Poison on the early modern English stage: Plants, paints and potions

By Lisa Hopkins

Many early modern plays use poison, most famously Hamlet, where the murder of Old Hamlet showcases the range of issues poison mobilises. Its orchard setting is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new arrivals in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and it is difficult to prove. This book explores poisoning in early modern plays, the legal and epistemological issues it raises, and the cultural work it performs, which includes questions related to race, religion, nationality, gender, and humans’ relationship to the environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526159915

Book preview

Poison on the early modern English stage

Poison on the early modern English stage

Plants, paints and potions

Edited by Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins, with Kibrina Davey

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2023

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

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www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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ISBN 978 1 5261 5992 2 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: A woman pouring lead into the ear of her sleeping husband. Wood engraving José Guadalupe Posada (Mexican, 1851–1913) c. 1890–1910

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Contents

Notes on contributors

Introduction

Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins

Part I Sources of poison

1 ‘Balms and gums and heavy cheers’: Shakespeare’s poison gardens

Lisa Hopkins

2 Shakespeare and the snakehandlers: venom, vermin and the circulation of eco-social energy in Renaissance drama

Todd Andrew Borlik

3 Shakespeare’s ‘baleful mistletoe’

Susan C. Staub

4 Poisoning and poisonous Black bodies: Egyptian magic on the early modern stage

Nour El Gazzaz

Part II Poisoners

5 ‘Spit thy poison’: the rhetoric of poison in Marston’s and Webster’s Italianate drama

Yan Brailowsky

6 Poisonous intent, or how to get away with attempted murder on the early modern stage

Anthony Archdeacon

7 ‘Let this deadly draught purge clean my Soul from sin’: poisons and remedies in Margaret Cavendish’s drama

Delilah Bermudez Brataas

8 Poxy doxies and poison damsels: venereal infection and the myth of the venomous woman in early modern literature

Dee Anna Phares

Part III Victims

9 ‘Thou didst eat my lips’: swallowing passion in William Davenant’s The Tragedy of Albovine

Kibrina Davey

10  ‘The leperous distilment’: authority, informers and the poisoned ear

Bill Angus

11  Playing with poison: murder, proof and confession in early modern revenge

Jessica Apolloni

12  ‘No healthsome air breathes in’: spiritual poison in Romeo and Juliet

Khristian S. Smith

13  ‘Death’s counterfeit’: the art of undying and the Machiavels in The Jew of Malta and Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany

Subarna Mondal

Works cited

Index

Notes on contributors

Bill Angus is a Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University in New Zealand. He has written extensively on metadrama and the informer figure in early modern drama and on music and material culture. His latest monograph, A History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture, encompasses histories of place magic, religious ritual, judicial execution, outcast burial and wandering spirits at physical crossroads. Other books include Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson (2016), Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre (2018) and the collection Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019), co-edited with Professor Emerita Lisa Hopkins.

Jessica Apolloni is an Assistant Professor of English at Christopher Newport University in the United States. She specialises in comparative law and literature in the early modern period and has been a reviewer for her expertise in these fields. Her scholarship and reviews have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Studies in Philology, The Journal for the Study of British Cultures, Forum Italicum and Early Theatre. Apolloni is currently at work on her first book manuscript, Violent Ends: Shakespeare and Comparative Law, which establishes the significant impact of literature in the comparative origins of current legal principles.

Anthony Archdeacon has taught English in universities in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates and now works in the Department of Language and Literature at Alliance University, India. He researches and writes about early modern literature, drama and ideas and is the author of From Narcissism to Nihilism: Self-Love and Self-Negation in Early Modern Literature (2022).

Todd Andrew Borlik is Reader in Renaissance Literature at the University of Huddersfield in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology (2019), Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature (2012) and more than a dozen articles in academic journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey and English Literary Renaissance. Recent publications have explored fairy lore as folk entomology, Doctor Faustus and Renaissance aviation disasters and android Hamlets. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Shakespeare Beyond the Green World, which investigates the ecopolitics of the late plays at the Jacobean court, and preparing a new edition of As You Like It for Oxford World Classics.

