When the Crying Stops

NO. 101: JUNE 2013 ISSN: 1751-8261 MAGAZINE OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE Contents Feature - crying 1-3 Carnival of lost emotions 4 Table of nerves 5 Breaking hearts 6-7 Queer stars 7 ICHSTM preview 8-9 Reviews 10-11 Conference reports 12-14 Interview - Charlotte Sleigh 15 BJHS, Viewpoint, BSHS info. 16 Editorial I Let’s get emotional. This issue features some of the burgeoning current research into the history of the emotions. To begin, Thomas Dixon traces tear tracks through literature and science in our early modern feature. Katy Price introduces an extraor- dinary and moving astronomical poem by William Empson. And Chris Millard tells how he came to be involved in recreating past emotional states with the help of the Lost Emotions Machine. We hear from the Great Exhibitions com- petition winners: David Rooney discusses heroes, hormones and heartbreak at the Science Museum’s Turing display; and Emma Shepley puts nerves on show at the Royal College of Physicians. Sean Johnston gets nostalgic whilst book-reviewing, and John Featley’s A Fountain of Teares (1646). © Trustees of the British Museum. Wahida Amin experiences the facts and feelings of Romantic Chemistry. There are also reports from BSHS-spon- sored conferences around the country, and When the crying stops a sneak preview of this summer’s Interna- tional Congress, which promises to be an Thomas Dixon on the science of weeping in the Shakespearean age. unforgettable, and probably emotional, experience. See you there! I have been researching the history of crying and striking book in many ways, including its Contributions to the next issue should for several years. This interest started back emphasis on the purposelessness of emo- be sent to [email protected] by 15th in 2009 when I was invited to an event on tional expressions, and its pioneering use of August 2013. Darwin and the emotions and began thinking research questionnaires and photographs. But Melanie Keene, Editor again about The Expression of the Emotions in what caught my attention was the chapter Man and Animals (1872). This is a surprising on ‘Special Expressions in Man: Suffering and 2 Viewpoint No. 101 This early staging of Titus Andronicus, as drawn by the author Henry Peacham, is the only contemporary illustration of one of Shakespeare’s plays to survive. Image in public domain. Weeping’, including the assertion that ‘English- boy-actor and not a woman. We do not know tem, in which the principle humours, or fluid men rarely cry, except under the pressure of whether he produced tears himself, but it is parts of the body were blood, phlegm, choler the acutest grief; whereas in some parts of likely that some of the audience would have and melancholy. ‘To these humours,’ he noted, the Continent the men shed tears much more been moved to tears by this spectacle. And ‘you may add serum, which is the matter of readily and freely.’ this reinforces the strangeness of weeping as urine, and those excrementitious humours of My attempt to position those three simple something simultaneously the acme of emo- the third concoction, sweat and tears.’ René words of Darwin’s – ‘Englishmen rarely cry’ – tional sincerity and the height of theatrical Descartes, in his 1649 treatise on The Passions in the longer histories of science, emotion, fakery. Tears of sorrow shed by the audience of the Soul, treated tears and sweat together and national identity, has now led me back in sympathy with a young boy in good health too: as the products of vapours issuing from to Shakespeare, and to a play currently being pretending to be a mutilated woman in the the body. For Descartes, weeping was a kind revived by the RSC. The Lamentable Roman midst of a horrific family revenge in ancient of sweating from the eyes. Only after the Tragedy of Titus Andronicus, to give it its full Rome might be interpreted as evidence of 1660s did anatomists, following Nicholas title, was first performed in 1594 and it serves admirable powers sympathy or of a patho- Steno, teach that tears were produced by the as a microcosm of early modern weeping, logical susceptibility to dangerous, false and lachrymal glands. understood as a kind of performance, a work unreal passions, as anti-theatrical polemicists The scenes in Titus Andronicus in which tears of nature, and an outward token of inner claimed. flow volubly like forces of nature, connect with states. Weeping was indeed an act, and yet at this