The Paracelsan Philosophy and Plot in Romeo and Juliet

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• The Paracelsan Philosophy and Plot in Romeo and Juliet
• Jaecheol Kim (bio)

Shakespeare, Paracelsus, and the Early Modern Medical Turn

Disease is often communicated through language, and the trajectory of contagion is coterminous with its discursive orbit. Early modern dramatic works, especially the plays of Shakespeare, pay keen attention to the linguistic matrix of disease.¹ Shakespeare lived during a time of important shifts in the history of medicine and disease, when leprosy gradually receded to the margins of social and medical concern, giving way to collective anxieties related to the rise of syphilis and occasional plague outbreaks. English Renaissance drama developed alongside this general shift in the medical concerns and disease control measures of English society.² In this essay, I investigate these parallel developments by exploring how Paracelsan medicine affected the literary imagination generally and Shakespeare's imagination in particular as a new system of medical thought, a system circulating in London print shops and apothecaries of the period, and I read Romeo and Juliet as a medical narrative informed by this system.

From a medical perspective, the plot of Romeo and Juliet reflects the operation of an organic human body. Ben Jonson's city comedy often reflects the early modern reception of humoralism by defining characters based on the four-humor (or four-element) theory. In Jonson's medical imagination, characters are defined by four different humors: yellow bile (fire), black bile (earth), phlegm (water), and blood (air). Characters not only become constructions of different humors but also often fashion their humors. In Every Man in His Humour, for instance, the gullible [End Page 252] countryman Stephen identifies himself as a melancholy man because he believes that it is fashionable in the city. Shakespeare also drew on humoralism to develop his characters. In Romeo and Juliet, for instance, Romeo is associated with melancholy at the beginning of the play because his dominant humor is black bile, while hot-tempered Tybalt embodies yellow bile. Paris is phlegmatic because he associates himself with water, specifically while standing before Juliet's grave, which, as he declares, "with sweet water nightly I will dew, / Or, wanting that, with tears distilled by moans" (5.3.14–15).³ Humoral theory was thus for early modern dramatists not only a medical philosophy but also a kind of literary principle. However, the focus of my analysis here is neither overt character constructions based on humoralism nor the prominent medical figures in the play such as Friar Laurence, the Apothecary, or the Nurse. Instead, I will show that Romeo and Juliet is a narrative actively responding to the medical reforms of the sixteenth century due to the advent of Paracelsan medicine. A few critics have found traces of Paracelsan rhetoric or concepts in Shakespeare's work.⁴ Contextualizing these elements by examining the Paracelsan discourses circulating among London print shops and apothecaries reveals the significant impact of such discourses on the plot of Romeo and Juliet.

In Shakespeare's time, the introduction of Paracelsan chemical science contributed to an important reform in disease control measures. This shift emerged out of the epicenter of London apothecaries. The apothecary and distiller John Hester, for instance, translated Paracelsan documents for English readers, and his translations were spread by print culture until they pervaded various realms of thoughts, from medicine and alchemy to metallurgy and literature. Coincidentally, the major Paracelsan turn took place between 1570 and 1600, a period coinciding with the formation of Elizabethan professional theatre. Indeed, Shakespeare produced Romeo and Juliet around the same time that Hester published his first translation of Paracelsus, A hundred and fourteen experiments and cures in 1596.⁵ There is also evidence to suggest that Shakespeare was aware of contemporary developments in medical thought and practice. In All's Well That Ends Well, he specifically mentions "Galen and Paracelsus" as great physicians "Of all the learned and authentic Fellows" (2.3.10–11). Shakespeare mentions Paracelsus as an emerging medical authority, [End Page 253] similar to other early modern dramatists such as John Webster.⁶ It is even more interesting that Shakespeare equates Paracelsus with Galen, a classical authority.

I do not claim that Shakespeare was conversant with Paracelsan doctrines or that...