Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England asks why Shakespeare and
his contemporary playwrights were so preoccupied with drugs and
poisons and, at a deeper level, why both critics and supporters of
the theater, as well as playwrights themselves, so frequently
adopted a chemical vocabulary to describe the effects of the
theater on audiences. Drawing upon original medical and literary
research, Pollard shows that the potency of the link between drugs
and plays in the period demonstrates a model of drama radically
different than our own, a model in which plays exert a powerful
impact on spectators' bodies as well as minds. Early modern
physiology held that the imagination and emotions were part of the
body, and exerted a material impact on it, yet scholars of medicine
and drama alike have not recognised the consequences of this idea.
Plays, which alter our emotions and thought, simultaneously change
us physically. This book argues that the power of the theater in
early modern England, as well as the striking hostility to it,
stems from the widely held contemporary idea that drama acted upon
the body as well as the mind. In yoking together pharmacy and
theater, this book offers a new model for understanding the
relationship between texts and bodies. Just as bodies are
constituted in part by the imaginative fantasies they consume, the
theater's success (and notoriety) depends on its power over
spectators' bodies. Drugs, which conflate concerns about unreliable
appearances and material danger, evoked fascination and fear in
this period by identifying a convergence point between the
imagination and the body, the literary and the scientific, the
magical and the rational. This book explores that same convergence
point, and uses it to show the surprising physiological powers
attributed to language, and especially to the embodied language of
the theater.
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