DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES: MEDICAL DIATRIBES IN EARLY MODERN DRAMA

Health, sickness, and death have always been concerns deeply embedded in society. Even more so in early modern England, at a time when people saw physicians as suspicious and vice-ridden individuals, medicine could easily turn into something grotesque, and kitchen physics was one step away from being labelled as witchcraft. The cultural terrors that emerged from the uneven and non-linear progression of medicine and the socio-political environment of Tudor and Stuart England led to the (re-)emergence of fruitful stereotypes: barbarous barbers, practising apothecaries, prescribing surgeons and, of course, quacks and mountebanks. After the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians (1518), they all seemed like stumbling blocks to physicians’ rise to eminence—aided by the population’s ignorance and foolishness. Vulgus vult decipi, as the saying went. However, the situation was more ambiguous, last but not least, because things were not as backward and unorthodox as they may seem to anyone who looks at the past searching for ignorance and deplorableness. The preheminence of these matters explains the abundance of references to disease and recovery featured in the works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Nevertheless, this dissertation aims to go further and analyse if and how these struggles over authority can also be traced in the time’s dramatic production. By opening a dialogue between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama and anti-quack literature, this study suggests that the richness of medical practices onstage mirrors the richness of the ones in real life, often with consistent overlaps and variations at times of increased uncertainty and anxiety. By examining a wide and diversified range of primary texts and moving beyond England’s most famous and staged playwrights, this dissertation argues that playwrights actively participate in the vernacular debate on knowledge to the point that the incorporation of medical diatribes into their work becomes a testimony to early modern culture and doctor-patient relationships, all while providing a less grim outlook on life. Both then and now.