by their numbers, they probably existed in sufficient quantity by the end of the period [Tudor era] to be accessible to most of the readers who positively wanted them’ (Slack 1979, 240). 70 roberta mullini 3. Words in the Shakespearean Corpus: Which and Wherefrom? 3.1 The Oxfordian Position On the basis of what written so far, it appears that for Shakespeare his ‘little Latin and less Greek’ were quite sufficient to access his coeval medical literature: actually, he didn’t need any specific classical language to read medical treatises, they being now mainly printed in English. For example, when Frank Davis writes that ‘[i]t is quite remarkable that in three plays he [Shakespeare] refers to the pia mater’, adding that whoever wrote the plays must ‘either have studied anatomy or read medical literature. He certainly did not get this knowledge from folk-medicine, Galen or Hippocrates’ (Davis 2000, 52-53), he is not completely favouring his own Oxfordian standpoint. In fact, ‘pia mater’ is a collocation occurring 24 times in six texts of the MEMT corpus (see Table 1).12 Table 1: Occurrences of PIA MATER in MEMT (2005). ‘Pia mater’, therefore, was an expression widely used and known, so much so that Thomas Gale, printing his works on surgery in 1563, did not even feel it necessary to explain its meaning when introducing the subject of ‘Hydro- cephalon’, a ‘tumour’ a type of which ‘is betwixt pia mater and the braine’ (1563, 27v). Furthermore, neither the medieval sources nor Gale can be considered ‘anti-Galenic’: all of them are well inside the traditional humoral and Galenic medicine. Of course, these sources cannot be interpreted as folkloric, or derived 71shakespeare and the words of early modern physic from popular culture; nevertheless words used in Middle English works can be thought of as part of the country’s shared linguistic treasure in Elizabethan times. The last mentioned text in Table 1 (Thesaurus pauperum) in particular is written to help the poor unable to resort to physicians, and therefore addressed to and written for lower social classes in need of cures, as the incipit reveals: ‘[b]rother I pray the for charite that thou write to me a fewe medecynes that I myght help pore folk that falleth into sekenes and beth vnkonnyng to helpe hem sylfen and of vnpower to huyre hem leches’ (f. 29r, in MEMT, 2005). The basic question, though, remains: did ‘William of Stradford’ have access to medical treatises? We cannot know, but the richness of the medical lexicon in Shakespeare’s plays is not a totally convincing reason to be given in support of the Earl of Oxford regarding the issue of authorship. 3.2 The Process by Steps and the Corpus Results 3.2.1 - Regarding the intention stated in 1.2, I built up a wordlist from the corpus of the two BL collections of handbills, so that a seventeenth-century popular medical lexicon was available. I selected keywords relating to body parts, illnesses, medicines and physiological processes, thus creating a whole (List A) made up of terms certainly connected to medicine (very presumably derived from popular culture, given the writers of the handbills) and compara- ble with other subsequent lists.13 Afterwards, the whole Shakespearean corpus of plays (excluding Edward III, but including TNK and both versions of Lr., Q and F, since I used the OUP floppy disk edition of the Complete Plays) was processed with the help of the AntConc 3.2.1 concordancer. Then another list (List B) was extracted from the concordance results, including the same word types as obtained from the previous one if present also in Shakespeare, with the addition of all other terms which might relate to the body and its possible diseases, such as appeared in Shakespeare’s plays but not in the handbills. A further step consisted in looking up the words of List B in the MEMT corpus, in order to verify which items were already present in vernacular medi- cal texts of the late Middle Ages (up to c. the 1520s) and could be considered ‘survivors’ from the past, and which on the contrary were clearly new coinages (of course spelling variations due to the passage from Middle English to Mod- ern English were not taken into account, for example eye was assimilated to ey/ey3e). Of the five sections offered by MEMT (‘Surgical texts’, ‘Specialized texts’, ‘Remedies and Materia medica’, ‘Verse’ and ‘Appendix’), ‘Remedies and Materia medica’ was chosen for a first confrontation with List B, because of the more popular origin of the texts included in this section when compared to the others; later the check was also carried out throughout the other four sections. Such tools as lexicographical studies of early modern English, general ones (see Schäfer 1989) and those especially relating to medicine (Norri 1992; Mc- Conchie 1997) and, of course, the OED, were also implemented in the research. 72 roberta mullini 3.2.2 - The first impressive result from the Shakespearean concordances is the high amount of words the playwright used just once in his plays (out of 25261 word types – with 1056068 word tokens – 9273 are counted as occur- ring only once).14 An immediate surmise might be that very specific medical nouns and adjectives appear exactly within this group, while it is evident that very widely used (and old) terms are to be found at the top of the frequency table (see Table 2). Tokens Type Rank 1267 hand* 1. 1240 heart * 2. 1130 eye* 3. 700 head* 4. 