BLOOD WAS AN element that bridged the spiritual and physical world in early modern science and culture. It was the humor of the human body facilitating communication between flesh and soul, inner passions, and social and political interaction. It was also a substance that extended outside the individual body, connecting one corporeality to another in familial bonds of heredity and alliance; and the shared shedding of blood enabled affective relationality. In a recent article, Monique Scheer discusses the philosophical implications of the emphasis on “emotional practices” in studies of the history of emotions. She argues that affective responses are means to engage with the world, and to form contingencies between self and environment, body and mind. According to Scheer emotions are thus “practices,” or embodied processes, orchestrated through physical and social interaction, and this is how we can talk of them having a “history.” Scheer bases her analysis of emotions on practice theory, and the philosophy of Pierre Bourdieu, but she traces the general approach further back in time, to the writing of Baruch Spinoza and other seventeenth-century metaphysical philosophers. Indeed, Scheer's view of emotions corresponds closely with early modern perceptions of inner life, and the relationships between passions, spirit, and humors, especially the blood, and as this chapter will show, the idea of “emotional practices” thus provides a useful analytic framework to explore early modern conceptions of self and embodiment.

This chapter investigates Scheer's theory of emotions in relation to ideas of sanguinity and passions regulated by the blood in early modern medicine. As a point of reference, it explores the expression of these discourses in William Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear, both thought to have been first performed in 1606. Shakespeare's oeuvre has often been used as a means to contextualize and make sense of early modern medical writing, and as Gail Kern Paster argues in Humoring the Body, Shakespeare's oeuvre is extraordinarily rich in references to the physical processes of the body. Curiously, however, considering their general popularity in Shakespeare studies, Macbeth and King Lear appear relatively seldom in this literature.