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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Humorality in
Early Modern Art,
Material Culture,
and Performance
Edited by
Amy Kenny
Kaara L. Peterson
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series
that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in liter-
ary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised
of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the
series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction
with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all
aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics
as well as established ones.
Editorial board
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony
Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies,
University of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania
State University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14613
Amy Kenny • Kaara L. Peterson
Editors
Humorality in Early
Modern Art, Material
Culture, and
Performance
Editors
Amy Kenny Kaara L. Peterson
University of California, Riverside Miami University of Ohio
Riverside, CA, USA Oxford, OH, USA
ISSN 2634-6435 ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)

Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-77617-6 ISBN 978-3-030-77618-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3
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Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank everyone at Palgrave who worked on this
book for their support and enthusiasm throughout the process. Some of
the essays featured in this collection emerged from a Shakespeare
Association of America seminar entitled “Performing the Humoral Body”
at the Los Angeles conference in 2018. We would like to thank the orga-
nizing committee for their support of the seminar.
v
Contents
1 Introduction—Everyday Humoralism 1
Amy Kenny and Kaara L. Peterson
Part I Performance and Embodiment 11
2 Humoural Versification 13
Robert Stagg
3 Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage 31

Darryl Chalk
4 “Great Annoyance to Their Mindes”: Humours,

Intoxication, and Addiction in English Medical and
Moral Discourses, 1550–1730 51
David Clemis
5 Performing Pain 69
Michael Schoenfeldt
6 A “Dummy Corpse Full of Bones and Entrails”: Staging

Dismemberment in the Early Modern Playhouse 85
Amy Kenny
vii
viii Contents
Part II Art and Material Culture 103
7 Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits105

Kaara L. Peterson
8 Seeing Saints in the Forest of Arden: Melancholic Vision

in As You Like It125
Kimberly Rhodes
9 Humors, Fruit, and Botanical Art in Early Modern

England147
Amy L. Tigner
10 The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern

English Domestic Tragedy167
Ariane Balizet
11 Afterword—No One Is Ever Just Breathing or, a

Sigh Is (Not) Just a Sigh189
Gail Kern Paster
Index199
Notes on Contributors
Ariane Balizet is the author of two monographs—Shakespeare and Girls’

Studies (Routledge, 2020) and Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama:
Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2014)—and
many articles on blood, bodies, and domesticity in the literature of
the English Renaissance. Her work has been published in Comparative
Literature Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Women’s Studies, and
Borrowers and Lenders, and elsewhere.
Darryl Chalk is Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Southern
Queensland, Australia, and Treasurer on the Executive Committee of
the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. He
researches medicine, disease, magic, and emotion in Shakespearean
drama and early modern theatre. His most recent book is Contagion
and the Shakespearean Stage (Palgrave, 2019), a volume of essays co-
edited with Mary Floyd-Wilson. A monograph, with the working
title Pathological Shakespeare: Contagion, Embodiment, and the Early
Modern Scientific Imaginary, is currently in progress.
David Clemis is Associate Professor of History at Mount Royal
University, Calgary, Canada. His research focuses on understandings of
alcohol intoxication and conceptions of craving, habit, and addiction in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of “Medical
Expertise and the Understandings of Intoxication In Britain, 1660
to 1830,” in Intoxication and Society: Problematic Pleasures (Palgrave,
2013), “The History and Culture of Alcohol and Drinking: 18th
ix
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Century” and “The History of Addiction and Alcoholism” in Alcohol:

Social, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives (SAGE, 2015).
Amy Kenny teaches at University of California, Riverside and has a PhD
in early modern literature and culture. She has worked as Research
Coordinator at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, where she was the chief
dramaturge for 15 productions and conducted over 80 interviews with
actors and directors on architecture, audiences, and performance, as part
of an archival resource for future scholarship. She is co-editor of The Hare,
a peer-reviewed, on-line academic journal of untimely reviews, on the edi-
torial board of Shakespeare Bulletin, and has published articles on drama-
turgy, the performance of laughter, the senses, and disease in Shakespeare.
Her first monograph, entitled Humoral Wombs on the Shakespearean Stage,
was published in 2019.
Gail Kern Paster is Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library
and Editor Emerita of Shakespeare Quarterly. She is the author of The Idea
of the City in the Age of Shakespeare (University of Georgia, 1986), The
Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern
England (Cornell, 1993), and Humoring the Body: Emotions on the
Shakespearean Stage (University of Chicago, 2004). She co-edited Reading
the Early Modern Passions (University of Pennsylvania, 2004), and has
written many essays on the history of emotion. She has been a National
Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim
Memorial Fellow, and a Mellon Fellow. She has served as President of
the Shakespeare Association of America and, in 2011, was named to the
Queen’s Honours List as Commander of the British Empire.
Kaara L. Peterson is an Associate Professor of English at Miami
University of Ohio. Exploring the intersections of Renaissance medical
history, art history, and literature, she has published most recently in
English Literary Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly and Studies in
Philology, focusing on the representations and iconography of virginity
and Elizabeth I. Her other published work appears in Shakespeare
Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, and Mosaic and includes a monograph on
early modern literature and popular medicine (Ashgate, 2010), as well as
co-edited volumes with Stephanie Moss on the staging of early modern
pathology (Ashgate, 2004) and with Deanne Williams on the interdisci-
plinary “afterlives” of Ophelia (Palgrave, 2012).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xi
Kimberly Rhodes is NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of the

Humanities and Professor of Art History at Drew University. She has writ-
ten extensively on Ophelia and visual culture, most recently for a mono-
graph of contemporary artist Nadja Verena Marcin’s work. Her new
research concerns the representation of deer in British art and literature
and includes the essay “‘A haunch of a countess’: John Constable and the
Deer Park at Helmingham Hall,” published in collection Ecocriticism
and the Anthropocene in Nineteenth Century Art and Visual Culture
(Routledge, 2019).
Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English Literature at
the University of Michigan. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George
Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (University of Chicago, 1991), Bodies
and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser,
Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999), and The Cambridge
Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010), as well as editor of the
Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Blackwell, 2006), and John
Donne in Context (Cambridge University, 2019).
Robert Stagg is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Shakespeare
Institute and an Associate Senior Member of St Anne’s College, University
of Oxford. Stagg has published essays in Shakespeare Survey, Essays in
Criticism, Studies in Philology, and numerous edited collections, and is
finishing a book about Shakespeare’s blank verse.
Amy L. Tigner teaches English at the University of Texas, Arlington and
writes about early modern food, gardens, and ecological concerns. Her
most recent co-edited books include Literature and Food Studies with
Allison Carruth (Routledge, 2018) and Culinary Shakespeare with David
B. Goldstein (Duquesne, 2017). She is the author of Literature and the
Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II (Ashgate, 2012). Tigner
is also the founding editor of Early Modern Studies Journal and a founding
member of Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC), a digital
humanities project dedicated to manuscript recipe books.
List of Figures
Fig. 7.1 Elizabetha Angliae et Hiberniae Reginae, Thomas Cecill,

c. 1625. © The Trustees of the British Museum 106
Fig. 7.2 Detail from Elizabetha Angliae et Hiberniae Reginae, Thomas
Cecill, c. 1625 © The Trustees of the British Museum 107
Fig. 7.3 “Dangers Averted” Medal, Elizabeth I (1558–1603),
CM.YG.1401-R. Attributed to Nicholas Hilliard
(1537–1619), c.1588. Gold medal. © The Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge 109
Fig. 7.4 Wax seal, The Great Seal of Elizabeth I, 1586–1603, reverse.
The National Archives of the UK, ref. SC13/N3 113
Fig. 8.1 Albrecht Dürer, Saint Eustace, c. 1501, engraving,
35 × 25.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
Fletcher Fund, 1919. www.metmuseum.org 126
Fig. 8.2 Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia 1, 1514, engraving, 24 × 18.5 cm.,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane
Dick Fund, 1943, www.metmuseum.org 132
Fig. 8.3 The Legend of St. Eustace, c. 1480, wall painting, Canterbury
Cathedral, International Photobank/Alamy Stock Photo 137
Fig. 8.4 Titian, St. Eustace, drawing, 21.6 × 31.6 cm., © The Trustees
of the British Museum 140
Fig. 9.1 “The Tradescant Cherry” from The Tradescants’ Orchard,
Ashmole MS. 1461, f.25r, with permission from Bodleian
Libraries157
xiii
xiv List of Figures
Fig. 9.2 Nathaniel Bacon, Cookmaid with Still Life of Vegetables and
Fruit, c. 1620–25, Tate 159
Fig. 10.1 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games (1560), detail.
Image credit: KHM-Museumsverband. Reproduced with
permission177
CHAPTER 1
Introduction—Everyday Humoralism
Amy Kenny and Kaara L. Peterson
Beneath the laurel-crowned, winged allegory of Melancholy in Albrecht

Dürer’s Melencolia 1 (1514), several objects are strewn about the floor,
including carpenter’s tools—a set-square, a plane, and a few scattered
nails—along with pincers, a crucible, and a clyster (used to evacuate ple-
thoric humors). This engraving, a focus of Chap. 8 in this volume, prompts
the beholder to consider the humorality and lived experience of melan-
choly by depicting it through a series of symbolic, scientific, and material
objects, capturing an arcane symbolism. Dürer asks the viewer to contem-
plate the multivalent nature of melancholy, not merely imagined as an
inward, corporeal state theorized by Galenism, but also as an embodied
experience, linked to the natural, mathematical, and scientific phenomena
of the early modern world. While an excess of melancholy humor, or black
bile, was associated with insanity and a requisite melancholy complexion,
A. Kenny (*)
University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA
e-mail: amy.kenny@ucr.edu
K. L. Peterson
Miami University of Ohio, Oxford, OH, USA
e-mail: petersk7@miamioh.edu
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
A. Kenny, K. L. Peterson (eds.), Humorality in Early Modern Art,
Material Culture, and Performance, Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science
and Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77618-3_1
2 A. KENNY AND K. L. PETERSON
it was also long alleged to be a source of creative genius in the period, a

notion the image refers to through its many objects related to intellectual
study. By depicting melancholy in this multi-faceted way, the engraving
reminds viewers that the medical instruments and carpenter’s tools scat-
tered across the floor at Melancholy’s feet were all linked to the cosmos,
humors, and elements in ways that now seem remarkably strange to mod-
ern readers. Objects or inanimate things were believed to contain elemen-
tal characteristics, not merely metaphorically, but materially within
humoral discourse. Seen in this light, Dürer’s famed image partly suggests
one of the central premises of this collection that we invite readers to con-
template: the way in which Galenic humoralityin its different expressions
and composition finds exemplification in one of the period’s most iconic
works of art as well as in many accessory objects and social practices, all
more familiar to early modern viewers’ eyes than to ours.
It is now well recognized that Galenic humoral theory underpinned
early modern medical practices and the maintenance of health, an antique
discourse used to describe interiority and emotion: medical practitioners
understood “temperament” or psychological and physiological bodily sys-
tems according to a subject’s individual balance of four essential humors—
yellow bile (or choler), black bile (or melancholy), phlegm, and blood.
But beyond this now-familiar early modern medical framework, how were
the humors more broadly understood, constructed, and appropriated to
elucidate the experiences of daily life and the broader phenomenological
world? For instance, how might Galenic humorality be perceived beyond
the immediate example of the human body whose fabric we have grown
accustomed to seeing as Galenically inflected? How is Galenism under-
stood by early modern individuals as surprisingly constitutive of and mani-
fest within, if latently so, inanimate objects or physical things, both natural
(such as fruit or metal) and manufactured (such as a stage property), or
even as intrinsic to particular social practices, such as gaming? Beyond the
discourse of the traditional Renaissance medical canon, how did early
modern humorality materialize in everyday life? How can the humors be
understood to lie within the solid matter of Dürer’s many scattered
objects, as analogues to metals that grow underground or to the metal-
work in which royal portraits are fashioned, or even to underpin the
somatic mechanisms of performing verse or breathing? Our collection
seeks to address these questions, among others, examining the representa-
tion of the humors from less traditional and more abstract, or materialist
perspectives, in order to consider more closely the humorality of ordinary,
1 INTRODUCTION—EVERYDAY HUMORALISM 3
even unremarkable objects, activities, and embodied performance in early

modernity.
While we cannot recreate the actual lived experience of another era,
the essays here explore how works of art, theater, and various physical
objects from the period communicate the extent to which Galenic humor-
alism shaped individuals’ understanding of routine encounters. Despite
the inherently inward human experience that is the typical focus of most
critical scholarship, the diverse set of things featured in this collection—
from poetry and drama, to paintings and metallic/medallic images, to
botanicals and deer, to toys and games—reveal and interrogate different
facets of the quotidian humoral experience of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. What unites our collection’s chapters is a recognition
that early modern subjects utilize humoral language to articulate a broad
range of experiences and matter frequently external to the body’s bor-
ders. Of course, as we emphasize above, Dürer’s Melencolia does not
allude merely to the melancholy humor in his engraving—a fact estab-
lished so long ago by Erwin Panofsky as to be a commonplace—but also
depicts a veritable catalogue of objects that are equally worthy of note.
Taking up this charge, the essays here are concerned more urgently to
explore what we might call a broader “catalogue of humorality” that
investigates artworks, material culture, and performance in order to
uncover the contours of humoral theory in daily life and to render visible
the tangible, external markers of this discourse of interiority in new and
compelling ways.
Accordingly, our title, Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material
Culture, and Performance, highlights how our contributors discuss repre-
sentations of the humors in highly diverse mediums. Although the collec-
tion is separated into two parts, “Performance and Embodiment” and
“Art and Material Culture,” in order to distinguish how humorality
informs cultural practice and embodiment versus its different manifesta-
tion as a form of production within material culture, we recognize that the
chapters occasionally and productively overlap in focus, complicating the
orderly distinctions between or among physical body, material object, and
created artwork. As a totality that is also the sum of its disparate parts,
then, the collection attempts to explore alternative forms of Galenism or
thinking heavily inflected by Galenism, as well as to reveal just how perva-
sive humoral theory is in early modern England, underpinning even the
most unlikely or unusual things.
We are honored to have Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt

among the contributors to the book, for these scholars stand as undis-
puted giants who have largely established a field of early modern studies,
specifically a body of work demonstrating the reach of Galenic humoral
theory as well as a focus on how the culture articulates notions of interior-
ity and affect as a means of self-knowledge. Paster’s ground-breaking The
Body Embarrassed (1993) and Humoring the Body (2004) consider the
portrayal of the humoral body in drama, perhaps most famously identify-
ing the “leaky” female body (a kind of everyday example of Galenic
humoralism) and the importance of affect and the “passions” for early
modern subjectivity. Another cornerstone of this collection, Michael
Schoenfeldt’s Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England (1999) examines
the pathologizing of inwardness in humoral bodies in early modern writ-
ing. Likewise, Mary Floyd-Wilson’s monographs Occult Knowledge,
Science and Gender on the Shakespearean Stage (2013) and English Ethnicity
and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003) introduced to many scholars
now-familiar concepts of the Galenic “non-naturals” and the humoral-
climatological basis for constructions of subjectivity and identity. Beyond
analysis of the human body alone, in their important contributions to a
growing field Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Vin Nardizzi have also explored
the vital materiality of things in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman (2015)
and The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (2012), inviting
scholars to consider the often fluid boundaries among object, the natural
environment, and human subject. Our collection extends but does not
repeat this analysis by extending the scope of humorality to a variety of
things or natural phenomena that denote a broader application of the
Galenic framework in the period.
While medical theory was undeniably influenced by Galen, the
Hippocratic corpus, and, to a lesser degree, Paracelsus and anatomical
discovery throughout the early modern period, there existed a variety of
other competing and heterogeneous medical philosophies and practices.
Some recent scholarship has suggested an overemphasis on Galenic pre-
cepts can produce a reductive approach to thinking about the early mod-
ern body, emotions, and spirituality. Works such as Katharine Craik’s
collection, Shakespeare and Emotion (2020); Ronda Arab, Michelle
M. Dowd, and Adam Zucker’s collection Historical Affects and the Early
Modern Theater (2015); and Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan’s The
Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and his
Contemporaries (2015) have all contributed to discussions of emotion and
embodiment beyond humorality, showing in compelling ways that