696 blood 5. 497 tongue* 6. 458 mother* 7. 456 arm* 8. 429 spirit* 9. 398 ear* 10. Table 2: Frequency ranking in the Shakesperean corpus (from List B).15 The data in Table 2, though, are soon questionable since many, if not all, of the words listed have both literal and metaphoric meanings, thus apparently invalidating the whole process. At this point a very careful verification of oc- currences in their individual co-texts would have been necessary, so as to be able to say, e.g., that heart* occurs – let’s say – only 300 times out of 1240 with its exact meaning as a body part. Another example: the word scruple, indicating a unit of weight in the medical world (20 grains), is very often used in its moral meaning in the corpus (where it occurs 23 times, while scruples – always to be understood morally – occurs 5 times).16 This kind of operation, I admit, scared me and so I decided to focus only on certain plays which, due to their plots, contain situations where medicine and medical language appear relevant, also considering a fairly homogeneous distribution over time. With all the limits and drawbacks of this decision, I worked on 1H4, 2H4, Wiv., Rom., Tro., Tim., Oth., JC and Per.17 3.2.3 - A new list (List C) was derived from the latter procedure, resulting after looking up the same words as included in List B, but in the nine-play corpus only. The results are partly visible in Table 3, which shows that no remarkable change occurs in the top ranking positions (the concordancer processed 249387 word tokens). It is interesting, though, to notice that 73shakespeare and the words of early modern physic some very specific words, on the basis of the plays selected, occupy higher positions than in List B. For example, Rom. being in the selection, nurse, with its 168 occurrences corresponding to 0.067% of all tokens in List C, acquires relevance when compared with List B in which the word does occur 227 times, but with a lower percentage equal to 0.021% (in both cases SSDD and speech headings are included). Tokens Type Rank 307 hand* 1. 303 heart* 2. 233 eye* 3. 168 nurse* 4. 165 head* 5. 157 blood 6. 118 matter* 7. 103 spirit* 8. 101 ear* 9. 94 arm* 10. Table 3: Frequency ranking in 1, 2H4, Wiv., Rom., Tro., Tim., Oth., JC, Per. (from List C). Apart from these remarks, a basic issue arises from the concordance data, relating to the lexical richness of the selected plays: the number of word types in List C (nine plays) is 14787. This means that these plays use a wide variety of terms, in particular some medical ones which occur in the selection more than elsewhere: for example, ache* occurs 11 times out of a total of 13 in the whole corpus, and other words are present only in the selected plays (e.g. blains, bone-ache, burning fever, coloquintida, epilepsy, falling sick- ness, guts-griping etc.; see Table 4). List C List B Word type 11 13 ache* 1 2 antidotes 3 4 apoplexy 10 13 apothecary (6 SSDD) 3 6 aqua-vitae 1 1 balsam 3 4 bladder 1 1 blains 2 2 blister* 2 2 bone-ache 74 roberta mullini 2 3 bots 1 1 burning fever 9 25 choler 2 3 colic 1 1 coloquintida 7 11 conceptions 3 6 contagion 5 5 curer 1 2 deafness 5 16 dram* 1 2 dropsies 4 9 drugs 101 177 ear* 1 1 epilepsy 5 17 eyelids 3 8 eyesight 2 2 falling sickness 1 2 fennel 1 2 forefinger 3 5 Galen 3 8 gout 2 2 gouty 3 4 green-sickness 2 4 gum 11 16 guts 2 2 guts-griping (**) 1 1 herb-woman 1 2 honeysuckle 1 1 Hibbocrates 60 136 humour* 1 1 impostume 3 6 incontinent (moral?) 2 4 incurable 3 7 infectious 7 7 infirmit* 1 1 unflammation 1 1 itches 1 2 jaundice 1 1 kidney 75shakespeare and the words of early modern physic 1 2 leech 2 4 leprosy 1 3 let blood 4 5 letharg* 1 1 lime-links 9 27 liver* 1 2 mandragora 3 4 mandrake* 3 7 marrow* 2 3 medicinable 10 27 medicine* 1 1 midriff 168 229 nurse* 7 13 palate* 3 5 palsy* (**) 2 2 phthisic (**) 12 31 physician* 2 3 pill* 52 116 plague* 1 1 poppy 2 2 pothecary 1 1 poultice 10 24 pox 1 1 pregnancy 2 5 prescribe 2 6 prescription* 2 5 purblind 1 2 quicksilver 1 1 recipe 2 4 rheumatic 2 3 rupture* (**) 2 4 scab 2 2 sciatica* 14 30 scurvy (adj) 1 1 shanks 62 166 sick 2 6 simples 10 32 spleen* 3 5 sterile 76 roberta mullini 2 5 sulphur 8 16 surgeon 1 2 syrups 1 3 tetter 8 15 thigh* 10 15 thumb 1 2 ulcer 1 3 ulcerous 3 4 urinal* 5 16 vapour* 16 43 vessel* 2 5 vomit* 4 11 web 1 1 wheezing-lungs 1 1 yellowness Table 4: Frequency comparison of medical terms (from Lists C and B).18 3.3 Shakespeare and Sixteenth-Century Medical Treatises 3.3.1 - Few of the affections listed in the ‘Quacks’ Charter’, the cure of which non-professionals were allowed to carry out, remain in Shakespeare (there is no trace of the names strangury, morfew, scalding, burning, and the stone), whereas apostemation is substituted by the more recent imposthume (occurring twice in the whole corpus). Only plaster and ‘a pin and the web in the eye’ survive: the former once each in Cor., Jn., MND and Tmp., the latter once in Lr. Q (Sc. 11, 105-106), in Lr. F (III.iv.109-110), and in WT (I.ii.293). However, all these were external diseases. As for internal ones, the repertory from both List B and List C is much richer (illnesses, cures and healers in the selected plays are listed in Table 5). Rank Tokens Word type 1. 168 nurse* 2. 68 wind* 3. 52 plague* 4. 48 doctor* 5. 32 pain* 6. 23 disease* 7. 14 sickness (alone) 8. 12 physician* 77shakespeare and the words of early modern physic 9. 