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Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England By Tanya Pollard Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005
Occasionally a book appears whose subject is so obvious that the reader can only wonder why no one has addressed it before. Pollard's study of drugs and the early modern theater is such a book. Drugs were controversial commodities in early modern England. A rapidly expanding pharmacopia created widespread interest in the use and misuse of various medicinal substances. The fairly stable list of herbal remedies used in Galenic humoral medicine had begun to swell in the latter half of the sixteenth century as new substances, including tobacco, arrived from the New World. In addition, chemical remedies advocated by Paracelsus and his followers slowly began to find favor among physicians in England. The debates surrounding the successes and failures of these new drugs, the challenges issued to Galenic practice by Paracelsian physicians, and the various poison plots reported against (and sometimes by) English monarchs, all combined to make drugs, and drugs as poison, a hot topic that dramatists were quick to exploit.
In order to study the function of pharmaceuticals in the theater, Pollard looks both at well-known plays such as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and also at some, including The second Maiden's Tragedy and Barnabe Barnes's potboiler, The Devil's Charter, known mostly to specialist readers. Her examination produces an intriguing argument: "Dramatists repeatedly link ambivalent, invasive, and transformative drugs with different aspects of the theater itself. . . . Drugs, with their ambivalent tension between curative promise and uncertain threat, offered a powerful vocabulary through which to imagine the effects of theatrical performance on spectators" (3). Thus, her study follows two...