Galenism is not the sole means of articulating embodiment, affect, and
emotion in the period. Galenic humoral theory is a stable if not static body
of knowledge in the early modern period, however; its dominance may be
perceived as a matter of degree. Notions of interiority, physicality, health,
and emotion were constantly shifting, as were phenomenologies of the
natural world, though Galenism stubbornly resists eclipsing. Our collec-
tion seeks to expand on existing critical considerations of how the humors
gain representation in highly varied media—within material culture, per-
formance, and other forms of cultural production and activities—without
necessarily shifting the dominant medical discourse. Recognizing the con-
tributions of recent scholarship, Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material
Culture, and Performance seeks to expand the perspective of everyday
humoral experiences and objects or materials to a range of novel focuses.
The essays in this collection accordingly do not seek to challenge the dom-
inance of Galenism, rather to supplement the period’s articulation of it as
demonstrated more broadly by early modern culture. Ultimately, the vol-
ume offers a different account of the significance of Galenism by examin-
ing new manifestations of its deployment instead of limiting analysis to the
human body alone, though many of our essays necessarily situate the
human actor or individual within its physical environment.
As most famously outlined by Paster, Galenic models are predicated on
the porous nature of the humoral body or “fungibility,” defined by the
body’s vulnerability to the surrounding environment, rendering the dis-
course of physicality as an exploration of the permeable self.1 Paster’s pio-
neering work sets out how early modern scientific explanations of animals,
plants, and human subjects are deeply informed and characterized by
humoralism. Describing the “psychophysiological reciprocity” between a
subject and the broader world, Paster notes, “the link between inner and
outer is often described in the language of the qualities, since the forces of
cold, hot, moist, and dry not only determine a individual subject’s charac-
teristic humors and behaviors but also describe the characteristic behaviors
of other living things—animate and inanimate.”2 As she makes clear,
Galenic classifications of temperament do not simply define human sub-
jects but interpellate the animal and botanical natural worlds. It is these
other aspects of the natural world that several of our contributors explore,
within two principal areas of investigation outlined below.
The first section, “Performance and Embodiment,” contains five essays,
each tracing how the humoral body is in fact performative, both on the
early modern stage and in daily life. The essays in this section are attentive
to the affective influence of the humors in embodiment in various con-
texts, with each tracing the consequences of performing pain, verse, sighs,
dismemberment, alcoholism, or the effect of playing a role on the body,
including the actor’s interaction with stage properties. Anti-theatrical
tracts from the period often bring together criticism on assorted forms of
idleness, playing, drinking, and, as will be explored later in Part II, dicing
and gaming, suggesting a range of similar deleterious effects of participat-
ing in any of these indulgent revelries.3
Robert Stagg’s chapter, “Humoural Versification,” opens the collection
by focusing on how rhythms of breathing and heartbeats cultivate a type
of humoral versification in performance. His essay examines the pace and
pauses that make up the somatic experience of performing verse, with a
particular focus on how caesuras and (un)stressed syllables influence the
actor’s body on stage. “Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean
Stage,” Darryl Chalk’s chapter, takes up a related thread, focusing on the
performativity of sighing and considering how the passions were under-
stood in the early modern playhouse. By connecting the somatic mecha-
nism of sighs to their expression of melancholic afflictions, Chalk questions
how repetitive sighing might have affected the actor’s body. These ques-
tions set the stage for David Clemis’ essay, “‘Great Annoyance to Their
Mindes’: Humours, Intoxication, and Addiction in English Medical and
Moral Discourses, 1550–1730,” which considers how humoral language
defines the morality of intoxication for individuals in the real world. Clemis
traces the early modern Galenic understanding of the unified mind and
body to explore how alcohol consumption shifted an individual’s humoral
balance, temperament, and character. He then turns to an epistemology of
drunkenness and demonstrates how the very malleability of the humoral
body is at work in notions of addiction and intoxication in the period,
given that humoral discourse asserts that the construction of the self lies in
the interplay between naturals and non-naturals. Alcohol consumption,
Clemis argues, thus acts as a non-natural that results in a state of very real
cognitive impairment for the subject.
Like Chalk’s and Stagg’s chapters, Schoenfeldt’s “Performing Pain”
shows how the rhetoric of inwardness borrowed from humoral discourse
can help elucidate the actor’s emotive performance of counterfeiting pain.
While pain is invisible, it must be witnessed by theatergoers, Schoenfeldt
argues, and therefore is dependent on the audience’s understanding of
humoral physiology. The body of the actor, then, is subject to the
corrosive consequences of im-passioned performance all the while his task

is paradoxically duplicitous, to convince the audience of feigned pain’s
authenticity. Drawing on Schoenfeldt’s exploration of how actors per-
formed excruciating dismemberment scenes, Amy Kenny’s essay, “‘A
dummy corpse full of bones and entrails’: Staging Dismemberment in the
Early Modern Playhouse,” shifts the focus from bodies to objects. Her
essay traces how the material composition of disarticulated stage proper-
ties—wax, blood, animal products, and paint—retained and were imbued
with humoral attributes, capable of exerting their influence on the body of
the actor performing in the theater. Kenny’s essay bridges the two sections
by exploring the humorality of objects within the theater and in perfor-
mance, laying the groundwork for the second section’s focus on art and
material culture. Part I’s survey of the quotidian experiences of drinking,
watching a play, and performing pain broadens how Galenic models of
affect are constituted outside of but also in relation to the individual body.
The collection’s two parts thus move from a more pronounced focus on
bodies to things, demonstrating their complex interplay.
Part II, “Art and Material Culture,” explores early modern artistic rep-
resentations and accounts of the relationship between the humors and
objects. Attending to the material histories of the humors expressed
through things or objects—such as artworks or coins fashioned of metal
or mineral paints; the cultural perception of vision construed as “melan-
cholic” or what determines the social practice of consuming and cultivat-
ing fruits and flowers; and the potential humoral risk of playing games—this
group of essays considers the relationship between the humoral body and
the objects that represent or influence it. In the first chapter in this section,
“Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits,” Kaara L. Peterson
investigates what she terms “elemental perfection,” or interpreting Queen
Elizabeth I’s embodied material flawlessness as akin to “noble” precious
metals of gold and silver. Beginning with Elizabeth’s famous speech from
the battlefield of Tilbury and an illustration of the scene by Thomas Cecill
in which the queen’s “mettle” is conveyed by her metal armor, Peterson
examines the queen’s image in contemporary metallic portraits, coins,
jewels, and badges. Ultimately, the essay offers an alternative to the typical
“leaky vessel” discourse about female bodies in the period, instead demon-
strating how Elizabeth’s contemporaries perceived her body as elemental,
metallic perfection with a “mind of gold” and a “body of brass,” in the
Earl of Essex’s phrasing. Her essay offers a more materialist reading, pav-
ing the way for deeper explorations of the humoralism that underlies and
even constitutes individuals’ relationships to other forms of matter or phe-

nomenological experience.
Turning to melancholy stags in Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, Kimberly
Rhodes’ essay, “Seeing Saints in the Forest of Arden: Melancholic Vision
in As You Like It,” investigates religious pastoral paintings in her discus-
sion of Jaques’ conversion from melancholic courtier to religious seeker,
focusing particularly on St. Eustace as engraved by Albrecht Dürer.
Employing the term “melancholic vision” to define the humoral and affec-
tive impact of the play, Rhodes explores early modern religious visual cul-
ture, particularly the figure of the hunted deer, through the lens of
Topsell’s Historie of Four-footed Beasts. If vision itself can be melancholic,
then fruit is frequently perceived as humorally suspect. In “Humors,
Fruits, and Botanical Art in Early Modern England,” Amy L. Tigner out-
lines the shift in medical advice about the healthfulness of fruit, from ban-
ning fruit consumption in 1569 after the plague to promoting fruit’s
salubriousness at the turn of the seventeenth century. Tracing dietary
practices and trends in botanical specimen collecting—some also featured
in seventeenth-century illustrated books and artworks, including The
Tradescants’ Orchard—Chap. 9 argues that reproducing beautiful images
of fruit, some paired with portraits of female sitters, helped to alter the
perception of the humoral status of fruit in the period.
In the final essay, “The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern
English Domestic Tragedy,” Ariane Balizet considers early modern domes-
tic tragedies, primarily Arden of Faversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy,
alongside the cultural history and visual culture of toys and game play to
demonstrate how playing games stimulated the humors and Galenic non-
naturals. Her reading situates games as instruments with the ability to
regulate the humoral body, posing a potential risk to domesticity by
threatening to provoke conflict. Through an intersectional approach that
locates specific games such as dice and spinning tops within prevailing
humoral precepts, Balizet demonstrates the effect of play on the ever-
fluctuating body and on domestic households and individuals. Balizet’s
essay completes the second section, linking materialist and performative
understandings of the humors together. The collection concludes with an
Afterword from Gail Kern Paster, “No One Is Ever Just Breathing or, a
Sigh Is (Not) Just a Sigh,” highlighting the implications for the field of the
new scholarship offered by our contributors. We are pleased to close the
collection with Paster’s perspective, given that her work as a totality has
almost single-handedly created the possibility for novel interpretations of
the humors in early modern culture, demonstrating just how widely con-
strued and pervasive, how urgently resident Galenic humoralism is within
visual objects and things. Like Dürer’s Melencolia, the collection is an
illustration of the multivalent nature of humoralism that is now largely
alien to our modern, subject-oriented ontologies: like Dürer’s famous
engraving, our authors also invite readers to extend the view of humorality
further beyond traditional limits, locating an everyday humoralism in the
quotidian objects that populate the scene of sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century English domestic life.
Notes
1. Paster, Body Embarrassed, 133.
2. Paster, Humoring the Body, 19.
3. See, for instance, Northbrooke, Treatise, and Stubbes, Anatomy of Abuses.
Bibliography
Northbrooke, John. A treatise wherein dicing, dauncing, vaine playes or enterluds
with other idle pastimes. London, 1577.
Paster, Gail Kern. The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in
Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.
Paster, Gail Kern. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage.
Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
Stubbes, Philip. The Anatomy of Abuses. London, 1583.
PART I
Performance and Embodiment

CHAPTER 2
Humoural Versification
Robert Stagg
There are “clichés of rhythm” as well as of speech.1 One of those clichés,

at least as old as the nineteenth century, hears blank verse adopting the
rhythm of a heart. Thus a popular TED-Ed video purporting to explain
“Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter” cutely concludes that
“Shakespeare’s most poetic lines don’t just talk about matters of the
heart”—wait for it—“They follow its rhythm.”2 In the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries, any equation between the heartbeat and metrical beat
would have been more difficult to sustain. Contemporary physicians dis-
puted whether the heartbeat and the pulse were synchronous or alternat-
ing (Galen, the fons of much Renaissance physiology, reckoned that the
pulse was uneven, sometimes beating rapidly, sometimes slowly, some-
times in an unpredictable mixture of the two) which, if transferred by
analogy to the metrical, promises something more various than a two-
tone, de-dum-de-dum prosody.3 Moreover, the heart was generally con-
ceived of less as a pump than as a “fountain, maintaining the vital economy
R. Stagg (*)
Shakespeare Institute, Warwickshire, UK
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
e-mail: robert.stagg@ell.ox.ac.uk

