Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance.

This book represents a milestone in the thinking about Shakespeare and medicine. Viewed from it, most earlier works on the subject pale in significance. Occasionally and very gently Hoeniger criticizes some of their more eccentric notions as the product of "excessive zeal of physicians" (217) and as the work of some "enthusiastic doctors" (144). Indeed, just as earlier history of medicine was interested in the physicians of the past primarily in order to gauge how far they anticipated modern science, so earlier scholarship on Shakespeare and medicine has often been preoccupied with determining how far the bard was right in anticipating this or that particular discovery (even Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood). With Hoeniger's book, this field of Shakespeare studies has come of age.

The book has three aims, of which the first is the most ambitious: to give an account of the system(s) of medicine relevant to Shakespeare's work, to elucidate medical references in Shakespeare's plays, and to treat in some depth three selected topics (the royal cure of scrofula in Macbeth, the cure of the French king's fistula in All's Well, and Lear's madness), in all of which interpretation and a sense of medical history very fruitfully intersect. A chapter on Shakespeare's medical knowledge (ch. 2) describes particular medical works that Shakespeare may have known and is prudently punctuated by a full gamut of guarded terms like "Shakespeare may well have known this book" (49) and "it is highly probable that he did" (46).

The entire book is an invaluable short-cut to a highly complex subject. A few times a reader may experience mild frustration with same or similar topics appearing in different places (for instance the contemporary physiological explanations of paleness [149 and 169]; the Galenic notion of blood [115 and 141]); this problem seems to result from Hoeniger's attempt to given an account of the systematic nature of old medicine first, i.e., before focusing on Shakespeare's medical references. Of the three essays on three different plays, the one on scrofula sketches some of the ambiguity attached to a ceremony of royal healing in a Protestant country (without exhausting the political and cultural ramifications); the one on King Lear demonstrates how reception of the play has been shaped by particular notions of madness; and the one on All's Well adduces impressively detailed Renaissance knowledge about fistulas and applies it to Helena's cure of the French king (without, however, considering what is a new pet idea of mine, namely the possibility that behind some of the sarcastic ribbing at court may be the belief that a male may rid himself of syphilis, the French disease, by sleeping with a virgin).

The reliability of this learned book is hardly diminished by the recurrent misspelling of the names of two physicians: Arnaldus of Villanova and Owsei Temkin.

Winfried Schleiner UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS