During the Renaissance, medical practitioners embraced both magic and astrology in their efforts to heal the sick and wounded. They believed that the planets affected human health in profound but mysterious ways, and physicians routinely cast the horoscopes of their patients as part of their healing regimens. Some went so far as to harness the power of the heavens with astrological magic, crafting talismans to draw down beneficial influences from particular planets. These practices were rooted in ancient beliefs that the human body was the microcosm or “little world” that mirrored the structure of the wider universe, or macrocosm. These same ideas also informed the teachings of the medical reformer Paracelsus (1493-541), who advocated for the inclusion of astrology, alchemy, and magic in the practice of medicine. Rejecting the standard medical education, he advised instead that the physician should wander the world, seeking the hidden secrets implanted in plants and minerals by God. Nature itself was the divine apothecary, offering everything required to heal the sick, and for Paracelsus the discovery of medical properties in natural things was an act of piety and veneration.

This chapter explores how medical knowledge shaped Shakespeare’s figuration of the passions. According to ancient writers, emotions originate in the organic soul, moving continually among the body, mind, and psyche. The passions are thus psychic in their inception and interstitial in their operations, both within the individual subject and in their transactions between people. Early modern emotions also shuttle between human beings and the meteorological world around them, as Macbeth, King Lear, and The Tempest exemplify. I supplement the precedence granted to Hippocratic and Galenic humoral theory in recent scholarship by charting how other ancient medical and natural philosophical sources informed early modern constructions of emotion. Emergent theories in medicine and natural philosophy (Vesalian anatomy, Paracelsian homeopathy) augmented existing understandings of the passions, as did vernacular medical treatises and popular medical controversies. While Shakespeare did not adhere in any systematic way to particular medical paradigms, their concepts and idioms influenced his eclectic representation of the passions. His plays depict the fundamentally interactive and dynamic nature of the emotions, the psychic intricacy of their physiological, mental, and imaginative functions, and the intensity of their intersubjective transmissions.