11 ache* 10. 10 apothecary 11. 10 pox 12. 8 surgeon 13. 7 infirmit* 14. 6 cure 15. 6 plant* 16. 5 ague* 17. 5 canker* 18. 5 curer 19. 5 vapour* 20. 5 wart 21. 4 herbs 22. 4 infection 23. 4 letharg* 24. 4 miscarry 25. 3 apoplexy 26. 3 aqua-vitae 27. 3 corruption 28. 3 distemper 29. 3 contagion 30. 3 frenzy 31. 3 Galen 32. 3 gout 33. 3 green-sickness 34. 3 incontinent 35. 3 infectious (+-ly 1) 36. 3 mandrake* 37. 3 midwi* 38. 3 pestilence 39. 3 swoon 40. 2 blister* 41. 2 blot 42. 2 boils 43. 2 bone-ache 44. 2 bots 45. 2 colic 78 roberta mullini 46. 2 contagious 47. 2 effects 48. 2 falling sickness 49. 2 leprosy 50. 2 gouty 51. 2 guts-griping 52. 2 incurable 53. 2 malady 54. 2 medicinable 55. 2 palsy* 56. 2 pothecary 57. 2 phthisic 58. 2 prescription 59. 2 purblind 60. 2 rheum 61. 2 rheumatic 62. 2 scab 63. 2 sciatica* 64. 2 simples 65. 2 vomit 66. 1 antidotes 67. 1 balsam 68. 1 blains 69. 1 brainsick 70. 1 burning fever 71. 1 catch cold 72. 1 cordial 73. 1 deafness 74. 1 dropsies 75. 1 epilepsy 76. 1 fennel 77. 1 gravel 78. 1 herb-woman 79. 1 Hibbocrates 80. 1 impostume 81. 1 impotent 82. 1 inflammation 83. 1 itches 84. 1 jaundice 79shakespeare and the words of early modern physic 85. 1 leech 86. 1 let blood 87. 1 lime-kilns 88. 1 mandragora 89. 1 pepper 90. 1 poppy 91. 1 poultice 92. 1 putrefied 93. 1 qualm 94. 1 quicksilver 95. 1 recipe 96. 1 rheumy 97. 1 ruptures 98. 1 syrups 99. 1 tetter 100. 1 ulcer 101. 1 ulcerous 102. 1 wheezing-lungs Table 5: Names of illnesses, cures and healers in the nine-play corpus. 3.3.2 - After searching for the words of Table 5 in the MEMT wordlist and sorting out those not present in late Middle Ages medical texts, I proceeded to verify through EMEMT the possible occurrence of the terms left over. The latter are in bold in the same table (30 in total). All these, apart from incontinent (n. 34), brainsick (n. 69), herb-woman (n. 78), lime-kilns (n. 87), qualm (n. 93), rheumy (n. 96), and wheezing-lungs (n. 102) are attested in the sixteenth-century medical treatises included in EMEMT. All 30 items, though, were also looked up in the OED and their use (excluding herb-woman and lime-kilns)19 was proved either in texts of the same period as the plays, or even from earlier times. Most words, in the end, appeared to have been known in the Elizabethan era, even if some of them – such as incontinent, for example, and lime-kilns – are used metaphorically in Shakespearean plays, i.e. with no medical meaning. It is interesting, however, to briefly analyse some of the 30 words, because of their ‘lexical’ history. a) bone-ache (n. 43) The word, which the OED signals as present in John Skelton’s Magnyfycence (1520?), appears twice in Tro., both times hinting at syphilis: Thersites, in 2.3.17-18, invokes ‘the vengeance on the whole camp or rather, the Neapolitan bone-ache’, and – towards the end of the play in the Quarto version – inserts an ‘incurable bone-ache’ in his colourful list of maledictions, where ‘incur- 80 roberta mullini able’ clearly refers to the desperate situation of people suffering from syphilis, the subsequent bone-ache caused by which could not be eliminated by any contemporary cure. While used as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, the much more frequently employed ‘French pox’ actually spread in the seventeenth century, and Shakespeare, therefore, still seems to follow the link between syphilis and Naples, according to what Jones writes in his Dial for All Agues (1566, 57; in EMEMT CDRom): … he [George Agricola] affirmeth that the parts of the world hath varied in forme and kindes of the plage: for the Egyptians were plaged with the Lepry, … the Nea- politanes, or rather the besegers of Naples, with the pockes (spred sence to far abrode, through al the parts of Europe, no kyngdome that I haue bene in free, the more pity). b) burning fever (n. 70) The word occurs in 2H4, 4.1.54-56, when the Archbishop of York laments the common situation of illness by saying: ‘we are all diseased, / And with our surfeiting and wanton hours / Have brought ourselves into a burning fever’. The usual collocation found in MEMT is ‘brennyng ague’ (with various spellings), while in the second half of the sixteenth century there are many instances of alternation between this older and the newer collocation ‘burning fever’, till the definitive adoption of the latter (see EMEMT). Thomas Gale, for example, uses the more modern form in his Antidotarie (included in Gale 1563), but the OED ignores this fact and dates the first use of the collocate to 1661 (defn. 1.b). c) corruption20 (n. 27) The item is present in 1H4, 2H4 and JC, but it is in the first play that it apparently acquires a medical, if metaphoric, meaning very similar to contagion. Worcester, speaking of Hotspur and trying to excuse his behaviour, says: ‘We did train him on, / And, his corruption being ta’en from us, / We as the spring of all shall pay for all’ (1H4, 5.2.21-23). The word is clearly used in a moral sense; however, the phrase ‘to take corruption from’ seems to equate corruption to the OED 2.a. definition: ‘infection, infected condition; also fig. contagion, taint’. d) curer (n. 18) The OED attests the word in St. Augustines Man by T. Rogers (‘[t]hou purger of wickednes and curer of wounds’, 1581), but in a purely medical meaning it is used by Thomas Gale in his translation of Galen’s Methodus medendi in 1586 (EMEMT). Shakespeare shows a knowledge of both usages: Thersites promises ‘I’ll be a curer of madmen’ (Tro., 5.1.47), while Shallow qualifies the evidently still neuter word with ‘He is a curer of souls, and you a curer of bodies’ (Wiw., 2.3.36), a distinction repeated by Host later in the play when he tries to define ‘Gallia and Gaul, French and Welsh, soul-curer and body-curer’ (3.1.89-90). 