The subject of Ursula Potter’s study is the portrayal on the early modern English stage of women’s diseases that were believed to be caused by the uterus. The extensive staging of these female maladies in the period from c. 1560 to 1640 calls to mind the many representations today in Hollywood films and in TV series of mental illnesses that are predominantly associated in the popular imagination with women, for example, The Virgin Suicides and Amy, as examples of characters with what DSM-5, the latest edition of the US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, calls Functional Neurologic Disorder or Conversion Disorder; and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Fatal Attraction, Girl, Interrupted, and Single White Female, supposedly showing women with Borderline Personality Disorder. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the maladies Potter is concerned with are known by many different names: “green sickness” (a malady of virgins, characterized by a green pallor), “fits of the mother,” “suffocation of the mother,” and passio hysterica. Their symptoms range from sexual frustration to inordinate sexual desire, promiscuity, melancholy, moodiness, swooning, or delirium. These symptoms stereotype and pathologize women as crazy, unstable, and hypersexualized, just as in popular culture today.

The well-documented history of women’s diseases that are believed to be caused solely by the possession of a uterus goes back to Hippocrates (c. 460-370 BCE). The names, symptoms, and representations of those diseases have changed considerably over the centuries, as has the understanding of their causes. In the early modern period the womb was seen as the most powerful organ in the female body, with independent sensory faculties and demonic powers, requiring male physicians, and indeed most men (as Potter amply demonstrates), to constantly regulate women’s health and sexuality. The womb’s capacity for movement within the body (the wandering womb theory of antiquity) could purportedly even lead to death, and was allied in the period with fear of religious damnation. By the nineteenth century, the cultural understanding of hysteria (Gk hystera, womb) had vastly changed. The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot believed that hysteria was hereditary, and that its cause was trauma to the nervous system. Yet in his lectures at the Salpêtrière Asylum in Paris in the 1880s, Charcot famously exhibited the grimacing or contorted bodies of his female hysterical patients. Potter does not make this point, but the theater of hysteria, in which women’s bodies are presented as spectacles for public gaze, has a history that reaches from the early modern period to the present.

Potter’s study opens with a chapter “Troubled with the Mother,” which gives an overview of Renaissance medical views of the womb and its diseases. Five chapters deal individually with the presentation of uterine disorders in either one or two plays spanning the period 1566 to 1634. The chapters run chronologically, beginning with the earliest play that mentions green sickness, The Bugbears (1566-70), an early Elizabethan comedy for grammar school boys or boy players, and ending with a chapter on William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604) and John Milton’s masque Comus (1634), these last two grouped together because they associate “excessive religious zeal in young women with adolescent development” (200), representing the interest towards the end of the period, Potter argues, in the Puritan obsession with the chaste female body. Shakespeare’s plays are heavily represented: in addition to Measure for Measure, there is lengthy discussion of The Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. But there is also substantial analysis of some lesser-known plays: The Maid’s Tragedy (c. 1611-13), Parasitaster, or The Fawne (c. 1604-06), A Fair Quarrel (1617), and The Hollander (1635).

The chapters follow more or less the same format. Potter provides an overview of each play (its date, author, genre, source(s), and early modern performance history), its topical interests, its engagement with contemporary medicine and medical techniques, brief character sketches, and plot details that relate to female (sometimes male) sexuality and its regulation. There is a very short chapter (6 pp.) on fathers and daughters in Shakespeare’s plays, the rationale for which is Potter’s observation at the end of the previous chapter on Romeo and Juliet that Shakespeare repeatedly stages “a daughter’s sexual maturation as a confronting development for her father” (103) and that this is supported by biographical evidence from Shakespeare’s life. Potter refers to a wide range of early modern plays throughout the study. An appendix usefully tabulates a selection of 58 early modern drama and performance texts that have female characters--very rarely, men--suffering from these maladies, with lists of their symptoms and contemporary diagnoses, texts that Potter argues warrant further research.

The book has several weaknesses. Potter treats the plays reductively, as transparent sources of information about women’s maladies rather than as representations that are open to differing interpretations. It is questionable that “Shakespeare and Fletcher stand out as supporters of healthy sexuality in women” (7), or that “the cornerstone of Renaissance medical understandings of the female body” was that it was “every woman’s unchallenged right to have a satisfying and fruitful sex life” (11), and that dramatists were “merely reflecting what Renaissance medicine took for granted” (27). Although Potter claims that these maladies drive the plot, the book lacks an overarching argument. In her reading of Romeo and Juliet, for example, the focus is less on the disease of green sickness than on Juliet’s “libido” as the signal of “a potential domestic crisis” (94). This is also not a feminist study. Although she claims that women were empowered through possession of a womb (12), and that The Fawne is sympathetic to women (159), Potter does not explore the gendered dynamics of each play in theoretical terms, nor does she consider what they might afford in terms of female resistance to the pathologizing of women’s behavior. Rather, Potter sees women in the plays as succumbing to “their bodies’ sexual demands” (197). Potter mentions friction as a cure for green sickness (36) but treats lesbian sex very perfunctorily (37). She asserts that both “green sickness” and “love sickness” were understood to be uterine disorders and were often conflated in the drama (35). But I would argue that there is a case for seeing green sickness as separate from “fits of the mother,” because of its origins in the late antique and medieval amor hereos, which Potter does not refer to, and because of its different nosological framework.

It is not clear who the audience for this book is. It seems to be aimed primarily at early modern drama scholars and scholars of English drama history, as well as scholars of the history of sexuality, and the general public. It is not a work of original scholarship. Potter knows the plays well and is familiar with contemporary attitudes towards the regulation of female behavior, but she does not use new archival material, and is very dependent on secondary sources. As she acknowledges, Chapter 2 draws almost entirely on Sara Read’s Menstruation and the Female Body (2013) and she also makes extensive use of Lesel Dawson’s Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (2008) and Laurinda Dixon’s Perilous Chastity (1995). The texts of the plays she uses are not always those of record, and Potter does not direct readers to the publication history of the plays, so this is not a study for book historians. There are some omissions from the bibliography, including G. S. Rousseau’s “‘A Strange Pathology’: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500-1800” in the collection Hysteria Beyond Freud, work by Mark S. Micale, Mary Wack’s Lovesickness in the Middle Ages, and Elaine Showalter’s The Female Malady.

Although Potter’s informative study is overly empiricist and lacks an argument, it draws readers’ attention to a body of important material that other scholars will use to develop arguments of their own. For example, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s notion of “narrative prosthesis,” that is, the reliance of writers on the trope of a disabled, eccentric, or deviant body as both a foundational narrative device and “an interruptive force that confronts cultural truisms,” would be useful in thinking in a more theorized way about the function of these female diseases as plot devices and their challenge to our assumptions about normalcy. [1]

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Notes:

1. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 48.