Yan Brailowsky is Senior Lecturer in early modern literature and history at the University of Paris Nanterre in France. His research interests include prophecy in early modern drama, the history of the Reformation and the relationship between gender and politics in Renaissance Europe, particularly the role of gendered violence. He is the author of monographs on A Winter’s Tale (2010) and King Lear (2008) and most recently published Shakespeare and the Supernatural (2020), co-edited with Victoria Bladen. He is working on a book on murderous queens in early modern drama and a collection on the poetics of blood in early modern Europe. He is the General Editor of Angles, a peer-reviewed online journal, and co-editor of a new bilingual collection of Shakespeare’s works for Les Belles Lettres (France).

Delilah Bermudez Brataas is an Associate Professor of English at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Norway. Her research interests consider aspects of gender in utopia from its earliest expressions in early modern literature to its contemporary adaptations in science fiction and fantasy, particularly in graphic novels and film. Her recent article ‘Peculiar Circles: The Fluid Utopia at the Northern Pole in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World’ appeared in Utopian Studies in 2019 and ‘The Blurring of Genus, Genre, and Gender in Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters’ appeared in SEDERI Yearbook no. 29 in 2019.

Kibrina Davey earned her PhD in English literature at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom and taught several modules in the English department as an Associate Lecturer. Her thesis was entitled Violent Passions and Vulnerable Bodies: Emotion and Power from Marlowe to Ford. Davey has had reviews published in the journals Cahiers Elisabéthains and Notes and Queries and articles on the drama of John Ford and Philip Massinger published in Early Modern Literary Studies and Textus. Her research interests include Caroline drama, history of emotions, early modern passion, revenge tragedy, violence on the early modern stage and ecology and environment in literature.

Nour El Gazzaz is a PhD Candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London in the United Kingdom. Her doctoral research combines premodern critical race studies and material culture studies to examine the intersectionality of racecraft and objecthood in early modern drama. Her thesis demonstrates how racialised characters were materially and metaphorically crafted with objects, as well as how foreign objects were themselves racialised. El Gazzaz has a forthcoming publication on the corporatisation of racialised scents in Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama (2023). Alongside her PhD, El Gazzaz sits on the steering committee of the Early Modern Scholars of Colour Network, United Kingdom (EMSOC). Created by Shakespeare’s Globe and King’s College London, EMSOC is the first anti-racist collective in the UK in the field of early modern literature and culture. She also co-founded and is a member of the Racial Justice Fellowship for TECHNE Doctoral Training Partnership, a consortium of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for London and South-East England.

Lisa Hopkins is Professor Emerita of English at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom. She co-edits Shakespeare, the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, Journal of Marlowe Studies, Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama and Arden Early Modern Drama Guides. Her most recent publications include Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction (2021), Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage (2020), A Companion to the Cavendishes, with Tom Rutter (2020), and Reading the Road from Shakespeare to Bunyan, with Bill Angus (2020).

Subarna Mondal is Assistant Professor of English at The Sanskrit College and University in India. She holds a PhD from Jadavpur University, Department of Film Studies. Her areas of interest include late-Victorian Gothic literature, the Gothic on screen, animal studies and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Her publications include ‘All the King’s Men and All the King’s Women: Reading Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool as a Creative Mistranslation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth’ (2017); ‘Did He Smile His Work to See?: Gothicism, Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and the Art of Taxidermy’ (2017); ‘Dead But Not Gone: Female Body, Surveillance and Serial-Killing in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy’ (2019); ‘One Grey Wall and One Grey Tower: The Bates World in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho’ (2019); and ‘Destruction, Reconstruction and Resistance: The Skin and the Protean Body in Pedro Almodovar’s Body Horror The Skin I Live In’ (2021).

Dee Anna Phares is an Assistant Professor and Social Sciences and Humanities Librarian at Northern Illinois University in the United States. Phares holds an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, an MS in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in English from the University of Nevada-Reno. Her research focuses on early modern material culture, memory, library and information history, the social history of medicine and the pathologising of collecting. She has served as an Associate Editor for The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare (2007) and primary Textual Editor for the Modern Library Classics editions of Macbeth (2009) and Othello (2010). Most recently, she has contributed a chapter on ‘The Renaissance (1300–1600)’ for Libraries, Archives, and Museums: An Introduction to Cultural Heritage Institutions through the Ages, edited by Suzanne M. Stauffer (2021).

