January 29, 2013 9:45 am
Did Shakespeare Have Syphilis?
The earliest known portrayal of patients suffering from syphilis, from Vienna in 1498. Photo: Bartholomäus Steber
Before penicillin arrived on the scene, syphilis was a very real horror for philandering citizens. By the early 1500s, syphilis filled every corner of Europe. Called the “Great Pox,” it permeated all corners of society. Beginning with an open ulcer, it soon manifested as a rash all over the skin. Eventually, the disease’s tertiary phase set in, striking victims down three to fifteen years after their fateful encounter with the bacterium, leaving them grossly disfigured, blind or insane.
The poet Charles Baudelaire died from the disease, as did writer Guy de Maupassant, painter Edouard Manet and bon vivant Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Now, a new book, Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough, questions: did Shakespeare, too, suffer from this disease?
The only medical hint that points in this direction is Shakespeare’s signature. During his final years, his signature displayed a marked tremor, PBS writes. His behavior, however, provided further evidence. Compared to other Elizabethans of his age—who no doubt all harbored a healthy fear of the horrific disease—Shakespeare took syphilis obsession to an extreme. His love life, too, further supports the possibility:
According to contemporary gossip, Shakespeare was not only notoriously promiscuous, but was also part of a love triangle in which all three parties contracted venereal disease. The standard Elizabethan treatment for syphilis was mercury; as the saying goes, “a night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” Mercury’s more alarming adverse effects include drooling, gum disease, personality changes, and tremor.
Short of exhuming Shakespeare’s corpse, we may never know if the playwright suffered from syphilis or if the disease was just a rather odd muse of his. As D.H. Lawrence speculated in 1929:
I am convinced that the secret awareness of syphilis, and the utter secret terror and horror of it, has had an enormous and incalculable effect on the English consciousness, and on the American. Even when the fear has never been formulated, there it has lain, potent and overmastering. I am convinced that some of Shakespeare’s horror and despair, in his tragedies, arose form the shock of his consciousness of syphilis. I don’t suggest for one moment Shakespeare ever contracted syphilis. I have never had syphilis myself. Yet I know and confess how profound is my fear of the disease, and more than fear, my horror. In fact, I don’t think I am so very much afraid of it. I am more horrified, inwardly and deeply, of the idea of its existence.
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What a ludicrous review. It simply takes the author’s woefully under researched views as fact. Where is this the citation for this ‘contemporary gossip’? “His love life, too, further supports the possibility:
‘According to contemporary gossip, Shakespeare was not only notoriously promiscuous, but was also part of a love triangle in which all three parties contracted venereal disease. The standard Elizabethan treatment for syphilis was mercury; as the saying goes, “a night with Venus, a lifetime with Mercury.” Mercury’s more alarming adverse effects include drooling, gum disease, personality changes, and tremor.’”
Dr Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare Scholar.
Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/01/did-shakespeare-have-syphilis/#ixzz2JOo7zNXf
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Comment by Dr Pauline Kiernan — January 29, 2013 @ 3:42 pm
Here’s the relevant “woefully under-researched” passage from my book, citing contemporary gossip about Shakespeare and venereal disease:
Willobie His Avisa purports to be an earnest moral tract about a virtuous wife who spurns the advances of her would-be seducers. The book was popular and went through several printings, probably because it was actually a literary hoax and subversive satire of the sexual mores of prominent Elizabethans. Authorities found it offensive, and reinforced its scandalous cachet by confiscating and burning copies of it in 1599.
The origins of Willobie His Avisa are obscure. In the book’s introduction, one Hadrian Dorrell claims to have found the manuscript of Avisa in the bedchamber of his friend and fellow Oxford student Henry Willobie. Conveniently, Willobie is away on military service, and Dorrell is so impressed with the epic poem that he cannot resist preparing it for publication. Needless to say, there is no record of a Hadrian Dorrell having attended Oxford at this time, although there was a real Henry Willobie (or Willoughby) at Oxford, who died in 1596. It remains unclear whether Willobie is the real author of Avisa, whether he was the butt of a sophomoric prank, or whether he was only a handy stalking horse for the actual author.
Various failed suitors of Avisa are mocked in the first half of the poem. For example, “Caveleiro,” who may represent an Elizabethan noble with the equestrian moniker of Sir Ralph Horsey, is ridiculed as syphilitic: his “wanny cheeks” and “shaggy locks” make Avisa “fear the piles, or else the pox.” The second half of the poem concerns the vain attempts of “H. W.” to woo Avisa. H.W. is given cynical romantic advice by a man expert in the arts of seduction, the “old player” “W.S.,” his “familiar friend.” In this passage, the passion of H.W. for the chaste Avisa is described in vocabulary evocative of venereal disease:
H.W. being suddenly infected with the contagion of a fantastical fit…at length not able any longer to endure the burning heat of so fervent a humor, betrayed the secrecy of his disease unto his familiar friend W.S. who not long before had tried the courtesy of like passion, and was now recovered of the like infection…he now would secretly laugh at his friend’s folly, that had given occasion not long before unto others to laugh at his own…he determined to see whether it would sort to a happier end for this new actor, then it did for the old player. But at length this Comedy was liken to have grown to a Tragedy, by the weak and feeble estate H.W. was brought into…until Time and Necessity, being his best physicians brought him a plaster, if not to heal, yet in part to ease his malady. In all which discourse is lively represented the unruly rage of unbridled fancy, having the reins to rove at liberty, with the diverse and sundry changes of affections and temptations, which Will, set loose from Reason, can devise…
The pointed references to a “new actor,” an “old player,” “Comedy,” “Tragedy,” “Will,” and a doggerel parody of Shakespeare that follows, strongly suggest that the “old player” is William Shakespeare. Could H.W., the “new actor,” be Shakespeare’s pansexual patron, Henry Wriothesley? If Wriothesley, one of the kingdom’s most prominent nobles, been the major target of the book’s satire, this would explain why the Elizabethan authorities were compelled to burn it. The overbearing medical metaphor, and the striking word choices, “contagion,” “disease,” “burning,” “infection,” and “malady,” intimate that the “weak and feeble” Wriothesley and Shakespeare are suffering from a sexually transmitted infection, rather than the pangs of unrequited love. “Having the reins to rove at liberty” suggests “running of the reins [kidneys],” Elizabethan slang for gonorrhea.
Comment by John Ross, author — January 29, 2013 @ 5:45 pm