81shakespeare and the words of early modern physic e) falling sickness (n. 48) The correspondence of epilepsy to falling sickness (FS) is evident (and in this meaning Shakespeare uses the term in JC), but what appears interesting is the progressive substitution of ‘sickness’ to ‘evil’ during the sixteenth century. EMEMT shows the transformation of the item: as early as 1528 FS is used in Mediolano, Regimen sanitatis salerni, but the later Boke of Children by Phayer (1546) alternates between falling evil and FS, an uncertainty shared by Braunschweig’s Homish Apothecarye (1561), which talks of ‘the falling euell or sykenesse’. Apart from other occurrences, Brasbridge definitively uses FS in his Poore mans Iewel (1578). But the old usage still persists as late as Batman’s Batman Vppon Bartholome (1582), where there is the following definition: ‘palsie or Epilepsia, that is the Falling Euyll’ (all quotations are from EMEMT). f ) green-sickness (n. 33) The first occurrence of the word in the OED refers to Mamillia by Robert Greene (1583), while my search in EMEMT showed that the word – meaning ‘chlorosis’, an anæmic disease usually associated with female adolescents – ap- pears earlier, being used by William Bullein in his Bulleins Bulwarke (1562), and later, in 1578, by Brasbridge’s Poore Mans Iewel. (This would, therefore, introduce an antedating). In my limited corpus of Shakespearean plays it oc- curs three times: in Per., Sc. 19.22, and Rom., 3.5.156, attributed to female characters, whereas in 2H4, 4.2.90 Sir John finds it necessary to redefine the word as ‘male green-sickness’ when applied to young men with a sober life in his famous ‘sack’ speech. g) guts-griping (n. 51) The phrase appears in Tro., 5.1.17, in the already mentioned list of maledic- tions uttered by Thersites, and it also occurs in the Quarto version of the play. It does not seem to have any antecedent (and actually the OED cites this play as the first occurrence), but a search in EMEMT testifies to the previous exist- ence of similar expressions. Brasbridge (Poore Mans Iewel, 1578) uses ‘griping paines of the belly’, and Hester, in his Key of Philosophie (1596), speaks about the ‘griping torment of the belly’, and of ‘gripings or wind in the guts’. From these examples Shakespeare, as often happens, shows his great skill in forg- ing words, not only when he ‘invented’ some of them, but mainly when he drew from the existing vocabulary and coined more impressive compounds. h) herb-woman (n. 78) This is a case of a real Shakespearean coinage (even if not present in McQuain and Malless 1998), occurring only once. It is to be found in Per., Sc. 19.86- 87, when Lysimachus answers Marina’s question ‘Who is my principal?’ with ‘Why, your herb-woman; / She that sets seeds of shame, roots of iniquity’. The passage, even if transferring the word’s meaning from the medical to the 82 roberta mullini moral discourse, clearly employs linguistic elements traditionally connected to the herbal tradition of wise women. i) infectious (n. 35) Shakespeare makes use of this adjective three times: there is an ‘infectious house’ in Oth., 4.1.21, an ‘infectious pestilence’ in Rom., 5.2.10, and ‘potent and infectious fevers’ in Tim., 4.1.22. The OED, for the meaning 2.a (‘of dis- eases’), quotes Rom., but at 1.a (‘having the quality or power of communicating disease by infection’) forgets to refer – while listing some previous medical works – to Queen Elizabeth I’s ‘Orders by Her Majestie’ issued in 1578, i.e. not a specialistic volume, but laws to be enforced all over the kingdom, and therefore to be known everywhere: this document quotes ‘infectious persons’, in whose presence a certain medicine, made of ‘Angelica, Gentian or Valerian’, is counseled (EMEMT). j) simples (n. 64) The word occurs twice: once in Rom., 5.1.40, in Romeo’s description of the apothecary ‘In tattered weeds, with overwhelming brows, / Culling of simples’, and once in Wiv., 1.4.59, when Dr. Caius says that, ‘for the varld’, he does not want to leave behind ‘some simples in my closet’. The word was widely used and known to mean herbs as components of medicines, especially when used individually, i.e. it belonged to the common and shared lexicon of apothecar- ies, physicians and surgeons, but also of those women who actually grew and picked the herbs of which their medicaments were made. 4. Conclusions: Much Ado About Nothing? At the end of my endeavour perhaps it is difficult to say whether the results are worth the time spent obtaining them. But one thing emerges with certainty: even if it is true that Shakespeare enriched the English language with so many new words, this principle does not seem to be applicable to medical discourse, since the words he uses were well-known in the Elizabethan era, deriving either from the spread of medical knowledge through the vernacularization of classical texts or from the continuous writing in English by contemporary medical practitioners and surgeons. The medical texts seen either directly or through the historical corpora