Khristian S. Smith is a graduate teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States, where he studies late medieval and early modern literature, primarily drama placed in its religio-political and material contexts. His research interests include the histories of religion, medicine and emotion; occult knowledge; and literary representations of the Devil. Smith’s public-facing writing for the University of North Carolina’s Rare Book Blog and the Folger Shakespeare Library has focused on demonic iconography, corpse-dismemberment and dissection, medicinal plants, and possets as potions. His dissertation project interrogates the relationship between the imagination and ‘horror’ as affect in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tragedies, epics and sermons.

Susan C. Staub is Professor of English at Appalachian State University in the United States. Her publications include Nature’s Cruel Stepdames: Representations of Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (2006) and The Literary Mother (editor, 2007), as well as numerous essays on early modern prose, Shakespeare and Spenser. Her current scholarship focuses on Shakespeare and botany, and she is editing the collection Shakespeare’s Botanical Imagination and completing a monograph, ‘Baleful Weeds and Precious Juic’d Flowers’: Shakespeare’s Plant Thinking.

Introduction

Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins

The most famous play in English literature centres on the consequences of a death, that of Hamlet’s father. But it is not a death that occurs just anywhere; it is a death that occurs in a garden, specifically in an orchard. This is one of a number of sinister uses of fruit and flowers in the plays of Shakespeare and of other early modern playwrights. At various points in Hamlet, Shakespeare seems to be remembering Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II, which in some ways tells the same story as Hamlet in that it focuses on a king, his unfaithful wife, and his only son. Edward and Gaveston exchange miniatures¹; Mortimer (referring to himself in the third person) declares, ‘Weep not for Mortimer, / That scorns the world, and as a traveller / Goes to discover countries yet unknown’ (5.6.63–5); and Edward III wonders whether Isabella is implicated in Edward’s death (5.6.69–70) as Hamlet wonders about Gertrude. Most notably, Lightborn can poison through the ear, the orifice through which Claudius poisons Old Hamlet, and he, unlike Claudius, spells out exactly how he does it:

I learned in Naples how to poison flowers,

To strangle with a lawn thrust through the throat,

To pierce the windpipe with a needle’s point,

Or, whilst one is asleep, to take a quill

And blow a little powder in his ears. (5.4.35)

Shakespeare appears to have been impressed by this passage. He remembered in the Henry VI plays that Neapolitans were bad, and he remembered in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the idea of poisoning flowers.

Shakespeare often uses fruit and flowers to disturb. Rupendra Guha Majumdar sees both the Masque of Ceres and the Hermione/Perdita strand of The Winter’s Tale as glancing directly at the Persephone myth,² while Hema Dahiya argues that in Coriolanus ‘the fruit of Mulberry becomes a metaphor for mildness, softness, or mellow nature’ – ironic given the notable absence of mildness or mellowness in the nature of the play’s hero.³ Richard III calls for strawberries; Lawrence J. Ross argues that this ‘depends on an idea of the strawberry which is classical in origin and which involves the hoary proverbial phrase There is a snake in the grass’,⁴ and Martin Schongauer’s painting Madonna of the Rose Bush, in the church of the Dominicans in Colmar, reminds us more specifically that strawberries are the food of children in Paradise; Ross notes that ‘the Virgin is seated in a bed of strawberries and, to show that she herself is the garden, she wears strawberry leaves in her crown as the emblem of her righteousness’.⁵

This is part of a pattern of dark uses of plants in early modern plays. It has long been noticed that the herbs listed by Ophelia are not chosen at random, but have abortifacient properties.⁶ In King Lear, Cordelia says of her father,

he was met even now

As mad as the vexed sea, singing aloud,

Crowned with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,

With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,

Darnel and all the idle weeds that grow

In our sustaining corn. [to Officer] A century send forth,

Search every acre in the high-grown field

And bring him to our eye. (4.4.1–8)