Switzerland AG 2021
14 R. STAGG
of the body” (while being, as today, “the source of desire, volition, truth,
understanding”).4
The relationship between heartbeat and metrical beat—“the cardiac
connection,” in Alan Holder’s phrase—is rarely conceived the other way
around, but if both heart and metre survive on pulse then why should
metre not affect the heart too?5 In the manuscript of The Return from
Parnassus (c. 1601), Judicio refers to Shakespeare’s “heart-throbbing
lines” (2.1.302; “heart-robbing” in the 1606 printed text) as though the
lines provoke the heart’s throbbing rather than the heart the lines’ throb-
bing.6 The heart’s metre, such as it was, might in fact tell us more about
the rhythm of the passions than the rhythm of iambic pentameter. As
Thomas Wright had it, writing of The Passions of the Mind in General
(1601), “All passions may be distinguished by the dilation, enlargement or
diffusion of the heart, and the contraction, collection or compression of
the same, for (as afterwards shall be declared in all passions) the heart is
dilated or coarcted more or less” (that last verb of Wright’s is now medi-
cally specific to the heart’s aorta, whereas in 1601 “coarct” could mean
more generally “To press or draw together; to compress, constrict, con-
tract, tighten”).7 The distinguishing done by the heart in Wright’s treatise
is far from binary or two-tone, despite its culmination in a twofold division
between dilation and coarction. Dilation is earlier distinguished from dif-
fusion and contraction from compression, for instance. The heart’s move-
ments are flexible, plural, improvisational, even, as it seeks or happens to
record the action of the passions around the body. Where the “pulse”
theory of the heart produces a metrical account of verse, straitening it into
two discrete stress categories, Wright’s yields something more rhythmic,
which is sufficiently protean to work outside a strict metrical time signa-
ture or structure.
Another popular physiological account of metre figures it as correspon-
sive with breath or breathing. There is often said to be a natural relation-
ship between iambic pentameter and breath; specifically, that we can
comfortably speak an iambic pentameter line with one breath (though the
director Tyrone Guthrie thought that actors should be able to manage
twelve syllables in one gulp).8 However, this “cliché of rhythm” is also
dubious. Given that the alexandrine (twelve-syllable line) is the French
equivalent of the iambic pentameter, and is similarly lauded in France as a
natural, breathable form, in order to sustain the cliché “we would have to
develop a poetics of respiration that has the French breathing less often
than the English.”9
2 HUMOURAL VERSIFICATION 15
At least the connection between metre and breath has proper sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century precedent; it is not wholly anachronistic, as met-
rical accounts of the pulse often are. Verse (as well as prose) punctuation
of the period was “a guide to breathing and pausing rather than […] to
the syntactical relationship between grammatical clauses,” a notion that is
sometimes expressed with the term “rhetorical punctuation” (which risks
being misleading, since it implies that early modern punctuation was
designed for oratorical performance).10 Thus for Mindele Treip, Milton’s
epic similes in Paradise Lost (1667) should be read “as a single, extended
verse period, punctuated not grammatically but rhetorically.”11 They
should be read by the lungs as much as by the eyes and ears. Grammarians
from Francis Clement to Elisha Coles consistently identified the syllable
with breath, and Thomas Campion described how “English monosyllables
enforce many breathings.”12 Most notably of all, the caesura was routinely
described as a “breathing place.”13
Today we think of the caesura as a pause. This need not, of course,
mean that every constituent element of the verse simply stops. The pause
could be more analogous to a musical rest, where the momentum of the
phrase is unabated; pause “does not necessarily imply a cessation of the
voice” since the prolongation of a word can constitute a pause.14 Indeed
Shakespeare often treats subclause as a type of pause, where his language
seems to pause (or brace) against itself. In the manuscript of Sir Thomas
More (c. 1596), for example, he writes the words “Alas, alas!” in the mid-
dle of a verse line, separating an exasperated ejaculation, “And lead the
majesty of law in lyam/To slip him like a hound” (6.136–37), from a new,
steadier phrase, “Say now the King” (137).15 “Alas, alas!” appears inter-
lined above a cancelled syllabic equivalent (“saying,” spelled “sayeng” in
the manuscript).16 In revising More for publication, Hand C deleted “Alas,
alas!”—suspicious of the long line it created but also, perhaps, of the
wordy caesura it effected. If the caesura is a pause, whether of cessation or
prolongation, it usually allows for the inhalation or exhalation of breath.
Richard Mulcaster, the sixteenth-century headmaster of Merchant Taylors’
and St Paul’s schools, taught his pupils how to breathe their way through
verse: “Now in the breathing there are three things to be considered, the
taking in, the letting out, and the holding in of the breath” (Mulcaster’s
vocal coaching helps us to hear how the caesura can also be a pause in
breathing, a “holding in,” rather than or as well as a cue for breathing).17
Accounts of the humours or passions conceived of the body not only as
permeable by fluid but by “wind,” “spirit,” and “air”—the body was, as
16 R. STAGG
Helkiah Crooke put it, “Transpirable and Trans-fluxible, that is, so open
to the air that it may pass and repass through” it.18 For Crooke, the body’s
spirits have a “motion” which is “sudden and momentary like the light-
ning, which in the twinkling of an eye shooteth through the whole cope
of Heaven” or—he swivels about his simile—“they are like the wind which
whisks about in every corner and turns the heavy sail of a windmill, yet can
we not see that which transports it.”19 “The air works on all men,” Robert
Burton writes, “when the humours by the air be stirred, he goes in with
them, exagitates our spirits, and vexeth our souls; as the sea waves, so are
the spirits and humors in our bodies, tossed with tempestuous winds and
storms.”20 The tightenings and loosenings of the heart, by which we might
read the body’s humours, are accompanied by the gusting and buffeting
of the winds coursing along and within it.
While the humoural body is often considered heavy with fluid, groan-
ing under the weight of its accumulated bile and phlegm, needing drain-
age for precisely this reason, it can also seem remarkably empty, a sort of
corridor through which breezes whizz and skim, with those breezes held
back and shaped only by the throat and mouth. The throat supplies “the
greater or lesser restraining of the air”; the mouth is “vaulted” such “that
the air being repercussed, the voice may be sharper.”21 We might, then,
think of the caesura as a porous point in the verse—allowing breath to leak
out of or be allowed into the line—but also as a vector by which the flow
of that breath (or air or spirit or wind) can be controlled and directed; the
caesura may therefore work a little like the Tudor surgeon Thomas Vicary’s
extraordinary conception of the hair, in which the hair suppresses the
body’s vapours lest “the fumosities of the brain might ascend and pass
lightlier out” of the leaky bald head.22
The staging of a play depends on “windy suspiration of forced breath”
(as Hamlet bitterly describes it (1.2.79)), where the spirits or winds of the
body are ostensibly regulated and expelled by the “propulsive force” of
the actors’ mouths, throats and lungs.23 Carolyn Sale has described the
1599 Globe Theatre as “a pair of lungs that scatter throughout its envi-
ronment” the actors’ particular breath, even as it also draws on and allows
space for the breathing lungs of its individual audience members.24 Put
this way, the experience of a theatre can seem grotesque—even, during a
time of airborne pandemic, dangerous—rather than pleasingly collabora-
tive. In any event, if the theatre itself serves as an “instrument” for the
breath, or the various breaths of its constituent peoples, then so too does
the caesura.25 It structures and moulds the breathy spirits of an actor’s
utterances, helping to decide (though without absolutely or unilaterally

determining) whether those utterances should be sighed or soughed or
panted or wheezed or many other things besides.
And what happens when the caesura becomes not a “breathing place”
but a place where breathing ends? Knowing that she has been poisoned,
John Ford’s character Hippolita (in ‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore, first printed
1633) inhales as much breath as she can over twelve lines, each of which
heave with caesura: “Kept promise, (o, my torment) thou this houre/
Had’st dyed Soranzo—heate aboue hell fire—/Yet ere I passe away—
Cruell, cruell flames—” (4.1.89–91; G4r in 1633 quarto text).26 These
caesuras pant with desperate, expiring life; we can almost hear Hippolita’s
breath escaping through the gaps or pores in her verse lines. All the char-
acters in 5.1 of Christopher Marlowe’s (and Thomas Nashe’s?) Dido
Queen of Carthage (first printed 1594) can be heard to die upon their
caesuras. Dido pivots on a caesura to make an antithesis between “false
Aeneas,” who will live, and herself, who will die, so that the caesura
becomes her last breath (at least in English): “Liue false Aeneas, truest
Dido dyes” (312; G3v in the 1594 quarto text).27 Iarbas follows Dido
onto the pyre through her caesura (“Dido, I come to thee, aye me Aeneas”
(319; G3v)). Then Anna follows Iarbus: “Now sweet Iarbas stay, I come
to thee” (328; G3v). In the 1594 quarto text of the play, quoted here, the
caesuras are relatively “lightly pointed”; in a modernised edition, there
would in all likelihood be more punctuated caesuras in the lines (though
they would still cluster or hinge around the lines’ midpoint).28 These cae-
suras are the moment at which the play’s characters decide upon death or,
alternatively, they are the characters’ last breaths having made their resolu-
tion to die. Doctor Faustus’ dying caesura is likewise both a last gasp and
a last gasp attempt at salvation: it comes between his final clutchings at the
material world (“I’le burne my bookes,” he says, having promised to
“breathe a while” (14.120, 118; F3v in the 1604 “A” text; H3v in the
1616 “B” text)) and the ultimate realisation of his demise (“oh,
Mephistophilis” (120; “Ile burne my books, ah Mephastophilis” in the 1604
text)). The caesura allows room for a range of tones to mingle—the “oh”
or “ah” that breathes out of it, at the last, is an undecidable combination
of regret, consummation, release, and surrender.
We might think too of how caesura works (or does not work) in “shared
lines”—one line spoken by more than one character—which smudge or
fudge the point of breathing, in that it becomes more difficult to deter-
mine quite where that breathing happens (the verb “shared” does
18 R. STAGG
insufficient justice to the range of ways in which verse lines can be divided
between their speakers). Where is the caesura, the breathing place or
places, in these lines? The shared lines of modern-day Shakespeare editions
can seem a textual anachronism—following in the metrical footsteps of
George Steevens, the eighteenth-century pioneer of the editorial shared
line, modern editors can seem to be “making use of what may be called
metrical white space” to present a series of fragmentary or short lines as
really being part of a whole, “platonic,” perfect pentameter.29 Yet shared
lines do appear in a number of Shakespeare’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century texts. Here is how one episode is formatted in the quarto or “his-
tory” text of King Lear (1608):
Duke. Great thing of vs forgot,

Speake Edmund, whers the king, and whers Cordelia
Seest thou this obiect Kent. The bodies of Gonorill and
Kent. Alack why thus. Regan are brought in.
Bast. Yet Edmund was beloued,
The one the other poysoned for my sake,
And after slue her selfe. Duke. Euen so, couer their faces.
(5.3.235–41; Q 3192–99)
The quarto heaves with shared lines, as though every character wants to
participate in one (does Kent’s “Alack why thus” share with Albany’s
“Seest thou this obiect Kent” or the Bastard’s “Yet Edmund was beloued”
or, somehow, both?). Could we imagine these characters stealing breath
from one another, or sharing breath in the space of the caesura as the line
relays between voices, or simply speaking in order to allow another to
breathe? Edmund’s short line—“Yet Edmund was beloued”—could be an
answer to Kent’s question (“Alack why thus”), interposed so quickly as to
take Kent’s breath away, but it is not framed as such, for it begins in a
syntax of self-disputation not conversational response (“Yet Edmund was
beloved”). His epiphanic line appears to share more with the action
described in the stage direction (“The bodies of Gonorill and Regan are
brought in”) than it does with Kent’s question. His line is audaciously
shared with Goneril’s and Regan’s corpses, which cannot breathe. But
then, as Jean-Thomas Tremblay has put it, “no one is ever just breathing.”30
As printed in a modern Shakespeare edition, the shared line exists both
horizontally and vertically. Readers’ eyes will run up and down the page,
putting the component elements of the line together, and from gutter to
margin, reading along the length or duration of the line. The humoural
body is oriented more vertically than horizontally, however. For example,
Gail Kern Paster opened her germinal 2004 book about the humours with
a “surprisingly vivid comparison” towards this point.31 The comparison
belongs to Edward Reynolds, specifically his Treatise of the Passions and
Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640), and it is between the passions of
Christ and those of ordinary men: “The Passions of sinfull men are many
times like the tossings of the Sea, which bringeth up mire and durt; but
the Passions of Christ were like the shaking of pure Water in a cleane
Vessell, which though it be thereby troubled, yet it is not fouled at all.”32
One of the striking things about this “anti-Stoic defense of emotion” is its
“depth ontology,” the ways in which “The Passions of sinfull men” get
“bringeth up” from some undisclosed location beneath.33 The sentence
has, Paster notes, a “dense metaphorical layering” and, with it, a syntacti-
cal layering that subdues the “mire and durt” of the deep sea in a sub-
clause that itself exists vertically, in grammatical terms, layered as it is
beneath the main clause.34
In their myriad imaginings, the humours are frequently subtended by
the vertical. Thus, Helkiah Crooke conceives of “the faeculunt excre-
ments” of digestion having “free and direct ascent to the upper parts,”
only to be “smothered” downward “in those gulphs of the guts.”35 In fact,
the very notion of the humours depends on a “depth model” of somatic
truth. It takes the inner meaning of the body, ultimately manifest in its
surface symptoms, “to be hidden, repressed […] in need of detection and
disclosure by an interpreter” (in this case, primarily a physician).36 Thomas
Fienus, the Flemish professor of medicine, warned how “the humours and
spirits are borne upwards, downwards, within and without” while Thomas
Rogers, writing an Anatomy of the Mind (1576), saw a possibility to “sub-
due” these “coltish affections.”37
It is possible, albeit with some strain, to map or graft this humoral
vocabulary onto a more modern sort of (particularly Shakespearean) char-
acter criticism. As Lorna Hutson has noted, character criticism (in its more
blatant and its more implicit forms) thrives on “the sense of the inner life
implied by words like […] ‘depth.’’’38 So: Shakespeare’s characters have a
“deeply physical sense of self” (Michael Schoenfeldt), a “deep subjectiv-
ity” (Wes Folkerth), and a “depth” which suggests “all sorts of possibili-
ties in them” (Imtiaz Habib), even if those possibilities are—as one of the
first, eighteenth-century character critics observed—“those parts of the
composition which are inferred only and not directly shown,” lingering
20 R. STAGG
somewhere below the surface of expression.39 Shakespeare’s characters are

routinely figured as both horizontal, “rounded,” and vertical, plunging
from surface simplicity to deep complexity.40 They are psychologically or
characteristically voluminous, with “Inner selves,” “inwardness” or “an
interior space capable of containing a complicated inner self.”41 “[D]epth,”
“deep,” and “deeply”—those keywords of character criticism—all rely on
a perception of verticality supervened by authorial pressure (early moderns
likewise kept the word “character” very “close to its etymological roots: it
meant a brand, stamp or other graphic sign,” something authorially
pressed or stuffed down into an otherwise “flat” persona).42
We might find one connection between the humours and a particularly
twentieth-century character criticism in the earliest phase of Freudian psy-
choanalysis, as Freud worked out “the corporeal topography of interior
and exterior,” yielding a Tiefenpsychologie or “depth psychology” (a term
first adopted by Eugen Bleuler and promptly adapted by Freud).43 By the
1920s, Freud was figuring consciousness as “the surface of the mental
apparatus; that is, we have ascribed it a function to a system which is spa-
tially the first one reached from the external world—and spatially not only
in the functional sense but, on this occasion, also in the sense of anatomi-
cal dissection.”44 Both psychoanalysis and character criticism can therefore
seem to be modes of humourality in centuries that no longer had a strict
positivist use for the humours; they re-purpose the vertical language of
humourality to new, but also old, effect.
Versification is likewise often a matter of depth, for prosodic lineation
has a vertical as well as lateral dimension. We have seen and heard how the
caesura figures breath as coming up out of or down into the line. This
seems true, too, of prosodic stress, which pressures us to think of “style as
though it had an altitude.”45 The sixteenth-century prosodist George
Puttenham defined “the sharp accent” as “that which was highest lifted up
and most elevated” in the ear; contrarily, “the heavy accent” was that
which “seemed to fall down rather than to rise up.”46 Seventeenth-century
pedagogues like Charles Hoole and Edward Coote afforded stress a simi-
lar verticality, defining it as “the manner of pronouncing a syllable by lift-
ing it up, or letting it down” and “the lifting up of the voice higher in one
syllable than in another.”47 Even Derek Attridge, a modern prosodist, who
uses the term “beat” rather than the word “stress,” writes of syllables
being “promoted” and “demoted,” up and down, in a reader’s ear.48
Both character and stress depend on a sense of virtual space: the depth
of a character (or “the psychological depth to which we have given the
name ‘character’”49) is partly related to the depth of stress rhythm in the

lines that they speak—such that when we hear a character talk a verse of
incessant binary, of de-dum-de-dum, we tend to find them obvious.
Metrical complexity can entail and inculcate other sorts of complexity. For
example, when we make our way through one of Shakespeare’s verse lines
we are often vibrating between what George T. Wright calls “the marked
syllables of the meter [de-dum-de-dum], and the stressed syllables of the
line [a more natural or speech-like stress]” (Wright is indebted to Halle
and Keyser’s effort “to differentiate actual stressing from the abstract met-
rical scheme”).50 We sometimes bestow natural or speech stress on a sylla-
ble which the metre (in, as it were, official terms) downplays as unstressed.
Conversely, the metre sometimes foists emphasis upon a syllable which
might otherwise have gone unstressed (and unnoticed). As such, we
sometimes feel in Shakespeare’s stresses and unstresses “less the immedi-
acy of statement, and more the preventions that lurk just behind what is
being spoken,” a metrical undertone, or what A. D. Nuttall called “under-
meaning” and Constantin Stanislavski called “subtext […] the meaning
lying underneath the text.”51
This is keenly the case in Hamlet (c.1601), a play of “corporeal inward-
ness”52 that is busily preoccupied with “The inward service of the mind
and soul” (1.3.13). Characters in the drama dwell obsessively upon
Hamlet’s interiority, and do so often in terms of depth. Claudius thinks
about Hamlet’s “inward man” (2.2.6) and his “deep grief” (4.5.74),
Polonius of what exists “Within the centre” of Hamlet (2.2.161). “There’s
something in his soul,” reckons Claudius, “O’er which his melancholy
sits” (3.1.167–68). For his own person, Hamlet speaks about his “heart’s
core” (3.2.71) and his “lowest note” (355). He wants Gertrude to see her
“inmost part” (3.4.20) and knows Claudius is deceiving him “as deep as
to the lungs” (2.2.577). The play stages its own sorts of depth: the ghost
crying from beneath the stage (1.5), the submerged and buried Ophelia
(4.7), the gravediggers digging (5.1). Modern productions have laboured
to represent Hamlet’s depth with physical space—in the case of Laurence
Olivier’s 1948 film, almost literally zooming in and out of Hamlet’s head.
In 1964 Richard Burton’s Hamlet soliloquised entirely to himself, recessed
within the proscenium arch of New York’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre,
whereas in the next year David Warner’s Hamlet moved to the lip of the
Stratford stage and addressed the audience directly—these being drama-
turgical manifestations of Hamlet’s psychological amplitude, employing
the depth of the set to communicate the depth of the character (an older
22 R. STAGG
model of locus and platea exists behind the arras of these stagings).53 Yet,
as Katherine Maus puts it, “inwardness as it becomes a concern in the
theatre is always perforce inwardness displayed: an inwardness, in other
words, that has already ceased to exist.”54
Like the humours, the play’s rhetoric of inwardness is strung on a verti-
cal axis; this can help it make audible “the symptomological effects of the
humors” as they reach the surface of the verse line.55 To take one example:
at the end of 4.4 Hamlet pledges to “spur”—or let “occasions” spur—his
otherwise “dull revenge” (31–32). His speech (omitted in the Folio text
of the play) ends with a vow promising “fresh determination,” concluding
“O, from this time forth/My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth”
(64–65).56 In Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film adaptation, the line became a
yell of resolution as the camera zoomed out to reveal Fortinbras’ vast army
massing in the distance. The film’s complementarily swelling music sug-
gests that Hamlet’s newfound bloodiness is a match for Fortinbras’ mili-
tary clout even as what viewers see before their eyes might insist otherwise.
If the speech can be a “striking climax,” it also has “a touch of the clap-
trap”; David Garrick was unconvinced by its ending, revising the final line
of Hamlet’s speech to “My thoughts be bloody all! The hour is come” and
then adding another: “I’ll fly my keepers—sweep to my revenge.”57 In
most performances of 4.4.65, the first major (or “primary”) stress of the
line alights on “bloody” (with a much gentler stress on “thoughts,” this
being a moment when an “apparently heavy beat surrenders its metrical
precedence to other syllables elsewhere”).58 Such a voicing emphasises
Hamlet’s official line, as it were, that his thoughts will be realised in blood
and therefore, presumably, in action. Thoughts will turn into bloody
deeds. Hamlet figures his bloodiness, or bloody-mindedness, in terms of
what Paster has called “Laudable Blood,” a blood awash with benignly
energetic “vital spirits.”59 For Ambroise Paré, the royal barber surgeon,
this blood “runs forth as it were by leaping, by reason of the vital spirit
contained together within it.”60 However, if we exclusively hear the line’s
metrical stresses a different Hamlet emerges—or rather, the tentative, vac-
illating Hamlet of critical legend. When reading only with the metre’s
stresses in our ears, we find that emphasis settles not on Hamlet’s promise
of action but (once again) on his thoughts: “My thoughts be bloody or
be nothing worth.” Hamlet’s newfound conviction will manifest not (or
not so much) in physical action, as we might crave by this late point in this
long play, but in a “somatic consciousness,” a kind of deep humoral blood
that is by contrast “sluggish” or “inanimate.”61 However humoral
Hamlet’s thoughts, on this stressing of the line they will scarce translate
into deeds. If this is a prosodic slip on Hamlet’s part, like the Freudian
parapraxis, it is a confession of his essential inertia, but it is also a humoural
exudation or secretion of that which “lies hid” in Shakespeare, where the
distinction between marked and stressed syllables can (paradoxically) give
voice to impulses which are “not speakable at all.”62
How can an actor perform this moment, or any other moment in which
the humoural versification of a text rises closer to the surface? Paster specu-
lates that an actor “can offer the image of an affective and physical control
so masterful as to quell, if only for a time, the inner turbulence of his own
humorality.”63 The actor thereby manages to have a humour or humours
“well within his affective command.”64 This would be near to what Erin
Sullivan has called “emotive improvisation,” a happening in which the
“radically conflicting paradigms” governing or shaping the understanding
of emotion in the period necessitate “a corresponding need” to clarify such
emotions “through active and wilful interpretation,” an interpretation that
could be a species of performed mastery.65 However, a humoural versifica-
tion such as Hamlet’s could end up cueing the humours of the actor’s
body quite independently of his volition, rather than allowing him to per-
form such humours with careful supervision or indeed pretence. The
humours, after all, were “forces […] at once extremely powerful and actu-
ally or potentially beyond our control”; they were “always active, always
escaping notice, always exceeding the domain of the will.”66 The same
might justly be said for prosody, which through its subtle, insinuating
rhythms “could control you without your knowledge.”67 A humoural ver-
sification could pose a challenge to an actor’s sense of agency: are these
performed humours chosen by the actor or is the actor being acted upon
by the verse’s humoural prosody (even if the verse’s “pre-articulate com-
mand” is “to act—now—in some definitively undefined new way”68)? And
where might this leave a reader or audience member, also exercised upon
by the humoural energies of verse? Ultimately, after all, “[t]o be in one’s
humor or out of it is not always in a man’s power to decide.”69
Notes
1. The phrase “cliché of rhythm” occurs in Steele, “Boundless Wealth,” 95.
2. Freeman and Taylor, “Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter.”
3. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy, 334–37. See also Galen’s commen-
tary on “The pulse for beginners,” Galen: Selected Works, 327.
4. Erickson, Language of the Heart, 15, 11.
24 R. STAGG
5. Holder, Rethinking Meter, 126.

6. See MS. V.a.355, f.7r. “Lines” may be singular. In his edition of The Three
Parnassus Plays, J. B. Leishman’s note for 2.1.302 indicates that “although
the scribe almost never employs the common secretary abbreviations for
-es, the tail of his -e here has rather more curl than usual.” In The Returne
from Parnassus, this line becomes “His sweeter verse contains hart robbing
life,” B3v. In one influential edition, The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, the line
has become somewhat garbled between manuscript and print copies: “His
sweeter verse contains hart [throbbing line],” 2.1.305. Leishman specu-
lates that “hart robbing” may have been the original reading in manuscript
(he thinks the Folger manuscript a later, revised copy), as an allusion to
Spenser’s Amoretti.
7. Thomas Wright, Passions of the Minde, 24. For “coarct,” see Oxford English
Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v., “coarct.” The question of how typical or
atypical Wright was as a writer about the “passions” and “humors” is well
treated in Sullivan, “The passions of Thomas Wright,” 25–44. Passions was
reprinted in 1604, 1620, 1621, and 1630.
8. Linklater, Freeing Shakespeare’s Voice, 154.
9. Menzer, “Lines,” 128.
10. Rokison, Shakespearean Verse Speaking, 51.
11. Treip, Milton’s Punctuation, 91.
12. Clement, Petty School, 11; Coles, Compleat English Schoolmaster, 108;
Campion, Obseruations, B2r.
13. See for example Sidney, Defence of Poesy, 248; Puttenham, Art of English
Poesy, 163–65.
14. Omond, English Verse, 40.
15. Scene/line references for this play are keyed to Shakespeare, Munday, and
Chettle, Sir Thomas More.
16. Harley MS. 7368, f.9r.
17. Mulcaster, Positions, I3v.
18. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 175.
19. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 824.
20. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1:237.
21. Robinson, Art of Pronunciation, 13; Read, Manuall of the Anatomy, 261
[mistakenly typeset as 361].
22. Vicary, Profitable Treatise, C3r.
23. Sale, “Eating Air,” 152. All Shakespeare references, except where other-
wise noted, are keyed to The Complete Works.
24. Sale, “Eating Air,” 156.
25. Smith, Acoustic World, 207–8.
26. Modern edition citations of Ford plays are from ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and
Other Plays.
27. Modern edition citations of Marlowe plays are from Complete Plays.
28. Hammond, “Noisy Comma,” 212.

29. Bertram, White Space in Shakespeare, 29, 26.
30. Tremblay, “Breath,” 96.
32. Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions, 49.
33. Paster, Humoring the Body, 2; Miller, Stuff, 50.
35. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 94–95.
36. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 1, 10.
37. Fienus, De viribus imaginationis, 62; Rogers, A philosophical discourse, 63.
38. Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare, 41.
39. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 2; Folkerth, Sound of Shakespeare, 26;
Habib, Shakespeare’s Pluralistic Concepts, 71; Morgann, “Essay,” 230.
40. Menzer, “Lines,” 128.
41. Bloom, Shakespeare, 11; Crane, Shakespeare’s Brain, 36.
42. Williams, Keywords, 240.
43. Hillman, “The Inside Story,” 301.
44. Freud, Ego and the Id, 357.
45. Dolven, “Shakespeare,” 3. Dolven is here referring to the notion of a high,
middle, and low style.
46. Puttenham, Art, 168.
47. Hoole, Latin grammar, 270; Coote, English School-Master, 26.
48. See Attridge, Rhythms of English Poetry, 164–72.
49. Hutson, Circumstantial Shakespeare, 44.
50. George T. Wright, Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, 195; Tarlinskja,
Shakespeare, 4.
51. Nuttall, New Mimesis, 176; Stanislavski, “Subtext,” 134–38.
52. Hillman, “Visceral Knowledge,” 81.
53. See Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition.
54. Maus, Inwardness and Theater, 32.
56. Kaufman, Elizabethan Introspection, 128.
57. Leggatt, “Standing Back from Tragedy,” 118.
58. Hughes, Winter Pollen, 338.
59. Paster, Body Embarrassed, especially ch. 2.
60. Paré, Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, 328.
61. Paster, “Nervous Tension,” 111; Paster, Body Embarrassed, 71.
62. Carlyle, “On Heroes,” 7.
65. Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy, 1.
66. James, Passion and Action, 11; Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 17.
26 R. STAGG
67. Martin, Rise and Fall of Meter, 20.

68. Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 134.
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CHAPTER 3
Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean

Stage
Darryl Chalk
“Why doe such as are in griefe, and in love, and in anger, sigh very oft?”
asks The Problems of Aristotle, the 1595 print version of the popular and
widely circulated pseudo-Aristotelian “problemata,” works aimed at
answering all manner of questions about topical issues in medicine and
natural philosophy.1 The response figures the causality of sighing as the
product of a soul and mind so fixated, “turned unto the cause” of the
overwhelming passion, that the individual effectively forgets to breathe:
The soule then being intentive upon that whither she moveth, doth after a
sort neglect & forget to give motive vertue and power unto the muscules of
the breast. Therefore the heart not receiving aire by opening of the breast,
& by a consequent neither blowing nor cooling, nor yet calling forth by
shutting and closing, any sighing superfluities, which are bred of the adus-
tion of bloud, whilest it dooth feare suffocation, the heart, I say, doth force
the minde and give her warning, that she would give more motion unto the
D. Chalk (*)
University of Southern Queensland, Darling Heights, QLD, Australia
e-mail: Darryl.Chalk@usq.edu.au

Switzerland AG 2021
32 D. CHALK
muscules, and cause greater breathing in and out, and that she would take
more store of colde ayre, and thrust out more excrements, and that often
small breathings woulde performe that that great one may effect. And there-
fore men of old time, called the word suspirio sighing.2
Sighing is here defined as an involuntary, circumstantial kind of deep

breathing. Excessive passion triggers an unconscious suppression of regu-
lar “small breathings” which is, in turn, rectified after the heart, in fear of
suffocating with humoral “superfluities,” sends an emergency signal, forc-
ing “the minde” to “give more motion” in the form of a sigh. In early
modern writing on the humoral body, sighing is an indicator of emotional
disturbance and often a symptom of underlying disease.
Sighs, sometimes accompanied by groans, sobs, and tears, are also
everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays. Curiously, they have received almost
no attention in scholarship on the passions and early modern theater.
References to sighing are often taken as a commonplace rather than as
potential cues to embodied action or clues to a character’s emotional state
and, yet, sighing had anatomical, humoral, spiritual, and pathological sig-
nificances in early modern culture. In The Passions of the Soul (1649), René
Descartes included sighing, along with “gestures of the eyes and face,
changes of colour, tremblings, languishing, swooning, laughter, tears,
[and] groans,” as among the nine key exterior signs by which passions
occurring in the body could be known to an observer.3 Descartes thus
assembles a catalogue of the spontaneous external characteristics of inner
perturbations, devoting space to each in turn. Yet many of the symptoms
of passionate excess can also be willfully manifested or, of course, per-
formed. Given how much Shakespearean drama is devoted to depicting
characters undergoing the emotional ravages of grief, love, and anger,
playing surely required the repeated display of such telltale humoral symp-
toms. This raises a question: What happened to actors’ bodies when they
performed the extremes of passionate states on the early modern stage?
The ubiquity of sighing provides a particularly interesting test case. As
Claudius suggests in Hamlet, “there’s matter in these sighs, these pro-
found heaves” (4.1.1), and thus, with such ideas in mind, this chapter
explores the representation of sighing on the Shakespearean stage in rela-
tion to other early modern writings on this respiratory phenomenon.4
Visceral, vital, non-verbal, and affective, sighing was more than merely
metaphorical: its use in Shakespeare often signifies the physicality and the-
atricality of the passions as necessarily performative phenomena.
3 LIKE FURNACE: SIGHING ON THE SHAKESPEAREAN STAGE 33
Definitions of the term “sigh” explicitly link this kind of breathing to

weighty emotions and the vocalization of such profound feeling. According
to the OED, sighing, then as now, is “a sudden, prolonged, deep, and
more or less audible respiration, following on a deep-drawn breath, and
esp. indicating or expressing dejection, weariness, longing, pain, or relief.”5
The “deep-drawn breath” is here a prelude to the sigh as an “audible res-
piration” laden with emotional sounding. Early modern lexicons suggest
an even greater range of possible meanings. For Thomas Cooper, in his
Thesaurus Lingae Romanae et Britannicae (1578), “Suspiro” can be
defined as “To sigh” but also “to desire fervently.”6 Sighing is here not
merely a vocal after-indicator of emotional breathing; it is the very embodi-
ment of longing. Such possibilities are extended by examples of classical
usage and derivative terms. While “Suspiriosus” means “Short winded:
that fetcheth breath painefully,” a further application of “Suspiro” is “To
sigh for love: by sighing to utter his inward love,” and the list for
“Suspirium” includes “To fetche deepe sighes: to sigh from the bottome
of ones heart.”7 Sighing as word and act is thus imbued with the affective
physiology of the passions.
Questions about whether sighing was considered positive or negative,
voluntary or involuntary in somatic experience are at issue in its depiction
on the early modern stage. Yet period writing on the subject often con-
structs sighing as a predominantly involuntary process with a variety of
causations, purposes, and effects. Descartes suggests that sighing, like
weeping, “presupposes sadness,” describing it as an anatomical agitation
emerging from tumultuous emotional change. He is at pains, though, to
distinguish it from weeping:
For whereas a man is excited to Weep, when the lungs are ful of blood; he is
incited to sigh when they are almost empty and when some imagination of
Hope or Joy opens the Orifice of the venous artery which Sadnesse had
contracted; because then the final remainder of blood in the lungs, falling all
together into the left side of the heart through this venous artery, and driven
on by a Desire to attain this Joy, which at the same time agitates all the
muscles of the Diaphragma and breast, the air is suddenly blown through
the mouth into the lungs, to fill up the vacant place of the blood. And this
is called sighing.8
That sighing functions as a response to a depletion and emptiness in the

lungs requiring an urgent, automatic refilling is akin to the earlier
34 D. CHALK
description of the process in The Problems of Aristotle. It is fascinating, and

perhaps telling, however, that it is also bound up with the notion of a sud-
den imaginative “Desire” to attain “Hope” or “Joy” which forces the
muscles of the diaphragm into action to counter the contraction caused by
“Sadnesse.” This idea of the body naturally seeking respite, and of sighing
as a kind of desire that ultimately provides relief during an abject emo-
tional state, seems to be a recurring idea in early modern accounts of sigh-
ing. Thus to Francis Bacon, in Sylva Sylvarum (1627), sighing was the
inevitable product of “Griefe and Paine […] caused by the Drawing in of
a greater Quantity of Breath to refresh the Heart that laboureth: like a
great Draught when one is thirsty. Sobbing is the same Thing stronger.”9
It is thus not as distinct from weeping as Descartes contends, though
Bacon sees sighing as part of a continuum of vocal reactions to pain and
grief, including “Sobbing,” “Groaning,” “Screaming,” and “Roaring,” all
of which are “the Impressions” following that which “The Passions of the
Minde, worke upon the Body.”10
In an earlier and more detailed examination of the subject, Timothie
Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy (1586) views sighing as intrinsically con-
nected to weeping. The latter is “of all the actions of melancholy” the
most “manifold and diverse in partes,” including the fact that it “shaketh
the whole chest with sighs, and sobbes.”11 While sighs can happen without
weeping and “are ordinarie and common upon causes that force no teares,
as every one hath experience,” weeping almost never occurs without sigh-
ing.12 Sighs and sobs in this formation are effectively coextensive, “differ-
ing onely in that sobbes are sighinges interrupted, and sighs sobbes at
large.”13 As with the later examples, this is caused when “the heart is
affected in griefe and sorrowe […] the Diaphragme, and the muscles
receive a weakenes […] whereby respiration is with more difficultie per-
formed […] which bringeth thereto a kind of suffocation.”14 Sighing
becomes the vital remedy to a heart asphyxiating and overwhelmed by
increasing heat and coagulating humors:
The heart being contracted […] delivereth not so freely his sootie and
smokie excrementes, whereby the spirites become impure, and it boyleth
with more distemper: which necessitie of fresh spirite and coole ayre
enforceth a deeper enlargement of the chest then is ordinarie; in which not
onely the midriffe playeth his parte, but outward intercostalls and middle
muscles of the ribbes, besides certaine of the shoulders, doe their endeavour
to this so necessary an office.15
Another random document with
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coumment il poroit passer le rivierre de Somme, car bien savoit que
li roys de Franche le sieuwoit à tout très grant effort. Si en fist li roys
englès parler à aucuns chevaliers franchois qu’il tenoit pour
prisonniers. Et leur faisoit proumettre grant courtoisie, mès que il li
volsissent enssignier un passaige pour passer le Somme, liquelx
devoit y estre ens ou pays entre Vismeu et Pontieu; mais li chevalier,
pour leur honneur, s’escusoient et disoient que nul n’en y savoient.
Quant li roys englès, qui estoit logiés ou grant hospital de
Oizimont, vit che qu’il ne porroit atraire aucuns chevaliers franchois
dou pays de Pontieu et d’ailleurs qu’il tenoit pour prisonniers, affin
que il li vosissent ensseignier passage pour passer et toutte sen host
le rivierre de Somme, et tout s’escuzoient pour leur honneur, si eut li
roys englès autre advis et conseil, que il fist venir devant lui gens de
menre estat et de le droite nation dou pays de Vismeu, que il tenoit
pour prisonniers, si leur dist enssi: «Se il a chi homme nul qui me
voeil enssegnier le passage, pour passer le rivierre de Somme, et
toutte mon host, je le quitteray de se prison et avecq lui cinq ou six
de ses compaignons pour l’amour de lui, et li donray cent noblez
d’Engleterre.»
Là eut un compaignon que on clammoit Gobin Agache, qui bien
congnissoit le passaige de le Blanke Take, car il avoit estet nouris
assés priès, et l’avoit passet et rappasset pluisseurs fois. Quant il oit
le proummesse dou roy, si eut grant joie, tant pour gaegnier lez
florins que pour estre delivréz de prison; si dist ensi: «Sire, oil, en
nom Dieu, se vous me volléz tenir couvent, je vous menray demain
au matin en tel lieu là où tout vostre ost sera passéz avant tierche,
sour l’abandon de ma teste. Je say ung gués là où douze homme
passeraient bien de froncq deux foix entre jour et nuit, et n’aroient de
l’yauwe plus hault que jusques à genoulx. Car li fluns de le mer est:
en venant, il regorge la rivierre si contremont, que nuls n’y poroit
passer; mès quant chilx fluns, qui vient deux foix entre jour et nuit,
s’en est tout rallés, li rivierre demeure là endroit si petitte, que on y
passe bien aise à piet et à cheval. Che ne fait on nulle part que là,
fors au pont à Aubeville, qui est forte ville et grande et bien garnie de
gens d’armes. Et à ce passage, sire, que je vous di, a gravier de
blanke marle, forte et dure, que on y puet seurement chariier, et pour
ce le appell’on le Blancque Take.»
Quant li roys oy les parolles dou varlet, il n’ewist mies estet ossi
liés qui li ewist donnet vingt mil escus; et li dist, s’il le trouvoit en
veritet, qu’il quitteroit tous sez compaignons pour l’amour de lui, et li
amenderoit son couvent. Et Agace li respondi: «Sire, oil. Ordonnés
vous sour ce, et pour y estre là sus le rivierre, devant soleil levant.»
Dist li roys: «Vollentiers.» Puis fist savoir par tuit son host que
chacuns fust armés et appareilliéz au son de le trompette, pour
mouvoir et departir de là pour aller ailleurs. Fº 92.
—Ms. de Rome: Ce jour que li rois d’Engleterre se departi
d’Arainnes et que il vint à Oizemont, li rois Phelippes de France se
departi de la chité d’Amiens et prist le cemin de Arainnes. Et estoit li
intension de li, quel part que il trouveroit le roi d’Engleterre et les
Englois, il les combateroit. Et avoit envoiiet devant, pour garder le
pas à la Blance Taqe grant fuisson de gens d’armes, des quels
messires Godemars dou Fai estoit chapitains, car on avoit enfourné
le dit roi que les Englois ne pooient avoir autre passage que par là.
Qant li rois de France vint à Arainnes, les Englois en estoient parti
dou matin. Encores trouvèrent les François biau cop de lors
pourveances, les pains ou four, et les chars ens ès hastiers, de quoi
les pluisseurs se disnèrent. Li rois de France se tint à Arainnes.
Gens d’armes et arbalestriers geneuois le sievoient de toutes
costés. Encores estoient à venir li contes Amé de Savoie et messires
Lois de Savoie, ses frères, et amenoient bien cinq cens honmes
d’armes. Li bons rois de Boesme et mesires Carles, ses fils, et leurs
routes sievoient le roi de France, et se logoient au plus priès de li
que il pooient. Tant de peuple venoient de tous lés que mervelles
seroit à penser; tous les camps estoient couvers de gens et de
charoi, qui poursievoient le roi. On disoit au roi: «Sire, cevauchiés
par ordenance. Les Englois sont enclos: il ne pueent avoir nullement
le pasage de la Blanqe Taqe si apparilliet, avoecques ce que
mesires Godemars dou Fai et grant gent d’armes sont par de delà la
rivière de Sonme, qui le garderont et deffenderont; et vous et li
vostre, lor venrés d’autre part au dos. Comptés ensi: il sont vostre,
car il ne sont que une puignie de gens ou regart des vostres. A celle
fois chi, en auerés vous raison; il ne vous pueent fuir ne escaper, se
il ne mucent en terre.» Fº 116.
P. 159, l. 18: voir Sup. var. (n. d. t.)
P. 159, l. 19: Gobin.—Mss. A 11 à 14: Colin. Fº 136.—Mss. A 20 à

22: Robin. Fº 205 vº.
P. 159, l. 19: Agace.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Agache. Fº 205 vº.—Mss. A
1 à 6, 11 à 14: Agathe. Fº 142.
P. 159, l. 22: passet.—Ms. B 6: le plus grosse nefs d’Espaigne y
passeroit. Fº 314.
P. 160, l. 15: cent nobles.—Mss. A 15 à 17: cent nobles d’or.
Fº 143.
P. 160, l. 19 et 21: voir Sup. var. (n. d. t.)
§ 269. P. 160, l. 22: Li rois d’Engleterre.—Ms. d’Amiens: Li roys ne