I availed myself of cannot be said to be addressed exclusively to the univer- sity ‘schools of physic’. Actually they belong rather to the series of medical publications which became popular especially during the second half of the sixteenth century, many of them being written not by members of the College of Physicians, but by surgeons (e.g. Thomas Gale and Thomas Vicary), and by unlicensed practitioners, or by those interested – like Sir Thomas Elyot in the 1540s – in the field of medicine. John Jones was a physician, but from 83shakespeare and the words of early modern physic the complete title of his A Dial for All Agues; Conteininge the names in Greeke, Latten, and Englyshe, with the diuersities of them, Symple and compounde, proper and accident, definitions, deuisions, causes, and signes, comenly hetherto knowen: Uery profitable for al men … (1566) it is evident that his readership was not necessarily limited to medical practitioners. Paul Slack writes that ‘only a third of the textbooks, regimens and collections of remedies with identifiable authors came from the pens of established physicians’ (1979, 252). William Bullein was also a physician, but his work being in dialogic form, the author’s will to develop medical awareness and to pass his knowledge to a large readership is unmistakable.21 A similar intention is readable in the title of Mosan’s transla- tion of Wirsung’s Arzney Buch (Wirsung 1598). By the end of the sixteenth century, therefore, medicine was using a widely anglicized vocabulary, made available to all educated people.22 When publishing his Antidotarie, Thomas Gale still apologized to his ‘louynge Reader’ because ‘I put the receptes and compositions in the Latyne tongue’, adding as an excuse that the Latyne names are uniuersallye used, & that there are an infinite number of sim- ples which want Englyshe names, & those for the more part that may be Englyshed, are not uniuersally knowen through England by that same name: because of the diuersitie that is used in callinge of simples, accordynge to the countrey. (Gale 1563, Aaa.iiiv-Aaa.iiiir) However, while stressing the necessity for a common scientific vocabulary in English, he advised his readers to ‘conferre with the Apothecarie … or elles use the helpe of a Dictionarie’ in case of necessity (Gale 1563: Aaa.iiiv). Even when translated, some words were possibly still considered ‘hard’: for exam- ple, in the Table Alphabetical Cawdrey (1604) listed ‘epilepsies’, explaining it as ‘the falling sicknes’, and ‘lethargie’ as ‘a drowsie and forgetfull disease’. These words, both present in Oth., are not ‘translated’ in the play, but cer- tainly Shakespeare trusted his spectators and relied on widely shared medical understanding (both lexical items appear in the texts collected in MEMT, i.e. they were used in the later Middle Ages).23 What can be affirmed – once again – is that Shakespeare mainly used a medical vocabulary with which his audience was acquainted, actually adding very little to it. This terminology cannot be said to come exclusively either from the social margins or from university-trained physicians, since early modern medicine had not yet reached such a high scientific level as to separate these two social spheres neatly. Galen and ‘Hibbocrates’ (Wiv., 3.1.61) were still the authorities and even if Paracelsus is mentioned by Lafew (AWW, 2.3.11), chemical medicine itself was not widely practised. All remedies were still based on the humoral tradition and on popular herbal recipes. Regular and irregular medical practice had not yet undergone any real scientific process, in spite of the new empiricist movement. In the field of medicine, therefore, 84 roberta mullini Shakespeare used the words his country had used for ages, sometimes creating new effective compounds, sometimes recalling some nearly forgotten terms of the past, but very rarely inventing. The results of my research also contradict the basic assumptions of the Oxfordian position concerning Shakespeare’s medical knowledge, i.e. that ‘The vast majority of medical works were published in Latin or in Greek’ and that England suffered from ‘the relative scarcity of available books on medicine’ (Davis 2000, 45). Even if it is true that on the Continent medicine was starting its great scientific progress more quickly than in England, it is not true to maintain that early modern England lacked vernacular medical literature, given the long process of vernacularization started far back during the Middle Ages. What was the role of popular medicine (and of popular culture) in all this? How far can the majority of the volumes quoted here refer to (or take part in) popular culture? None is an almanac, none a handbill; on the contrary they all seem to belong to the elite kind of printed material.24 Only that – given the relatively high number of reprints (see Slack 1979, 239) – one is entitled to suppose that their diffusion and success was large, thus reaching a wide and multifaceted readership, although limited to the literate and fairly well-off. On the other hand, as mentioned above, the matter of medicine did not change much during the whole sixteenth century, so as to justify the inclusion of many of these texts in a then ‘popularized’ medical library. One cannot forget, furthermore, that Shakespeare wrote first of all for London spectators, many of whom had, for decades, been accustomed to recurrent