The corn apparently stands so tall that Lear might be completely concealed within it, and in it, echoing the blighted landscape through which the characters move, thrive the weeds that one might expect of hard pastoral, whose presence, Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas suggest, would have been particularly resonant for a contemporary audience in ways that would have made them unlikely to be overlooked. Situating the scene within the forgotten materiality of arable farming in the early seventeenth century, they point out that the height of the corn and the presence of darnel mean that it must be time for the harvest, but that

At the moment when farmers and laborers should be reaping the fields and laying store for the long winter ahead, the land and its people are embroiled in civil war and foreign invasion, and the best that the former king can do is to pick poisonous weeds and leave the ‘sustaining corn’ to rot.⁷

Hard or not, then, the overtones of this scene are unquestionably pastoral, and indeed Archer, Turley and Thomas note that one of the flowers mentioned, which is not in season when the others are, seems deliberately mentioned to evoke some of the more optimistic elements of pastoral: ‘The presence of cuckoo flowers seems to promise the hope of spring and a happy ending, while reiterating the betrayals that have led – and will lead – to tragedy.’⁸ Pastoral and spring flowers would be odd things to find towards the end of a tragedy were it not that we also encounter such motifs in Othello, in Desdemona’s Willow Song which takes us to the banks of a stream and speaks of how ‘all a green willow must be my garland’ (4.3.50), and in Hamlet when Ophelia, the ‘rose of May’ (4.5.157), distributes rosemary, rue, pansies, fennel, columbines and a daisy, and regrets that she has no violets (4.5.173–82). Writers were not, moreover, interested only in what grew in English gardens: the ripe southern Italian apricots which reveal the Duchess of Malfi’s pregnancy and the melons which nauseate Annabella in the Parma-set ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore are plants which operate directly on the human body even if they do not quite poison it. As Susan C. Staub’s and Khristian S. Smith’s chapters both show, plants can also become a metaphor for people.

Another important thing to note about the death of Hamlet’s father is how difficult it is to prove. As Jessica Apolloni’s chapter shows, proof was always a problematic concept in early modern culture, but it is particularly so in the case of poison unless it turned the body black, as Thomas Browne assured his readers that silver would do; he is thinking in chemical terms, but Nour El Gazzaz’s chapter shows that black skin was connected with poison for other, racialised reasons too. Hamlet is sometimes seen as the earliest detective story, but it is one which lacks the diagnostic tools so beloved of modern crime fiction: nobody can perform an autopsy on Old Hamlet (and even if they did, they might not think to look in his ear, although Bill Angus’s chapter shows that they would have been wise to do so because poison was often connected with ears). Poison is easy to suspect, but much harder to detect; even Hamlet himself, who knows that his uncle is a poisoner and so is presumably on his guard, falls victim to Laertes’s ‘envenomed’ sword. Whether it really is ‘envenomed’ or whether it is anointed with poison is a little ambiguous, but Todd Andrew Borlik’s chapter shows that venom aroused almost as much fear as poison. Finally, the death of Old Hamlet draws attention to another way in which poison could arouse fear, for the substance which kills him, like that which Friar Laurence supplies to Juliet, is one which troubles the distinction between sleep and death. A poison which kills you while you are awake may be bad enough, but one which kills you in your sleep raises disturbing questions not only about spiritual preparedness (which is something Old Hamlet complains about) but also about the very nature of consciousness, as both Khristian S. Smith and Subarna Mondal explore in their chapters.

The idea of poison was endlessly fascinating to the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was kept in the public eye by several high-profile cases of actual or possible poisoning. In April 1594, Ferdinando Stanley, fifth Earl of Derby, died apparently unexpectedly at the age of thirty-four, and rumours immediately flew that he had been poisoned because of his suspected Catholicism and his dangerous closeness to the crown (his mother Lady Margaret Clifford was a granddaughter of Princess Mary Tudor, sister of Henry VIII, which gave him a potential claim to the throne). Two months later, Dr Roderigo Lopez, Elizabeth I’s Portuguese physician, was executed after being accused by the Earl of Essex of plotting to poison the queen. This seems to have been nothing more than a crazed fantasy on Essex’s part, but it was made possible by the difficulty of detecting both poisonous substances and human intentions (something explored further in Anthony Archdeacon’s chapter), and also by the potential slippage between the categories of poison and medicine. The year 1594 also saw the birth of Prince Henry, elder son of James VI of Scotland, whose sudden death eighteen years later (probably due to typhus) inevitably led to rumours of poison. In 1613, a year after the death of Prince Henry, the minor writer Sir Thomas Overbury really was poisoned, having been caught up in the events surrounding the scandalous divorce of Frances Howard from the third Earl of Essex (son of Lopez’s accuser) and her remarriage to the Earl of Somerset. In the resulting trial of the Somersets, London was regaled with full details of the yellow starch administered to Overbury through a variety of means, including tarts, jellies and an enema, and the painful death that ensued. If anything had been wanting to feed fear and fascination about poisoning, the Overbury case supplied it in abundance.

