capri0mni | [crossposted] Questioning Authority

A little over twenty years ago, my undergraduate Shakepeare professor (Dr. Irene Nunnary -- and yes, there were Hamlet jokes) recommended that we read Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery, and What it Tells Us, for its thoroughness and insight in deciphering Shakespeare's work. Originally published in 1935, it had been reprinted eleven times since, and was still considered a classic go-to book.

Spurgeon's method was to go through his plays (and some of his poems) and count every single metaphor and simile he used, and the context in which he used them, and attempted to figure out, from the evidence, what sort of person he was, and how he thought about life. I loved it then, but now, as I'm going back and rereading the book, her almost saintly portrait is making me squirm (she even calls him 'Christ-like'), and want to argue with her -- towhit:

He was healthy in body as in mind, clean and fastidious in his habits, very sensitive to dirt and evil smells. Apart from many indirect proofs of these facts in his plays, no man could have written his images on sickness, surfeit, gluttony, dirt and disease, who had not naturally a strong feeling for healthy living, a liking of for fresh air and 'honest water', and who was not himself clean, temporate, and healthy.

I see the opposite. In my experience, healthy people tend to go through life not even thinking about their bodies. It's when you're ill that your brain fixates on the germs and lurgy, and how one ache differs from another. If you have an iron-clad immune system, you hardly notice the mold growing up the damp wall, in that dark corner, but if you're prone to asthma attacks (for example), you're hyper-aware of anything in the environment that might set one off (believe me, I know -- I've been there/done that).

And then, there's this -- and this is one thing I want to ask about, because my background knowledge of Elizabethan culture is moderately broad, and very shallow:

One of the things we notice in his collected 'sickness' and 'food' images is how far ahead of his age he is in his belief -- implied and stated -- that we bring upon ourselves a great deal of our own bad health by ill-regulated living, and especially by over-eating.
(Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeare's Imagery, and What it Tells Us. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 203)

Was he ahead of his time? What was the generally accepted knowledge about health and disease in the late 16th and early 17th centuries? Caroline Spurgeon never cites any contemporary sources to back up her claim, and seems to be working on the assumption that because 'those people' lived long ago, they must have had Wrong Ideas about things, because, long ago, people were Scientifically Backward.

It's also clear to me (now) that she approached her work with the belief that Shakespeare was the "Greatest Genius Writer of the English Language of All Time," and possibly the greatest genius, period, of all humanity, and that she interpreted everything she studied through the filter of that belief; I'm learning just as much about her thoughts of what it means to be an ideal human being as I am about Shakespeare's (if not more).

Do college Shakespeare professors still recommend Shakespeare's Imagery to their students, as mine did, a generation ago? If not, what are they recommending instead?

[cross-posted from