plague visitations and to difficult and unhealthy living conditions (i.e. they could recognize and name many a disease and a lot of frightening symptoms), and – at the same time – were ‘exposed’ to the popular medical literature inserted in almanacs and calendars, something that – though mixed with astrological stuff and folklore – could do nothing but rely on the same scholastic vocabulary as the university physicians. As Nagy affirms, ‘popular practice was at the centre of health care, not its fringe’ (1988, 79), simply because ‘[t]here were not two distinct medical cultures’ (Slack 1979, 273); or because even if people recog- nized the differences between the ‘learned physician trained in the universities and the empiric or mountebank’, they were not troubled by them: ‘in practice those distinctions were often ignored’ (Wear 1992, 17). 1 After this article was already finished, I read the book by S. Iyengar (2011) which systematically covers the issue of the rich presence of medical language in Shakespeare. The volume lists entries in alphabetical order, offering for each term the historical meaning (in section A), the identification of occurrences in Shakespeare (in section B), and brief citations of early modern medical treatises employing the word, and of modern studies on the subject (in section C). The wide scope of this volume does not seem to supersede, though, the more 85shakespeare and the words of early modern physic limited purpose of the present paper, especially since the latter uses various and different sources. This article is an expanded and revised version of a paper discussed at the Ninth World Shakespeare Congress (Prague, 17-22 July 2011). 2 Given the scope of this paper, vernacular herbal literature will not be taken into account. Suffice it to say that it dates back to the Middle Ages, with Old English manuscripts and such later texts as the translation into Middle English of Macer’s De viribus herbarum (before the fifteenth century) and Henry Daniel’s Rosemary (mid-fourteenth century). See MEMT 2005. The sixteenth-century production reached its apex with John Gerard’s Herball (1597). For plants and herbs in Shakespeare, see Kail 1986, 123-140; Tierra 2008. Neither will I touch on ‘books of secrets’ (but see Eamon 1996). 3 In the same book, see in particular Traister 2004. 4 I have discussed the relevance of these handbills for popular culture in Mullini 2011 (see also Mullini 2009). 5 The plays themselves will be searched by using the AntConc 3.2.1. concordancer. 6 The ‘Explication of the Frontispiece’ reads: ‘Loe here a woman comes in charitie / To see the sicke, and brings her remedie. / … But lowe an Angell gently puts her backe, / Lest such erroneous course the sicke do wrack, / Leads the Physitian, and guides his hand, … ’ (Primerose 1651, ll. 1-2, 19-21). 7 This version is drawn from , accessed 9 Jan 2011; a modern spelling edition is in Davis, ed., 1983, 257. 8 For the relevance of wise women in health care in provincial parishes, see Cook 1986, 32-33, and Laroche 2009 for the relationship between women and herbal knowledge. A general survey of Medieval and early Renaissance medicine is to be found in Siraisi 1990. 9 For a concise view of the role and status of medicine in early modern times, see Mikkeli and Marttila 2010. 10 See Wear 1992, 20-24 for Elyot’s defence against the College of Physicians of London. 11 On the levels of literacy in England see Barry 1995; Reay 1998, 36-70; Fox 2000. 12 All these texts date between the end of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth (see MEMT 2005, ‘Catalogue of MEMT Texts’). 13 For brevity this list and the others are not included here. 14 A caveat must be kept in mind: given the source of my Shakespearean corpus – the OUP electronic edition – editorial words (and the SSDD) were also counted in the totals. Certainly the editors’ intervention does not affect the data referring to the occurrence of ‘hard’ lexical terms. Due to the former reason, though, I have not tried to calculate percentages, leaving this phase to a possible further study, for the necessity of editing the individual files without any spurious material. 15 Here and elsewhere in the tables, an asterisk signals that plural forms have also been counted. 16 It is interesting to note that Shakespeare has Falstaff make a joke of the transfer of meaning from the material to the ethical sphere when, answering the Lord Chief Justice, who is there to admonish him, he says: ‘I am as poor as Job, my lord, but not so patient. Your lord- ship may minister the potion of imprisonment to me in respect of poverty; but how I should be your patient to follow your prescriptions, the wise may make some dram of a scruple, or indeed a scruple itself ’ (2H4, 1.2.128-132). 