Poison offered particular affordances to dramatists. They revelled in both the range of possible sources of poison and the variety of ways in which it could be administered, with notable examples including inducing the victim to kiss a poisoned book or a poisoned picture, coating the inside of a glove or a helmet with poison, and dripping a noxious substance into the ear of a king asleep in an orchard. They were also interested in who was likely to use it. The use of poison for dramatic effect perhaps allowed meditation on the fragility of the boundaries of rigid social hierarchies, exemplifying a threat both to ‘social, gender, and political order and to porous personal, national, and religious identities’.⁹ Women and Italians were both considered particularly likely to resort to poison, but there was also a distinct frisson attached to the idea of the male poisoner.

Dramatists of the period also delighted in the range of effects and symptoms which could be described or, better still, acted. From a theatrical point of view, the affordances of a poisoning episode on stage are obvious: all an actor has to do is touch an object or drink something which does not even need to be visible to the audience, and then they can let rip, without any of the complications which could potentially attend the use of weapons on stage, as when a cannon set fire to the Globe or a spectator was killed by a firearm during a performance of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two. There is also scope for characters to pretend that they have been poisoned, something which is not possible if they are supposed to have been hurt by a sword or a gun.

Thematically, poison is even more useful, because it can represent, suggest or address an exceptionally broad range of topics including race, religion, gender, the law, political dissimulation, erotic attraction and the relationship of humans to the environment. Also, many English Renaissance plays address anti-theatrical discourses that associate the insidious and transformative nature of poison with the theatre itself. As Tanya Pollard suggests, ‘the medical, bodily, and pharmacy-steeped vocabulary of early modern plays’ engages with that by attributing to the theatre ‘the power to harm, heal, and otherwise transform spectators in immediate, forceful, and physical ways’.¹⁰ Collectively, these new essays expand the conversation on this subject and do justice both to the rich variety of ways in which poison figures in these plays and to the broad tenor of social forces for which it stands as a vehicle.

The first and most obvious issues raised by any consideration of poison are the nature of plants and humans’ relationship to them. Plants were a topic of compelling interest in the early modern period. Plant classification was a burgeoning science; plant illustration was becoming less stylised and more informative; and the number of those known about and available in England was increasing dramatically through trade and travel. Sir Robert Cecil had a Persian lily sent to him by the English ambassador at Constantinople,¹¹ and Benedict S. Robinson notes that ‘Tobacco arrived from Virginia in the 1580s, currants from the eastern Mediterranean perhaps around the same time’ and that ‘The herbals produced by European gardeners throughout this period repeatedly testify to their authors’ dependence on merchants and travelers for their knowledge, as well as for actual supplies of seeds, roots, and cuttings’,¹² while Miriam Jacobson observes that ‘Gerard … frequently states that he can find no account of these flowers in his classical sources’.¹³

The garden was by no means only a place to grow things. Benedict Robinson notes that ‘The English repeatedly expressed their sense of national and cultural identity through the image of England as a garden’,¹⁴ and Roy Strong observes that Shakespeare ‘gives that notion its most enduring expression in Richard II’.¹⁵ To suggest that plants from the garden were being used to poison people was therefore potentially political, as we see in Hamlet where a poisoning in the royal garden becomes an emblem of a rotten state. Moreover, as the English garden changed physically, it also developed as a psychoscape. A garden could be a safe space for the expression of dangerous religious beliefs. Indoors, there was a danger of being spied on by servants: in 1651, when the Royalist Colonel Frank Wyndham sheltered Charles II after the Battle of Worcester, he told only