dormy mies gramment celle nuit, ains se leva à le mienuit, et fist
sounner le tronpette. Chacuns fu tantost appareilliéz, sommiers
tourssés, chars cargiés. Si se partirent, sour le point del jour, de le
ville de Oizemont, et chevauchièrent sour le conduit de ce varlet et
de ses compaignons, parmy le pays que on claimme Vismeu, tant
qu’il vinrent à soleil levant assés priès de che gués que on claimme
à le Blancque Take; mès li fluns de le mer estoit adonc tous plains: si
ne peurent passer. Ossi bien couvenoit il au roy atendre sez gens
qui venoient apriès lui. Si demoura là endroit jusques apriès prime,
que li fluns s’en fu tous rallés. Et ainssois que li fluns s’en fuist rallés,
vint d’autre part messires Godemars dou Fay à grant fuisson de
gens d’armes, envoiiéz de par le roy de Franche, si comme vous
avés oy. Et avoit li dis messires Godemars rassamblet grant fuisson
des gens dou pays à piet et à cheval avoecq les siens, qui tantost se
rengièrent sour le pas de le rivierre pour deffendre le passage. Mais
li roys englès ne laissa mies à passer pour che; ains coummanda à
ses marescaux tantost ferir ou gués et sez archiers traire fortement
as Franchois. Là commença ungs fors hustins, car messires
Godemar et li sien deffendoient vassaument le passaige. Là y eut
aucuns chevaliers et escuyers franchois d’Artois et de Pikardie et de
le carge monseigneur Godemar, qui, pour leur honneur avanchier, se
freoient ou dit gués et venoient d’encontre jouster as Englès. Là eut
mainte belle jouste et maintez bellez appertisses d’armes faittes. Et
vous di que li Englès eurent là ung mout dur encontre, car tout ceux
qui estoient avoecq monseigneur Godemar envoiiet pour garder et
deffendre le passage de le Blancque Taque, estoient gens d’eslite, et
se tenoient bien rengiet et sus le destroit dou passage de le rivierre:
dont li Englès estoient dur rencontré, quant il venoient à l’yssue. Et y
avoit Geneuois qui dou tret leur faisoient mout de maux; mais li
archier d’Engleterre traioient si fort et si ouniement qu’à merveillez,
et entroez qu’il ensonnioient les Franchois, gens d’armes passoient.
Et sachiés que li Englès se prenoient bien priès de bien yaux
combattre, car il leur estoit dit que li roys de Franche les sieuwoit à
plus de cent mil hommes. Et jà estoient aucun compaignon coureur
de le partie des François venus jusques as Englès, et qui en
reportèrent vraies enssaingnes au roy dez Franchois, si comme
vous oréz dire. Fº 92 vº.
—Ms. de Rome: Or retourrons au roi d’Engleterre, qui estoit en la
ville d’Oisemont, à quatre lieues priès d’Abeville, et avoit entendu,
par auquns prisonniers que ses gens avoient pris, que li rois de
France, à grant poisance, estoit venus à Arainnes et le sievoit
fortement. Li rois d’Engleterre desiroit à avoir passet la rivière de
Sonme, avant que li François venissent sur lui. Et fu ordonné, la nuit
que il se loga à Oisemont, que, tantos apriès mienuit, on se
deslogeroit, et fu conmandé que on sievist les banières des
marescaus. Tout ensi que il fu ordonné, il fu fait; et sonnèrent les
tronpètes des mareschaus tantos apriès mienuit. Toutes manières
de gens, au son des tronpètes, sallirent sus et se resvillièrent et
armèrent; au secont son des tronpètes, on toursa et apparilla, et se
missent toutes gens en ordenances des batailles, ensi que il
devoient estre et aler. Au tier son, tout montèrent à ceval et se
departirent et prissent le cemin, et jà estoit l’aube dou jour apparant,
et se missent sus les camps; et ne laissièrent nulle cose derrière, et
esqievèrent le cemin pour aler à Abeville, et prissent celi de la
Blanqe Taqe. Si bien se esploitièrent que, sus le point de solel
levant, le flun estoit tous plains; et qant il vinrent au pas, il trouvèrent
que la mer weboit et se mettoit au retour. Donc dissent il: «Vechi
bonnes nouvelles: avant que l’arrière garde soit venue, li avantgarde
passera.» Messires Godemars dou Fai et sa carge estoient d’aultre
part la rivière de Sonme. Et avoient les gens d’armes requelliet et
assamblet parmi tout le pais et fait venir avoecques euls, et avoient
les arbalestriers d’Amiens, d’Abeville, de Saint Riqier et tous les
arbalestriers des villes là environ et les honmes de deffense aussi.
Et estoient bien douse mille, et quidoient bien garder le pasage,
mais non fissent, ensi que je vous recorderai; mais avant je vous
parlerai un petit dou roi de France.
Qant ce vint le joedi au matin, li rois de France, qui logiés estoit à
Arainnes, se desloga et envoia ses coureurs devant pour descouvrir
le pais, et pour avoir nouvelles des Englois. Et vinrent à Oizemont, et
trouvèrent encores grant apparel de chars en hastiers, à moitié
quites, là laissies, et des pastés grant plenté ens ès fours, et des
chars en caudrons et en caudières sus le feu, qui n’estoient point
quites. Et disoient li auqun François: «Les Englois sont malescieus.
Il ont tout volentiers laissiet ces pourveances en cel estat, à la fin
que nous nos i ataqons. Il n’i a gaires que il se departirent de chi.»
Les nouvelles vinrent au roi de France, là où il cevauçoit entre
Arainnes et Oisemont, et mesire Jehan de Hainnau en sa
compagnie, et li fut dit et nonchiet le couvenant des Englois. Adonc
fist li rois haster ses gens, et vint à Oisemont ensi que à heure de
tierce; et entra en la ville et descendi à l’ostel des Templiers, et là
s’aresta, et toute li hoos aussi. Et destoursèrent les sonmiers et les
pourveances, et burent et mengièrent un petit, et puis tantos
retoursèrent et missent à voiture. Et fu adonc conmandé que tout
voiturier et charoi et sonmiers presissent le cemin de Abbeville et
tournaissent celle part, et toutes gens d’armes et de piet sievissent
les banières des marescaus. Ensi conme il fu ordonné, il fu fait. Tout
se departirent de Oizemont, et n’i arestèrent li François, depuis que il
i furent venu, que une heure; et se missent tout au cemin en
ordenance de bataille et en grande volenté de trouver les Englois, à
ce que il moustroient. Les Englois, qui estoient venu sus le pas de
Blanqe Taqe pour passer oultre, n’eurent aultre espasce de loisir que
ce que li François missent à venir de Oizemont à la Blanque Taque,
où il puet avoir de cemin environ cinq lieues. Or vous recorderai
conment la besongne se porta celle journée que les Englois vinrent
pour passer la rivière de Sonme.
Mesires Godemars dou Fai et sa poissance estoit d’aultre part
l’aige, ens ou pais de Pontieu; et les François estoient avoecques
lui, tout rengiet et ordonné en bataille sus le rivage. Li rois
d’Engleterre et ses gens estoient en Vismeu: ensi se nonme le pais
où il se tenoient. Et bien veoient François et Englois l’un l’autre; et
atendirent là les Englois tant que la rivière fu bien ravalée. Mais les
Englois, qui desiroient à passer, le prissent moult vert, car bien
sçavoient que les François les poursievoient, et si veoient lors
ennemis d’aultre part la rivière. Et avint que pluisseur chevaliers et
esquiers, qui se desiroient à avancier et à faire armes, brochièrent
cevaus des esporons, les lances ens ès poins et les targes au col, et
entrèrent en la rivière. D’aultre part, chevaliers et esquiers françois,
qui veoient les Englois venir, se vorrent aussi avanchier et se
boutèrent contre euls en la rivière. Et i ot fait des joustes au plat de
la rivière... abatus et bien moulliés et noiiés, qui ne les euist rescous.
Finablement toutes manières de gens se missent au pasage et en
haste de passer. Là couvint que Englois fuissent bonnes gens
d’armes et de grande ordenance; car les François, qui estoient
d’aultre part, les empeçoient et ensonnioient ce qu’il pooient. Fos
116 vº et 117.
§ 270. P. 162, l. 21: Sus le pas.—Ms. d’Amiens: Sus le pas de le

Blancque Take fu la bataille dure et forte, et mout bien gardée et
deffendue des Franchois; et maintes belles appertisses d’armes y
eut ce jour fait, d’un lés et de l’autre. Mais finablement li Englès
passèrent oultre, à com grant mesaise que ce fuist, et se traissent
sus lez camps. Depuis qu’il eurent gaegniet le pas de le rivière et
qu’il furent sur lez camps, li Franchois furent tantost desconffis. Et y
eut là grant occision et maint homme mort de Abbeville, de Saint
Rikier, de Rue, de Monstroel, dou Crotoi et dou pays de Pontieu, qui
là estoient tout assamblet. Et s’en parti messires Godemars
durement navrés et aucuns chevaliers et escuiers de se routte, et en
laissièrent pluisseurs mors et pris. Quant li Englès, qui premiers
estoient passet, furent oultre, il fissent voie as darrains et à leurs
charoy et à leurs pourveanches. Encorrez n’estoient il mies tout
oultre, quant aucun escuier as seigneurs de Franche qui aventurer
se volloient, especiaulment de chyaux de l’Empire, dou roy de
Behaingne et de monseigneur Jehan de Haynnau, vinrent sur yaux,
et concquissent aucuns chevaux et harnas et tuèrent des Englès
sour le rivaige, qui mettoient painne à passer, affin qu’il fuissent tout
oultre. Les nouvellez vinrent au roy Phelippe de Franche, qui
chevauchoit fortement celle matinée, et estoit partis de Arainnes,
que li Englès avoient passet le Blancque Taque et desconfit messire
Ghodemar et se routte. De ces nouvellez fu li roys moult
courouchiés, car il quidoit bien trouver là les Englès sus le passage.
Si demanda se il poroit passer à le Blancque Take: on li respondi
que nenil, car li fluns de le mer commençoit jà à remonter. Dont eut
conseil li roys de venir passer le rivierre de Somme au pont à
Abbeville, et retourna mout courouchiéz, et s’en vint ce joedi jesir à
Abbeville. Et toutte sen host sieuwy ce train, et vinrent li seigneur
logier en le ditte ville et ou pays environ, car tout n’y pooient mies y
estre logiéz, tant estoient grant fuison. Fº 92 vº.
—Ms. de Rome: Et avant que li Englois fuissent tout passet, il i ot
grande escarmuce et maint homme reversé. Toutes fois, li Englois
passèrent oultre, à quel mescief que ce fust; et ensi que il passoient,
il prendoient terre et s’ordonnoient sus les camps. Sitos que ces
bonhonmes dou pais, que messires Godemars avoit amené pour li
aidier à garder et à deffendre le pasage, sentirent les saiettes de ces
archiers, et que il en furent enfillé, il se desroutèrent tout, et ne
tinrent point de ordenance et de conroi, mais tournèrent les dos et
laissièrent les gentils honmes combatre et faire ce que il pooient. Se
les Englois euissent aussi bien entendu au cachier et au prendre
prisonniers, que il entendirent à lor charoi et sonmiers à metre hors
de la rivière, il euissent porté plus de damage assés les François
que il ne fissent. Qant messires Godemars dou Fai vei le grant
mescief qui tournoit sus euls, et que tout li Englois estoient oultre, et
que, de sa poissance, ce n’estoit riens, car moult de ses honmes
fuioient et se sauvoient, si s’apensa que il se sauveroit aussi, car
point n’i avoit de recouvrier. Si prist les camps et fist retourner sa
banière avoecques lui. Et me fu dit que chils qui le portoit, le bouta
en un buisson, car elle l’ensonnioit au brocier son ceval, et que là
elle fu trouvée en ce jour meismes des Englois. Messires Godemars,
tous desconfis et desbaretés, et auquns chevaliers de sa route, s’en
vinrent à Saint Riqier en Pontieu, et là se tinrent pour aprendre des
nouvelles et où li rois de France estoit. Or, vous parlerons dou roi
d’Engleterre, conment il persevera depuis que il ot conquis le
pasage. Fº 117.
P. 162, l. 30: desconfit.—Ms. B 6: Toutefois les Englès vinrent sy

enforchiement que il conquirent la rivière et prirent terre et
desconfirent tous les Poulyés et Normans qui là estoient. Et y fut pris
le conte de Dreus, le sire de Castillon, le sire de Pois, le sire de
Briauté, le sire de Cresecque, le sire de Bourbourc, messires
Hectors Kierés et grant foison de chevaliers et d’escuiers. Et en y
eult mors, que d’un que d’autre, bien six mille. Et s’eufuy messires
Godemars et se sauva. Fº 315.
P. 163, l. 6: de Rue.—Mss. A 30 à 33: d’Arras. Fº 186 vº.
P. 163, l. 6: Saint Riquier.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Saint Richier.
Fº 206 vº.
P. 163, l. 7: plus d’une grosse liewe.—Mss. A 20 à 22: plus de
deux grosses lieues. Fº 206 vº.
§ 271. P. 164, l. 5: Quant li rois.—Ms. d’Amiens: Or parlerons dou

roy englès coumment il persevera depuis qu’il fu passés à le
Blancque Take, et qu’il eult desconfi monseigneur Godemar dou Fay
et lez Franchois. Il s’aroutèrent et se missent en ordonnance si
comme il avoient fait par devant en venant jusques à là, et
chevauchièrent tout bellement et à leur aise. Quant il se trouvèrent
en Pontieu et le rivierre de Somme à leur dos, si en loa li roys englès
ce jour Dieu par pluisseurs foix, qui tel grasce li avoit fait, et fist venir
avant le varlet qui le passaige li avoit enssaigniet, et li quitta se
prison et à tous ses compaignons pour l’amour de lui, et li fist
delivrer cent noblez et un bon ronchin: de celui ne say jou plus
avant. Mais li Englès chevauchièrent tout souef et tout joyant, et
eurent che jour empensset de logier en une bonne et grosse ville
que on claimme Noyelle, qui priès de là estoit; mès quant il seurent
que [elle estoit à] la comtesse d’Aubmarle, qui estoit serour à
monseigneur Robert d’Artois, qui trespassés estoit, il assegurèrent le
ville et le pays appertenans à le damme pour l’amour de lui, de quoy
elle remerchia mout le roy et les marescaux. Si allèrent logier plus
avant ens ou pays en aprochant la Broie. L’endemain au matin,
chevauchièrent li marescal englès et vinrent jusquez au Crotoy, qui
est une bonne ville et marcande et bon port de mer; si le gaegnièrent
à peu de fait, car elle n’estoit point fremmée: si le pillièrent et
robèrent enssi qu’il veurent. Et puis s’en revinrent au soir deviers
leur host, et amenèrent grant fuisson de buefs, de vaches, de pors et
de brebis, et ossi grant fuison de bons vins de Poito et de
Gascoingne, qu’il avoient trouvet en le ville dou Crotoy, car elle en
estoit bien pourveue. Ceste nuit se tinrent tout aise, et à l’endemain,
se deslogièrent et tirèrent pour venir deviers Crechi en Pontieu; si
chevauchièrent che venredi jusquez à heure de miedi. Et se loga
adonc toutte li os par le coummandement dou roy, assés priès de
Crechi. Fº 93.
—Ms. de Rome: Qant li rois d’Engleterre et ses gens furent oultre,
et que il eurent mis en cace et desconfi lors ennemis et delivré la
place, et que il ne veoient ne trouvoient mais qui lor veast le cemin, il
se traissent bellement et ordonneement ensamble et aroutèrent tout
lor charoi, et cevauchièrent, banières desploiies, li avant garde des
marescaus premiers, le roi et son fil le prince apriès, et l’arrière
garde tout derrière. Et cevauçoient ensi, par ordenance que il
avoient fait ou païs de Vexin et de Vismeu, et ne se esfreoient de
riens, puis que il sentoient la rivière de Sonme derière euls. Il
n’avoient mais que la rivière de Qance à passer, qui court desous la
ville de Monstruel, et orent intension d’aler veoir Noielle et asallir le
chastiel et logier dedens la ville. Mais qant il sceurent que elle estoit
à madame d’Aumale, serour à mesire Robert d’Artois, qui
trespassés estoit, il tournèrent d’aultre part et asegurèrent le castel
et toute la ville. Mais li marescal cevauchièrent jusques au Crotoi et
prissent la ville et le ardirent, mais il ne fissent riens au chastiel, car il
est trop fors; et chevauchièrent viers Saint Esprit de Rue, et prissent
la ville et le ardirent. Et se logièrent les Englois là environ la Broie, et
orent grant fuisson de bons vins, qui furent trouvé au Crotoi des
marceans de Saintonge et de la Rocelle, qui là gissoient à l’ancre. Et
le venredi il ceminèrent tant que il vinrent à Creci en Pontieu et là se
arestèrent, et se requellièrent toutes les trois batailles des Englois
ensamble. Fº 117.
P. 164, l. 23: Noielle.—Mss. A 1 à 6: Norle. Fº 143 vº.—Mss. A 11
à 14: Nocle. Fº 137 vº.—Mss. A 18, 19: Noile. Fº 147.
P. 164, l. 25 et 26: sereur à monsigneur Robert d’Artois.—Ms. B 6:
nièche à messire Goddefroy de Harcourt. Fº 316.
P. 164, l. 30: la Broie.—Mss. A 1 à 6: la Voie. Fº 143 vº.—Mss. A
11 à 22: la Voye. Fº 137 vº.—Mss. A 8, 9: la Boye. Fº 129 vº.
P. 165, l. 15: de Saint Esperit de Rue.—Mss. A 20 à 22: de Saint
Esprit et de Rue. Fº 207.
§ 272. P. 165, l. 20: Bien estoit infourmés.—Ms. d’Amiens: Bien