17 At least a note is needed to justify my choice, besides that which has already been stated. My first reason for the choice derives from the plots of the individual plays, even if this criterion might have suggested quite different plays, given the omnipresent use of medical language in the canon. But there were other valid motives, mainly deriving from either the plots themselves or the frequency of certain word-types: 1H4, 2H4, and Wiv. feature a ‘great’ body such as Falstaff’s, with all its possible parts and diseases, Rom. has a herb collector such as Friar Laurence and an apothecary among its characters, Tim. deals with moral and bodily 86 roberta mullini corruption; Tro., Oth., Per. and JC present interesting word-types because of their either high or low frequency (for the relevance of high- and low-frequency lexical items see Halliday 1989, 65). Furthermore, I wanted to have samples of comedies, tragedies, history and problem plays, and romances represented in my corpus. Of course my ‘collection’ consists in less than a quarter of the Shakespearean canon, so that my whole paper has to be read as a methodological attempt at the issue raised, and should later be extended to a more representative set. 18 (**) These terms occur twice in Tro.: both in the Folio and Quarto version. 19 Iyengar 2011, 192 explains the term as follows: ‘This obscure and figurative description in Thersites’ long catalog of the ‘diseases of the South’ could allude to the painful chalk deposits found in the hands in chronic gout, or, more likely, to the excruciating burning itch of palmar psoriasis’. 20 corruption is included in this section because its meaning in the play (1H4) seems to anticipate a general, although at least partly metaphorical, medical sense of the term. 21 See Taavitsainen 1999 for an analysis of dialogic medical treatises. 22 This fact is also stressed by Iyengar 2011, 7. 23 In MEMT ‘epilepsy’ occurs 21 times with different spellings; there is also the adjec- tive ‘epilentic’ (in De spermate, dating back to the late fifteenth century): it is a first coinage of ‘epileptic’, a form of which Shakespeare is considered to be the ‘inventor’ in Lr. F, 2.2.81 / Lr. Q, Sc. 7.79 (McQuaine and Malless 1998, 59). However, to further limit the halo of inventiveness surrounding this adjective, it is notable to see that Thomas Vicary, surgeon to all Tudor sovereigns, uses a very similar form: writing of how human brain may suffer from the influences of the Moon, he says ‘And this [the brain] is moved in men that be lunatick or mad, and also in men that be epulenticke or hauing the falling sicknesse’ (1587, 17; my italics). 24 For women’s almanacs see Weber 2003. Works Cited A Collection of 185 advertisements, etc. [1660-1716], British Library C.112.f.9. A Collection of 231 advertisements, etc. [1675-1715], British Library 551.a.32. Anthony Laurence (2009), AntConc (Version 3.2.1) Computer Software, Tokyo, Waseda University. , accessed 7 Dec 2009. Barry Jonathan (1995), ‘Literacy and Literature in Popular Culture: Reading and Writing in Historical Perspective’, in T. Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500-1850, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 69-94. Bullein William, (1562), Bulleins Bulwarke of defence againste all Sicknes, Sornes, and woundes, that dooe daily assaulte mankinde, whiche Bulwarke is kepte with Hillarius the Gardiner, Health the Phisician, with their Chyrurgian, to helpe the wounded soldiors. Gathered and practised from the moste worthie learned, bothe old and newe: to the greate comforte of mankinde: Doen by Willyam Bulleyn, and ended this Marche, London, Printed by Ihon Kyngston. Burke Peter (2006 [1978]), Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, Ashgate. Cawdrey Robert (1604), A Table Alphabeticall, contayning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes … With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull person …, London, Printed by I.R. Chesney J.P. (1884), Shakespeare as a Physician, Chicago (IL), Chambers. , accessed 10 Dec 2010. Cook H.J. (1986), The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London, Ithaca (NY)-New York (NY), Cornell University Press. 87shakespeare and the words of early modern physic Crystal David and Ben Crystal (2002), Shakespeare’s Words. A Glossary & Language Companion, London, Penguin. Davis F.M. (2000), ‘Shakespeare’s Medical Knowledge: How Did He Acquire It?’, The Oxfordian 3, 45-58. Davis Norman, ed. (1983), The Paston Letters. A Selection in Modern Spelling, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Eamon William (1996), Science and Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, Princeton (NJ), Princeton University Press. Elyot, Sir Thomas (1541), The Castel of Helthe, London. EMEMT (2010), Early Modern English Medical Texts Corpus CD-ROM, ed. by I. Taavit- sainen et al., in Early Modern English Medical Texts, Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Fox Adam (2000), Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Furdell E.L. (2002), Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England, Rochester (NY), University of Rochester Press. Gale Thomas (1563), Certaine Workes of Chirurgerie, newly compiled and published, London, Rowland Hall. Halliday M.A.K. (1989), Spoken and Written Language, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Iyengar Sujata (2011), Shakespeare’s Medical Language. A Dictionary, London, Con- tinuum. Kail A.C. (1986), The Medical Mind of Shakespeare, Balgowlah, Williams and Wilkins. Laroche Rebecca (2009), Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550- 1650, Farnham, Ashgate. Maple Eric (1968), Magic, Medicine and Quackery, London, Robert Hale. McConchie R.W. (1997), Lexicography and Physicke. The Record of Sixteenth-Century English Medical Terminology, Oxford, Clarendon Press. McQuaine Jeffrey and Stanley Malless (1998), Coined by Shakespeare, Springfield (MA), Marriam-Webster. MEMT (2005), Middle English Medical Texts, ed. by I. Taavitsainen, P. Pahta and