Lady Wyndham his mother, and her niece Juliana Coningsby, besides his trusty servant Henry Peters, and two female domestics, Eleanor Withers, and Joan Halsenoth, of whose loyalty he felt assured … The rest of the servants having been dispersed on different pretexts, and Lady Wyndham’s chamber being prepared as Charles’s ordinary place of retirement.¹⁶

Outdoors, one might be safer (as Charles had been when he had earlier hidden in an oak tree). At the same time, though, gardens, once closely associated with monasteries, became, after the Dissolution, both haunted by the memory of lost monasticism and also safe spaces for the expression of religious allegiance, in ways that Lisa Hopkins’s chapter explores.

Gardens, then, were charged with meaning, teeming with old memories and new plants, and potential sources of poison. But even if some plants were poisonous, what kind of people would go so far as to actually administer them to other humans? To this question early modern English drama had one stark and simple answer: Italians would. As Yan Brailowsky’s chapter explores, Sir Francis Bacon called poisoning ‘a forraign practice, fit for Rome and her Doctrine’,¹⁷ Henry Peacham spoke of going to ‘Italy to be poisoned’,¹⁸ and Fynes Moryson declared:

the Italyans aboue all other nations, most practise revenge by treasons, and espetially are skillfull in making and giuing poysons … For poysons the Italians skill in making and putting them to vse hath beene long since tryed, to the perishing of kings and Eniperours by those deadly potions giuen to them in the very Chalice mingled with the very precious blood of our Redeemer … In our tyme, it seemes the Art of Poysoning is reputed in Italy worthy of Princes practise.¹⁹

For Thomas Nashe, Italy was ‘the Academie of man-slaughter, the sporting place of murther, [and] the Apothecary shop of poyson for all Nations’.²⁰ This perceived tendency of such notable Catholics as the Italians also led to the convenient conflation of poison with the doctrines of Catholicism, as Alastair Bellany notes.²¹ Other foreigners might also resort to poison occasionally, but Bacon was confident that the practice was fundamentally alien to the English: ‘how rare it was to heare of poysoning in England, so detestable to our Nation’.²² Any exceptions to this were likely to be women: poisoning was, for instance, one of the many ways in which Alice Arden tried to get rid of her husband, and Dee Anna Phares’s chapter traces ways in which women could be equated with poison, although Delilah Bermudez Brataas shows how Margaret Cavendish, original as ever, figures women as victims of poison rather than its agents. Because poison was seen as a woman’s weapon, some poison victims in early modern drama are husbands, but the victims are much less easy to pigeonhole than the poisoners and also include women (including, in the case of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, an entire convent full of nuns). More fundamentally, however, the five chapters in the ‘Victims’ part here collectively suggest that the plays they discuss not only make it hard to predict the identity of individual victims but also problematise the very notion of identity itself by dissolving or troubling distinctions between soul and body, humans and plants and life and death.

Just as the victims of poison were difficult to classify, so poison itself was surprisingly hard to define, because there is a sense in which everything and nothing is potentially poisonous: as Todd Andrew Borlik reminds us, snakes are less deadly than cows. In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two, Northumberland says, ‘In poison there is physic’,²³ and a number of chapters in this collection show that it may only be dosage which tips something from the beneficial category to the harmful, particularly in the case of plants which, as Ashley Howard observes, have an inherent ‘duality … as both poisons and remedies’.²⁴ Susan C. Staub, for instance, shows that the ‘vampire plant’, mistletoe, could have a homoeopathic effect, and Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Bill Angus and Khristian S. Smith also show that what may act as a poison might also be a remedy, and that the distinction between poisonous and not poisonous is a false dichotomy. Poison, already difficult to detect because of its invisibility, thus becomes doubly undetectable, and the disturbing ambiguity about whether substances are beneficial or harmful becomes particularly troubling when it comes to drinking blood, for, as Kibrina Davey’s chapter shows, that is something which uncannily blurs the boundaries between the salvific and the monstrous.