savoit li roys englès et estoit emfourmés que li roys Phelippez de
Franche le sieuwoit à tout son grant effort, et avoit grant desir de
combattre à lui, si comme il appairoit, car il l’avoit vistement
poursieuwi jusquez à le Blancque Take et estoit retournés arrierre à
Abbeville. Si dist adonc li roys englès que jammais n’yroit plus avant,
si aroit veus et attendus ses annemis, et que il estoit sus son bon
hiretaige de Pontieu, qui estoit à madamme se mère et li avoit estet
donnés en mariaige, pour tant avoit il mieux cause et raison de là
atendre ses ennemis que ailleurs, et de prendre l’aventure et le
fortune telle que Dieux li envoieroit. Or savoit il bien que il n’avoit pas
si grant gens de six fois comme estoient si annemy: pour tant avoit il
plus grant mestier, ou cas que combattre se volloit, de regarder à
son conroy et aviser le marce et le pays et d’entendre à son
avantaige. Si fist touttez mannierrez de gens logier très ce venredi,
et leur dist et fist dire par son connestable et ses marescaux, que
chacuns se pourveist et appareillast endroit soy, si comme pour
attendre le bataille, car, se li Franchois venoient, il seroient combatu.
Adonc entendi chacuns à se besoingne che venredi toutte jour à
rebourbir leurs armures, et remettre tout leur harnoy en bon point et
à yaux fortefiier. Et regardèrent et advisèrent li doy marescal et
messires Renaux de Gobehem et messires Richart de Stanfort terre
et plache pour ordounner leur batailles et atendre leurs ennemis.
Fº 93.
—Ms. de Rome: Bien estoit enfourmés li rois d’Engleterre que son
adversaire, li rois de France, le sievoit à tout son grant effort, si
ques, qant li rois d’Engleterre se vei à Creci en Pontieu, il dist à ses
gens: «Prenons chi place de terre, et attendons nostres ennemis qui
nous poursievent. Je sui sus mon droit hiretage, qui me vient de par
madame de mère. Si le vodrai deffendre et calengier contre ceuls
qui le me vodront debatre.» Donc se logièrent les Englois sus les
camps et missent en bonne ordenance, et avoient vivres et
pourveances assés, qui les poursievoient; et aussi li fourageur en
trouvèrent assés, qant il orent passet la rivière de Sonme. Et fist li
dis rois aviser et regarder par ses chevaliers les plus usés d’armes,
le lieu et la place de terre, où il ordonneroit ses batailles et atenderoit
ses ennemis. Ce furent li contes de Warvich, mesires Renauls de
Gobehen, mesire Godefroi de Harcourt et le conte de Sufforc. Chil
quatre baron, le samedi au matin, avisèrent et considerèrent bien la
place de terre et raportèrent au roi: «Sire, à nostre avantage, nous
attenderons chi nostres ennemis.» Et li rois respondi: «Ce soit, ou
nom de Dieu et de saint Gorge!» Ensi se portèrent les ordenances.
Or parlons un petit dou roi Phelippe de France, liquels poursievi le
joedi, qant il se departi de Oizemont, les Englois jusques moult priès
de la Blanqe Taqe. On li dist sus le cemin: «Sire, les Englois sont
oultre, et li flos de la mer conmence à retourner. Vous ne poés
passer par là: il vous fault revenir à Abeville, et là passerés vous la
rivière de Sonme à pont et toutes vostres aussi.» Li rois crei ce
consel et retourna à Abeville, et toutes ses gens, et se logièrent: ce
fu le joedi; et le venredi aussi, il se tint là tout le jour, attendans ses
gens, car il en i avoit grant fuisson derrière. Fº 117 vº.
§ 273. P. 167, l. 3: Le venredi.—Ms. d’Amiens: Che venredi tout le

jour se tint li roys Phelippez de Franche en Abbeville, attendans sez
gens, et faisoit ossi passer oultre les aucuns pour estre plus
appareilliet quant li bataille se feroit. Et avoit li dis roys de Franche
envoiiet devant ses marescaux, monseigneur Carle seigneur de
Montmorensi et le seigneur de Saint Venant, pour aprendre et savoir
le couvenant des Englès. Si raportèrent li dessus dit au roy à heure
de vespres que li Englèz estoient logiet assés priès de Crechi en
Pontieu, et moustroient, seloncq leur ordounanche, qu’il atenderoient
là le roy. De ces nouvelles fu li roys de Franche moult liés, et dist, se
il plaisoit à Dieu, que à l’endemain il seroient combatu. Si pria au
soupper dalés lui, che venredi, les haux prinches qui adonc estoient
dedens Abbeville, telx que le roy de Behaingne, le comte
d’Alenchon, son frère, le comte de Blois, son nepveu, le duc de
Loerainne, le comte de Flandres, monseigneur Jehan de Haynnau,
le comte de Namur, le comte de Salebruche, l’arcevesque de Roem,
l’arcevesque de Rains, l’arcevesque de Sens, l’evesque de Laon, le
comte d’Auçoire, le comte de Halcourt et pluisseurs autres. Et fu che
soir en grant recreation et en grant parlement d’armes, et pria à tous
les seigneurs que il fuissent amit et courtois, sans envie, sans
orgoeil et sans haynne li uns as autrez, et chacun li eut en couvent.
Encorres atendoit li roys le comte de Savoie et monseigneur Loeys
de Savoie, son frère, qui devoient venir à bien mil lanches, Savoiiens
et de le Dauffinet; car enssi estoient il mandet et retenut et paiiet de
leurs gaiges pour trois mois tous pleniers. Or vous conterons dou roy
englèz et de son couvenant, et coumment il ordounna ses batailles,
et puis si retourons as Franchois. Fº 93.
—Ms. de Rome: Ce venredi, envoia li rois descouvrir sus les
camps, pour aprendre le couvenant des Englois. Et raportèrent chil
qui envoiiet i furent, que les Englois avoient pris place et pièce de
terre au dehors de la ville de Creci en Pontieu. Et fu dit ensi au roi:
«Sire, à ce que il moustrent et sont ordonné, il vous atenderont, et
auerés la bataille.» De ces nouvelles fu li rois Phelippes tous resjois,
et conmanda à ses marescaus et au mestre des arbalestriers que il
regardaissent que toutes gens fuissent prest et ordonné, car le
samedi on iroit combatre les Englois. Chil obeirent au
conmandement dou roy, et se apparillièrent li signeur de France et
lors gens de tous poins. Là estoient logiet dedens Abbeville et venu
pour servir le roi, premierement li rois de Boesme, messires Carles
de Boesme son fils, rois d’Alemagne, li contes de Alençon, li contes
de Flandres, li contes de Blois, li dus de Lorainne, li contes de
Harcourt, li contes de Namur, li contes d’Aumale, li contes de Forois,
li contes d’Auçoire, li contes de Sansoire, le daufin d’Auvergne, le
conte de Boulongne et tant de nobles et hauls signeurs que la
matère en seroit trop longe au prononchier et au nonmer. Et estoit la
ville de Abbeville, qui est une ville grande et estendue et bien
logans, si raemplie de gens d’armes que tout estoit plain et pris, et
encores tous les villages de là environ. Mesires Godemars dou Fai
se tenoit en la ville de Saint Riquier, et n’osoit venir à Abeville
deviers le roi Phelippe, car il le sentoit trop crueuls, pour tant que,
sus sa garde et carge, li rois d’Engleterre et les Englois estoient
passet oultre à la Blanqe Taqe. Et de ce il estoit bien consilliés, car
voirement se il fust venus avant deviers le roi, entrues que il estoit
en son aïr, il euist fait le dit messire Godemar dou Fai pendre, jà ne
l’en euist respité ne deporté. Et en avoit parlé moult hault li dis rois
sus celle fourme, là où mesires Jehans de Hainnau estoit presens.
Encores atendoit li rois de France le conte de Savoie et mesire Lois
de Savoie son frère, qui venoient à bien mil lances de Savoiiens et
de Geneuois. Par especial, la poisance dou roi de France estoit trop
grande enviers ceste des Englois, car li rois de France avoit bien
vingt mil honmes d’armes et soissante [mil] honmes de piet des
conmunautés dou roiaulme de France et bien vingt mil Geneuois
arbalestriers; et li rois d’Engleterre, quatre mil honmes d’armes et
douze mil archiers. Nous retournerons au roi d’Engleterre et
parlerons de son couvenant. Fos 117 vº et 118.
P. 167, l. 20: au souper.—Ms. B 6: à l’abeie Saint Pière. Fº 318.
P. 167, l. 22: premierement.—Le ms. B 6 ajoute: messires Charles
de Behaingne, ses filz, qui jà avoit enchergiet les armes, le roy de
Navare. Fos 318 et 319.
§ 274. P. 168, l. 8: Ce venredi.—Ms. d’Amiens: Che venredi, si

comme je vous ai dit, se loga li roys englès à plains camps à toutte
son host, et se aisièrent bien de ce qu’il avoient: che fu assés, car il
avoient trouvet le pays moult cras de vins et de touttez autres
pourveances. Si donna à soupper che venredi tous lez baronz et le
plus des chevaliers de son host, et leur fist moult grant chière, et
puis leur dounna congiet d’aller reposer, si comme il fissent. Ceste
meysme nuit, ensi que jou ay oy depuis recorder, quant touttes ses
gens furent parti de lui et qu’il fu demourés dallés les chevaliers de
son corps et de sa cambre, il entra en son oratore et fu là en genoulx
et en orisons devant son autel, en priant à Dieu que il le laiast partir
de le besoingne à honneur. Environ mienuit il alla couchier, et se
leva l’endemain assés matin par raison, et oy messe et s’acumenia,
et ses fils li prinches de Gallez ossi, et en tel mannière li plus de
l’host. Et oïrent tout li seigneur messe et s’acumeniièrent et
confessèrent et se missent en bon estat.
Apriès les messes, li roys commanda à touttes gens armer et yssir
de lor logeis et à traire sus les camps, et fist faire un grant parck
priès d’un bois de tous les chars et charettez de l’host, liquelx pars
n’eut qu’une seule entrée, et fist mettre tous les chevaux dedens che
parck, puis ordounna trois bataillez bellement et sagement. S’en
dounna la premierre à son aisnet fil le prinche de Gallez à tout douze
cens armures de fier, quatre mil archiers et quatre mil Gallois de son
pays, et mist son fil en le garde dou comte de Warvich, dou comte
de Kenfort, dou comte de Kent, de monseigneur Godeffroy de
Halcourt, de monseigneur Renaut de Gobehen, de monseigneur
Richart de Stanfort, de monseigneur Jehan de Biaucamp, de
monseigneur Thummas de Hollandes, de monseigneur Jehan
Camdos et de pluisseurs autres bons chevaliers et escuiers. Et
donna la seconde bataille au comte de Norhantonne, au comte de
Sufforch, à l’evesque de Durem, à monseigneur Loeis de Biaucamp,
au seigneur de le Ware, au seigneur de Willebi et as pluisseurs
autres bons chevaliers et escuiers, à tout douze cens armures de
fier et trois mil archiers. Et la tierche il retint pour lui, qui devoit estre
[entre] ces deux batailles, à tout quinze cens ou seize cens armurez
de fier et quatre mil archiers et le remannant de pietons. Et sachiés
que tout estoient Englès ou Gallois: il n’y eult miez plus hault que six
chevaliers d’Allemaingne, desquelx fu li ungs messire Rasses
Masurez, je ne say lez autrez noummer, et messires Oulphars de
Ghistellez, de Hainnau.
Quant li roys eut enssi ordonné sez batailles par l’avis de ses
marescaux en un biel plain camp devant son parck deseure dit, là où
il n’avoit fraite ne fosset, et tout estoient à piet, il alla tout autour de
renck en renck, et leur amonestoit de si bonne chière, en riant, de
chacun bien faire son devoir, que ungs homs couars en deuwist
hardis devenir. Et coummanda sour le hart que nuls ne se meuvist
ne desroutast de son renck pour cose qu’il veist, ne alast au gaaing,
ne despouillast mort ne vif, sans son congiet, coumment que li
besoingne tournaist; car, se li fortune estoit pour yaux, chacuns
venroit assés à tamps et à point au gaaing; et, se li fortune estoit
contre yaux, il n’avoient que faire de gaegnier. Quant il ot tout
ordonnet et coummandé ensi comme vous avéz oy, il donna congiet
que chacuns alast boire et reposer jusqu’au son de le trompette, et
quant li trompette sonneroient, que chacuns revenist à son droit
renck, desoubz se bannierre, là où ordonnéz estoit. Si fissent touttez
gens son coummandement, et s’en allèrent boire et mengier un
morsiel et rafreschir pour y estre plus nouviel, quant il besongneroit.
Fº 93 vº.
—Ms. de Rome: Ce venredi, ensi que je vous ai dit, se loga li rois
d’Engleterre à plains camps o toute son hoost, et se aisièrent de ce
que il orent. Il avoient bien de quoi, car il trouvèrent le pais cras et
plentiveus de tous vivres, de vins et de viandes, et estoient bien
pourveu sus lors sonmiers, car il en avoient grant fuisson trouvé en
Normendie, ou Vexin et en Vismeu. Ce venredi, donna li rois
d’Engleterre à souper tous les barons et les capitainnes de son
hoost, et lor fist bonne chière et lie, et puis lor donna congiet d’aler
reposer, si com il le fissent. Ceste meismes nuit, qant toutes ses
gens furent departi de li, et que il fu demorés avoecques les
chevaliers de sa cambre, il entra en son oratore, et fu là en genouls
et en orisons devant un autel que ses cambrelens avoient fait, ensi
que on fait et ordonne pour un roi, qant il est logiés as camps, et
reconmenda à Dieu toutes ses besongnes, et li pria affectuesement
que il peuist, à son honnour, retourner en Engleterre, et puis ala
couchier. Le samedi au matin, il se leva et apparilla, et li princes de
Galles, son fils, et aussi fissent tout chil de l’hoost. Et oïrent messe
et se confessèrent li rois et ses fils, et la grignour partie de ceuls de
l’hoost, et se aqumeniièrent et missent tout en bon estat, car bien
sçavoient que point ne partiroient dou jour sans bataille. Qant tout ce
fu fait, il fu heure de mengier et boire un cop, et puis entendre à li
ordonner et à mettre en ordenance de bataille. Qant il eurent
mengiet et beu à lor aise, et il se furent armé et mis en ordenance, il
se traissent tout sus les camps en la propre place que il avoient le
jour devant aviset.
Et fist faire li rois un grant parc priès d’un bois derrière son hoost,
et là mettre et retraire tous chars, carettes et sonmages, et fist
encores tous les cevaus entrer dedens ce parc, et demorèrent tout
honme à piet; et n’avoit en ce parc que une seulle entrée. Encores là
presentement il fist faire et ordonner par son connestable le conte de
Herfort et de Norhanton et ses marescaus, trois batailles. Et fu mis
et ordonnés en la première Edouwars, son fil, li princes de Galles. Et
dalés le prince furent esleu à demorer, pour li garder et consillier, li
contes de Warvich, li contes de Kentfort, mesires Godefrois de
Harcourt, mesires Renauls de Gobehen, mesires Tomas de
Hollandes, messires Richars de Stanfort, li sires de Manne, li sires
de le Ware, li sires de Felleton, messires Jehans Candos, mesires
Bietremieus de Brouhes, mesires Robers de Noefville, mesires
Thomas Clifors, mesires Guillaumes Penniel, mesires Jehans
Hacconde, li sires de Boursier, mesires James d’Audelée, mesires
Pières d’Audelée, li sires de Basset, li sires de Bercler, li sires de
Ponnins, li sires de Moulins et pluisseurs aultres, lesquels je ne puis
pas tous nonmer. Et pooient estre en la bataille dou prince environ
douse cens honmes d’armes et quatre mille archiers et mille Gallois,
trop apertes gens. Si se mist la bataille dou prince en ordenance
moult proprement, tout signeur desous sa banière ou son pennon.
En la seconde bataille furent li contes de Herfort et de Norhantonne,
li contes d’Arondiel, li sires de Roos, li sires de Lussi, li sires de
Persi, li sires de Noefville, li sires de Braseton, li sires de Helinton, li
sires de Multon, li sires de Fil Watier, li sires de Fil Warin, et
pluisseurs aultres et tant que il furent douse cens hommes d’armes
et quatre [mille] archiers. La tierce bataille ot li rois pour son corps et
pluisseurs bons chevaliers et esquiers; et estoient en sa bataille
environ quinse cens hommes d’armes et siis mille autres hommes
parmi les archiers.
Qant ces batailles furent ordonnées et mises à lor devoir, et que
casquns sçavoit quel cose il devoit faire, on amena le roi une petite
blance hagenée: il monta sus, et puis cevauça autour des batailles
en priant et en amonestant ses hommes que casquns vosist
entendre à bien faire son devoir, et que tout i estoient tenu; et
retenoit sus son corps et se ame que pour son hiretage et son bon
droit, que Phelippes de Valois li ostoit et perseveroit en ce, il avoit
passet la mer et atendoit l’aventure de la bataille. Tout respondirent
à lui, chil qui ses paroles entendirent, que loiaument il s’aquiteroient,
tant que tout i aueroient honnour, et il lor en saueroit gré. De ces
responses les remercia li rois, et puis revint à sa bataille, et descendi
de sa hagenée, et se mist à piet avoecques ses gens et manda son
fil, le prinche. On li amena et fu adestrés de quatre chevaliers de son
corps qui sont nonmé ensi: mesires Jehans Candos, mesires
Bietremieus de Bruhes, mesires James d’Audelée et mesires
Guillaumes Penniel. Li enfes se engenoulla devant son père: li rois
le prist par la main et le baisa et le fist chevalier, et puis le renvoia en
l’ordenance de sa bataille, et pria et enjoindi as quatre chevaliers
desus nonmés que il en fesissent bonne garde; et il respondirent en
inclinant le roi, que tout en feroient lor devoir. Qant ces batailles
furent toutes apaisies et mises en pas et en ordenance, ensi que
vous avez oï, on ordonna de par les marescaus que casquns
s’aseist à terre et mesist son arc ou son bacinet devant lui, pour
estre plus frès, qant on asambleroit. Tout ensi que il fu ordonné, il fu
fait. Et se reposèrent et rafresqirent les Englois par la fourme et
manière que dit vous ai. Or retournons à l’ordenance dou roi de
France et des François qui estoient logiet dedens Abbeville. Fº 118.
P. 169, l. 14 et 15: Stanfort.—Mss. A 1 à 6: Pontchardon. Fº 145.

