Shakespeare, Tragedy and Menopause : The Anxious Womb

Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
List of Figures
1 “Bedlam Dames and Fowle Hags”: Uterine Pathologies and Menopausal Ambiguities
	Contemporary Menopause; Shakespearean Proto-Menopause
	Sociocultural Fears of the Ageing Woman
	Theatrical and Literary Archetypes of the Ageing Woman
	The Parameters of This Study
	Ontological and Semantic Challenges to Defining Early Modern “Menopause”
	Humoralism, Natural Science, and the Female Body
	Defining the Female Ageing Process
	Defining the Proto-Menopause “Event”
	The Proto-Menopausal Paradigm
	The Ageing Woman and Sociocultural Anxieties
	Silencing the Hag
	Historical Review of Early Modern Menopause and Ageing
	Structural Rationale
	Notes
2 Gertrude and the Petrifying Gorgon Womb
	Introduction: Columba Chatry, Nostradamus, and the Stone Baby
	“The Heyday in the Blood Should Be Tame”: Furor Uterinus and Suffocation of the Womb
	The Basilisk Gaze: Ocular Fascination and the Heating Womb
	Petrifying Older Women: Niobe, Hecuba, and Medusa
	“Destroy Your Sight”: The Old Woman in the Mirror
	Silencing Through Petrification: Medusa’s Stare
	Notes
3 Tamora and the Invasive Vegetable Womb
	Introduction: “Gone to Seed,” the Vegetable Madonna and Proto-Menopausal Pregnancy
	Fears of the Parthenogenic Womb
	The Botanical Discourse of Alien Stock and Invasive Species
	“Base Fruit”: Of Bastards and Grafting
	“In Due Season”: That Strumpet Fortune and Father Time
	Silencing by Consumption
	Notes
4 Volumnia and the Sacrificial Animal Womb
	Introduction: The Dog and the Woman at the Dissecting Table
	“Like Some Animal Within an Animal”: The Wandering Womb and Plethora
	“She’s a Very Dog to the Commonalty”: The Bitch’s Animal Instinct
	“The Lamb that Baas like a Bear”: The Danger of the Female Mouth
	Blood-sports and Bear-baiting: Purging the Animal Womb
	Notes
5 Lady Macbeth and the Envious Womb
	Introduction: “Fit Food for Spite”
	The Proto-Menopausal Female: Envy, Madness, and other Passions
	Thomas Wright and Early Modern Notions of the Psychosomatic
	“Bloody Instruction”: How Invidia Worked
	Melancholy: Invidia’s Humoral Sister
	Reason as Prophylaxis
	Abject Consumption: The Proto-Menopausal Female and Diabolical Foodstuffs
	Silencing Through Self-Cannibalization
	Notes
6 Menopausal Cleopatra and the Hybrid Cyborg Womb
	Introduction: “Dreams of a New Heaven and Earth”
	From Automaton to Cyborg
	Mechanical Theory, Mechanical Metaphor
	“To Set a Bourn”: Reckoning the Immeasurable Womb
	“In the Lap of Egypt”: Masturbation, Strangulation, and Precipitation of the Womb
	The Perpetual Sex Machine: Isis and her Mechanical Phallus Antony
	“A Cistern for Scaled Snakes”: The Self-Replicating Womb
	Silencing the Proto-Menopausal Dream: Descartes Kills the Cyborg
	Notes
7 Conclusion
	The Hag’s Enduring Legacy: The Menopausal Woman Today
	Notes
Index