The book is divided into three parts – ‘Sources of Poison’, ‘Poisoners’ and ‘Victims’ – which systematically address the three crucial questions about early modern poison: where it comes from, who uses it and how, and what effects it has. The first part, ‘Sources of Poison’, contains four chapters: Lisa Hopkins, ‘Balms and Gums and Heavy Cheers: Shakespeare’s Poison Gardens’; Todd Andrew Borlik, ‘Shakespeare and the Snakehandlers: Venom, Vermin and the Circulation of Eco-Social Energy in Renaissance Drama’; Susan C. Staub, ‘Shakespeare’s Baleful Mistletoe’; and Nour El Gazzaz, ‘Poisoning and Poisonous Black Bodies: Egyptian Magic on the Early Modern Stage’. The second part, ‘Poisoners’, also contains four chapters: Yan Brailowsky, ‘Spit Thy Poison: The Rhetoric of Poison in Marston’s and Webster’s Italianate Drama’; Anthony Archdeacon, ‘Poisonous Intent, or How to Get Away with Attempted Murder on the Early Modern Stage’; Delilah Bermudez Brataas, ‘Let This Deadly Draught Purge Clean My Soul from Sin: Poisons and Remedies in Margaret Cavendish’s Drama’; and Dee Anna Phares, ‘Poxy Doxies and Poison Damsels: Venereal Infection and the Myth of the Venomous Woman in Early Modern Drama’. The third and final part, ‘Victims’, has five chapters: Kibrina Davey, ‘Thou Didst Eat My Lips: Swallowing Passion in William Davenant’s The Tragedy of Albovine’; Bill Angus, ‘The Leperous Distilment: Authority, Informers and the Poisoned Ear’; Jessica Apolloni, ‘Playing with Poison: Murder, Proof and Confession in Early Modern Revenge’; Khristian S. Smith, ‘No Healthsome Air Breathes In: Spiritual Poison in Romeo and Juliet’; and Subarna Mondal, ‘Death’s Counterfeit: The Art of Undying and the Machiavels in The Jew of Malta and Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany’. Theoretical and conceptual paradigms deployed include ecocriticism, race, religion, gender, the law and the stereotype of poisoning as Italian, and amongst them these chapters shed light on a number of topics.

The first chapter in the book, Lisa Hopkins’s ‘Balms and Gums and Heavy Cheers: Shakespeare’s Poison Gardens’, argues that, in the last plays in particular, the loss of monastic horticultural expertise has eroded understanding of how to use plants and led gardens to be perceived as sites of danger as well as of potential healing. When the dirge in The Two Noble Kinsmen sings of ‘Balms and gums and heavy cheers’,²⁵ it articulates a sense of ambivalence about things which come from plants which is found throughout the last plays. Hopkins traces a recognition of the connection between priests and gardens in Romeo and Juliet and also considers what and how Shakespeare might have known about plants before focusing on the last plays, for example, in The Winter’s Tale in particular, Perdita has heard stories about how gillyflowers are cultivated but does not know for certain.

The second chapter, Todd Andrew Borlik’s ‘Shakespeare and the Snakehandlers: Venom, Vermin and the Circulation of Eco-Social Energy in Renaissance Drama’, takes an ecocritical approach to mentions and representations of venomous creatures in a wide range of plays. Borlik shows that the risks posed by toads, spiders, adders and snakes are consistently exaggerated, but that they do create another sort of danger by potentially evoking stories of saints and miracles. His analysis sheds particular light on Cleopatra and Paulina and also reminds us that snakehandling was a type of performance with which Elizabethan audiences might well have been familiar.

The third chapter, Susan C. Staub’s ‘Shakespeare’s Baleful Mistletoe’, also uses a source of poison to give insight into human characters by reading mistletoe as an emblem of the generative process in ways which comment both on human gestation and on the nature of revenge. She also teases out the processes by which the ambivalent status of mistletoe as both parasite plant and source of magic helps us see how revenge plots too blur boundaries. Titus Andronicus, a play in which Shakespeare mentions six different types of tree, uses a tree-dwelling plant associated with both fertility and poison to theorise the relationship between the human and the botanical.