M. Mäkinen, CD-ROM, Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Merret Christopher (1660), A Collection of Acts of Parliament, Charters, Trials at Law, and Judges Opinions Concerning Those Grants to the Colledge of Physicians London, taken from the Originals, Law-Books, and Annals, London. Mikkeli Heikki and Ville Martilla (2010), ‘Change and Continuity in Early Modern Medicine (1500-1700)’, in I. Taavitsainen and P. Päivi, eds, Early Modern English Medical Texts, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 13-27. Moss Stephanie and K.L. Peterson (2004), ‘Introduction’, in S. Moss and K.L. Pe- terson, eds, Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, Aldershot, Ashgate, xi-xvii. Mullini Roberta (2009), ‘ “With such flourishes as these”: The Visual Politics of Charlatans’ Handbills in Early Modern London’, Textus XXII, 3, 553-572. Mullini Roberta (2011), ‘La Londra di fine Seicento attraverso la pubblicità dei ciar- latani: risultati dalle concordanze’, in M. Amatulli et al., eds, Leggere il tempo e lo spazio. Studi in onore di Giovanni Bogliolo, München, Martin Meidenbauer, 43-57. Nagy D.G. (1988), Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, Bowling Green (OH), Bowling Green State University Popular Press. 88 roberta mullini Norri Juhani (1992), Names of Sicknesses in English, 1400-1550: An Exploration of the Lexical Field, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica. Pelling Margaret (1997), ‘ “Throughly Resented?” Older Women and the Medical Role in Early Modern London’, in L. Hunter and S. Hutton, eds, Women, Science and Medicine 1500-1700, Phoenix Mill, Sutton Publishing, 63-88. Pelling Margaret (2003), Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London. Patronage, Physi- cians and Irregular Practitioners 1550-1640, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Pettigrew T.H.J. (2007), Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic, Newark (DE), Uni- versity of Delaware Press. Primerose James (1651), Popular Errours or the Errours of the people in matter of Physick, London, printed by W. Willson for Nicholas Bourne. Rawcliffe Carole (1997), Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England, Stroud, Sutton. Reay Barry (1998), Popular Cultures in England 1550-1750, London, Longman. Schäfer Jürgen (1989), Early Modern English Lexicography, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2 vols. Shakespeare William (1988), The Complete Plays, ed. by S. Wells and G. Taylor, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Shakespeare William (1989), The Complete Plays, Electronic Edition, ed. by S. Wells and G. Taylor, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Slack Paul (1979), ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Use of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England’, in C. Webster, ed., Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 237-273. Silvette Herbert (1967), The Doctor on the Stage. Medicine and Medical Men in Seventeenth-Century England, Knoxville (TN), University of Tennessee Press. Siraisi N.G. (1990), Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, Chicago (IL), University of Chicago Press. Stearns C.W. (1865), Shakespeare’s Medical Knowledge, New York (NY), Appleton. , accessed 27 Dec 2010. Taavitsainen Irma (1999), ‘Dialogues in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Medical Writing’, in A.H. Jucker, F. Gerd and F. Lebsanft, eds, Historical Dialogue Analysis, Amsterdam, John Benjamins, 244-268. Taavitsainen Irma (2004), ‘Transferring Classical Discourse Conventions into the Vernacular’, in I. Taavitsainen and P. Päivi, eds, Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 37-72. Taavitsainen Irma and Pahta Päivi, eds (2004), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Tierra Michael (2008), ‘Herbal Medicine in Shakespeare’s England. From Dr. John Hall’s Case Studies’, in PlanetHerbs. , accessed 15 Oct 2010. Traister B.H. (2004), ‘ “Note Her a Little Farther”: Doctors and Healers in the Drama of Shakespeare’, in S. Moss and K.L. Peterson, eds, Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, Aldershot, Ashgate, 43-52. 89shakespeare and the words of early modern physic Vicary Thomas (1587), The Englishemans Treasure: With the true Anatomie of Mans bodie, London, Imprinted by George Robinson. Wear Andrew (1992), ‘The Popularization of Medicine in Early Modern England’, in R. Porter, ed., The Popularization of Medicine 1650-1850, London, Routledge, 17-41. Weber A.S. (2003), ‘Women’s Early Modern Medical Almanacs in Historical Context’, English Literary Renaissance 33, 358-402. Wirsung Christoph (1598), Praxis medicinae vniuersalis, or, A generall practise of physicke wherein are conteined all inward and outward parts of the body, with all the accidents and infirmities that are incident vnto them, euen from the crowne of the head to the sole of the foote, also by what meanes (vvith the help of God) they may be remedied: very meete and profitable, not only for all phisitions, chirurgions, apothecaries, and midwiues, but for all other estates whatsoeuer, the like whereof as yet in English hath not beene published / compiled and written by the most famous and learned Doctour Christopher Wirtzung, in the Germane tongue; and now translated into English, in diuers places corrected, and with many additions illustrated and augmented, by Iacob Mosan ..., Londini, Impensis Georg Bishop.