P. 169, l. 15: Manne.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 11 à 14, 18, 19: Mauni,
Mauny. Fº 145.
P. 169, l. 15: de le Ware.—Mss. A 18, 19: de Ware. Fº 148 vº.
P. 169, l. 16: Chandos.—Ms. B 6: qui estois tenus pour ung moult
vaillant homme d’armes et saige; et estoit delés le banière du
prinche, laquelle messires Thomas Ourduwich portoit. Là estoit le
sire de le Ware, le sire de la Poule, le sire de Basset et plus de deux
mille hommes d’armes et quatre mille archiés. En la seconde
bataille, estoit le conte de Norhantonne, le conte de Herfort, le conte
d’Arondel, le sire de Manne, messires Hues de Hastinges, le sire de
Willeby, messires Thomas Bisse et pluiseurs aultres qui estoient
douze cens lanches et deus mille archiers. En la tierche bataille
estoit le roy bien acompagniés de barons, de chevaliers et de
aultres. Sy estoit delés luy le conte de Sallebrin, le conte d’Arezelles,
le conte de Cornuaille, le sire de Lusy, le sire de Persy, le sire de
Neufville, le sire de Ros, le sire de Felleton, messire Thomas de
Hollande et messire Jehan de Hartecelle. Fos 319 et 320.
P. 169, l. 16: Broues.—Ms. A 7: Bruues. Fº 138 vº.—Mss. A 1 à 6,
15 à 17, 20 à 33: Brunes. Fº 145.—Mss. A 8, 18, 19: Brubbes.
Fº 130 vº.—Mss. A 11 à 14: Brubles. Fº 138 vº.
P. 169, l. 17 et 18: Cliffors.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 8, 18 à 22: Clisors.
Fº 145.
P. 169, l. 18: de Boursier.—Mss. A 23 à 29: le Boursier. Fº 164.
P. 169, l. 18: Latimiers.—Mss. A 15 à 17: le Latimier. Fº 145 vº.—
Mss. A 11 à 14: Latiniers. Fº 138 vº.—Mss. A 18, 19: de Latiniers.
Fº 148 vº.
P. 169, l. 21: huit cens.—Mss. A 20 à 22: huit mille. Fº 209.
P. 169, l. 26: d’Arondiel.—Les mss. A 20 à 22 ajoutent: de Labreth.
Fº 209.
P. 169, l. 27: Ros.—Mss. A 30 à 33: Rooz. Fº 187.
P. 169, l. 27: Luzi.—Mss. A 30 à 33: Ligy. Fº 187.
P. 169, l. 27: Willebi.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Willebri. Fº 209.
P. 169, l. 29: Tueton.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 11 à 14, 18, 19: Tuecon.
Fº 145.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Turcon. Fº 209.
P. 169, l. 29: li sires de Multonne.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Loys de
Multonne, monseigneur de la Haze. Fº 145 vº.
P. 169, l. 29: Multone.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 11 à 14: Mulsonne. Fº 145.
—Mss. A 18, 19: Mulconne. Fº 148 vº.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Mulcon.
Fº 209.
P. 169, l. 29: Alassellée.—Mss. A 23 à 29: de la Selée. Fº 164.—
Mss. A 30 à 33: de la Selle. Fº 187.
P. 170, l. 2: cinq cens.—Mss. A 15 à 17: six cens. Fº 145 vº.—
Mss. A 20 à 22: huit cens. Fº 209.
P. 171, l. 1 et 2: poissance.—Les mss. A 15 à 17 ajoutent: ainsi
qu’il fist. Fº 146.
§ 275. P. 171, l. 3: Ce samedi.—Ms. d’Amiens: Che samedi au

matin que li roys englès eult ordounné ses bataillez, si comme vous
avés oy, se parti li roys de Franche de Abbeville, qui sejourné y avoit
le venredi tout le jour, atendans ses gens, et chevaucha, bannierrez
desploiiées, deviers les ennemis. Adonc fu biel veoir ces seigneurs
noblement montéz et acemés et cez rices paremens et ces
bannierrez venteler et ces conrois par ces camps chevauchier, dont
tant en y avoit que sans nombre. Et sachiés que li hos le roy de
Franche fu extimés à vingt mil armurez de fier, à cheval, et à plus de
cent mil hommes de piet, desquelx il y avoit environ douze mil que
bidaus, que Jeneuois. Et li roys englès en avoit environ quatre mil à
cheval, dix mil archiers et dix mil Gallois, que sergans à piet. Quant li
roys de Franche se fu très sus les camps et eslongiet Abbeville
environ deux petittez lieuwez, il ordounna ses bataillez par l’avis de
ses marescaux. Et toudis alloient et chevauçoient ses gens avant,
bannierres desploiiées, et ossi le sieuvoient il, car li routte estoit si
grande que il ne pooient mies chevauchier, ne aller tout d’un froncq.
On faisoit les geneuois arbalestriers à leur aise aller tout devant et
porter sus chars leurs arbalestres et leur artillerie, car on volloit de
yaux coumenchier le bataille et assambler as Englès. Et cilz qui se
tenoit che jour le plus prochains dou roy, c’estoit messires Jehans de
Hainnau, car li dis roys l’avoit retenu dalléz lui pour deviser et
ordounner par son conseil en partie de ses ennemis. Quant li roys
de France eut ordounnet ses bataillez et ses conrois, il fist
cevauchier avant delivrement pour raconsuir lez Englèz, et si envoya
devant pluisseurs appers chevaliers et compaignons pour veoir là où
on les poroit trouver ne raconssuiwir, car bien penssoit qu’il
n’estoient mies loing. Et toudis alloit li hos avant et li roys ossi.
Ainchois qu’il ewist esloingniet Abbeville quatre lieuwez, revinrent li
chevalier qui envoiiet y avoient estet, et li dissent qu’il avoient veut
les Englèz et qu’il n’estoient mies plus hault de trois lieuwez en
avant.

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Humorality in Early Modern Art Material Culture and Performance 1St Edition Amy Kenny Full Chapter

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Humorality in Early Modern Art, Material

Culture, and Performance 1st Edition

More information about this series at

ISSN 2634-6435 ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)

Cover illustration: The Artchives / Alamy Stock Photo

Part I Performance and Embodiment 11

3 Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage 31

4 “Great Annoyance to Their Mindes”: Humours,

6 A “Dummy Corpse Full of Bones and Entrails”: Staging

Part II Art and Material Culture 103

7 Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits105

8 Seeing Saints in the Forest of Arden: Melancholic Vision

9 Humors, Fruit, and Botanical Art in Early Modern

10 The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern

11 Afterword—No One Is Ever Just Breathing or, a

Ariane Balizet is the author of two monographs—Shakespeare and Girls’

Century” and “The History of Addiction and Alcoholism” in Alcohol:

Kimberly Rhodes is NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor of the

Fig. 7.1 Elizabetha Angliae et Hiberniae Reginae, Thomas Cecill,

Amy Kenny and Kaara L. Peterson

Beneath the laurel-crowned, winged allegory of Melancholy in Albrecht

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

it was also long alleged to be a source of creative genius in the period, a

even unremarkable objects, activities, and embodied performance in early

We are honored to have Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt

embodiment beyond humorality, showing in compelling ways that

corrosive consequences of im-passioned performance all the while his task

even constitutes individuals’ relationships to other forms of matter or phe-

Performance and Embodiment

There are “clichés of rhythm” as well as of speech.1 One of those clichés,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 13

utterances, helping to decide (though without absolutely or unilaterally

Duke. Great thing of vs forgot,

somewhere below the surface of expression.39 Shakespeare’s characters are

name ‘character’”49) is partly related to the depth of stress rhythm in the

5. Holder, Rethinking Meter, 126.

28. Hammond, “Noisy Comma,” 212.

67. Martin, Rise and Fall of Meter, 20.

Rokison, Abigail. Shakespearean Verse Speaking: Text and Theatre Practice.

Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 31

Sighing is here defined as an involuntary, circumstantial kind of deep

Definitions of the term “sigh” explicitly link this kind of breathing to

That sighing functions as a response to a depletion and emptiness in the

description of the process in The Problems of Aristotle. It is fascinating, and

P. 159, l. 19: Gobin.—Mss. A 11 à 14: Colin. Fº 136.—Mss. A 20 à

§ 269. P. 160, l. 22: Li rois d’Engleterre.—Ms. d’Amiens: Li roys ne

§ 270. P. 162, l. 21: Sus le pas.—Ms. d’Amiens: Sus le pas de le

P. 162, l. 30: desconfit.—Ms. B 6: Toutefois les Englès vinrent sy

§ 271. P. 164, l. 5: Quant li rois.—Ms. d’Amiens: Or parlerons dou

§ 272. P. 165, l. 20: Bien estoit infourmés.—Ms. d’Amiens: Bien

§ 273. P. 167, l. 3: Le venredi.—Ms. d’Amiens: Che venredi tout le

§ 274. P. 168, l. 8: Ce venredi.—Ms. d’Amiens: Che venredi, si

P. 169, l. 14 et 15: Stanfort.—Mss. A 1 à 6: Pontchardon. Fº 145.

§ 275. P. 171, l. 3: Ce samedi.—Ms. d’Amiens: Che samedi au

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Part I Performance and Embodiment 11

3 Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage 31

4 “Great Annoyance to Their Mindes”: Humours,

6 A “Dummy Corpse Full of Bones and Entrails”: Staging

Part II Art and Material Culture 103

7 Elizabeth I’s Mettle: Metallic/Medallic Portraits105

8 Seeing Saints in the Forest of Arden: Melancholic Vision

9 Humors, Fruit, and Botanical Art in Early Modern

10 The Humorality of Toys and Games in Early Modern

11 Afterword—No One Is Ever Just Breathing or, a