The fourth chapter, and the last in this first part of the book, is Nour El Gazzaz’s ‘Poisoning and Poisonous Black Bodies: Egyptian Magic on the Early Modern Stage’. This puts three very different texts, William Shakespeare’s Othello (1604), Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet (1997) and William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady (1637), into a sustained and mutually illuminating dialogue which helps us see how ideas about poison are both racialised and connected to fear of witchcraft. While Staub’s chapter mentions the homoeopathic effects of poison, El Gazzaz’s notes its potential for purgation, and reminds us too of how exotic it is.

The second part of the book turns the focus on the people who use poison. Yan Brailowsky’s chapter, ‘Spit Thy Poison: The Rhetoric of Poison in Marston’s and Webster’s Italianate Drama’, considers four plays: John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1601) and The Malcontent (1603) and John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613). On the surface, all four suggest clearly and simply that poisoning is something Italians do, but these plays all share a strong satiric flavour which implicitly invites reflections on other states and nations, including England. There is also a strong emphasis on the Catholicism of all the Italian characters, which ostensibly dissociates them from English Protestants but in fact smuggles in potentially disturbing questions about religion and religious practice more generally. Finally, all four foreground women (in the case of Webster, going so far as to make them eponymous heroes), and Brailowsky’s chapter thus complements Borlik’s by offering a different perspective on the common association of women and poison.

The second chapter in the ‘Poisoners’ part is Anthony Archdeacon’s ‘Poisonous Intent, or How to Get Away with Attempted Murder on the Early Modern Stage’. This examines two plays in which men try to poison married women with sleeping draughts: Thomas Heywood’s How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad (1602) and John Day’s Law-Tricks, or Who Would Have Thought It (1604–5, printed 1608). Since attempted murder was not a crime, neither would-be poisoner is punished for what they tried to do (though one was executed because someone other than the intended victim died), and Archdeacon argues that this makes for unsatisfactory conclusions which leave us with the feeling that it is not only individual characters but also some wider aspect of society which is subject to malaise. These plays expose the troubling distinction between sin and crime in a particularly acute manner.

The third chapter in the second part of the book is Delilah Bermudez Brataas’s ‘Let This Deadly Draught Purge Clean My Soul from Sin: Poisons and Remedies in Margaret Cavendish’s Drama’. Brataas argues that although Cavendish only incorporates actual poison into two of her plays, she figures marriage and gender relations as potentially poisonous. She also blurs the distinctions between poison and remedy and between poison and food. The overall effect is an ambivalence which leaves us asking ourselves whether poison is in fact something socially produced rather than an absolute property of any particular substance.

The second part is completed by Dee Anna Phares, ‘Poxy Doxies and Poison Damsels: Venereal Infection and the Myth of the Venomous Woman in Early Modern Drama’, which considers the idea that women were in themselves potential sources of poison since they might infect men with syphilis. Phares relates this to the mediaeval myth of the snake-woman and to language commonly used about sex workers to identify a trope of the poison damsel who is always already guilty and poses a constant source of threat to innocent male victims. Collectively, the four chapters in this part thus show that whether as victims, sources of sexual temptation, preparers of food or participants in the complex transaction that is marriage, women are always liable to be seen as both poisoned and poisonous.

The third and final part of the book has five chapters that focus on victims of poisoning. The first is Kibrina Davey’s ‘Thou Didst Eat My Lips: Swallowing Passion in William Davenant’s The Tragedy of Albovine’, which takes us from the fears of syphilis explored in Phares’s chapter to an actual victim of the disease: Davenant lost his nose to it, and Davey shows that he consistently figures noses as gateways of infection (although eating is also important in the play). She traces the multiple sensational poisonings of The Tragedy of Albovine to the effect of uncontrolled passion and argues that they collectively constitute a critique of royal power, and she also notes that the play’s emphasis on the drinking of blood has clear religious connotations.

Bill Angus’s ‘The Leperous Distilment: Authority, Informers and the Poisoned Ear’, meanwhile, considers the image of the poisoned ear to explore the connections that many dramatists make between the poisonous work of informers and the danger that authorities may be corrupted by their influence. At the time, informers are well incentivised to lie for profit, thus feeding the