sense of bodily overflow. Shakespeare The play is a revenge tragedy of astonish- the same time a work of nature – something identifies human tears with all the seasons ing violence: bowels, limbs, heads, hands and elemental, which came easily to children and and all the waterworks of nature – streams, tongues are lopped and hewn. Virtually all the women because they were more under the rivers, and oceans; showers, storms and protagonists end up dead – many of them in a sway of the passionate parts of nature, and life-giving rain. Lavinia and Titus at different final blood-soaked show-down in which Titus more naturally moist. Weeping, for early mod- points refer to their ‘tributary tears’ of mourn- kills his only daughter, the defiled Lavinia, erns, was like urinating, sweating, or vomiting. ing – alluding simultaneously to tributes to who has been raped and mutilated by Queen It was an ‘expression’ in the literal sense of a the dead and to natural rivulets. Lavinia is Tamora’s sons, whom Titus now serves in a squeezing out or excretion. We can trace our described as a pure spring, muddied by her pie to their mother, before being promptly own ideas about weeping as a kind of ‘emo- rape, and Titus’s grandson is described both as killed by the emperor, who is in turn killed by tional incontinence’ back to this humoural a ‘tender sapling’ and a ‘tender spring’ – tender Titus’s remaining son Lucius. There is much view of the body, according to which tears in the sense both of youthful and moist. Titus sorrow and plenty of weeping – although were a kind of ‘excrement’ – a liquid distilled tells the boy, ‘thou art made of tears’. not during the final scenes of tearless and from the blood, spirits, humours or vapours, Titus’s depicts his own tears as forces of pitiless revenge. The play is a very useful one produced by the heart or brain, and pressed nature, describing himself as the sea and the for my purposes, as its writing, performance out through the eyes. earth; Lavinia as the sky (or ‘welkin’) and wind. and reception can be used to explore medical For the English clergyman and physician, When heaven doth weep, doth not the earth ideas about the body and mind, as well as the Timothy Bright, writing his Treatise on Melan- o’erflow? histories of tragedy, Stoicism, religion, and choly in 1586, tears were ‘the brain’s thinnest If the winds rage, doth not the sea wax mad, morality. and most liquide excrement’. Robert Burton, in Threatening the welkin with his big-swollen As performed on the London stage in 1594, his Anatomy of Melancholy, in 1621, described face? Lavinia would have been portrayed by a sweat and tears within a similar humoural sys- And wilt thou have a reason for this coil? Viewpoint No. 101 3 I am the sea; hark, how her sighs do blow! consequences of inordinate passions: ‘blind- act belong to a young boy – Titus’s grandson. She is the weeping welkin, I the earth: ness of understanding, perversion of will, and The boy’s father, Lucius, Titus’s only remain- Then must my sea be moved with her sighs; alteration of humours; and by them, maladies ing son, addresses the child in words that are Then must my earth with her continual tears and diseases’. And these are precisely the surely also addressed over his head to the Become a deluge, overflow’d and drown’d; effects that Titus’s inordinate sorrows seem to theatre audience beyond: For why my bowels cannot hide her woes, have on him. Come hither, boy, come and learn of us But like a drunkard must I vomit them. After the speech in which Titus declares ‘I To melt in showers. That final image of vomiting out woes rein- am the sea’ and ‘she is the weeping welkin’, What Shakespeare presents his audience forces the understanding of tears as a voiding a messenger enters the stage carrying two with here is a task – somehow to learn to of bodily waste. This moment is the high heads and a hand. The heads belong to Titus’s weep without becoming morally and mentally water mark of Titus’s epic, meteorological, sons, and the hand is Titus’s own, chopped deranged, without going blind, without los- humoural, natural weeping. And it is part of a off by himself and misguidedly offered as a ing the power of speech. More importantly literary tradition of tears that continued into ransom for his sons’ lives. This mocking of he provides them with an activity through the seventeenth century – including religious Titus’s pleas for mercy by the execution of his which to make the attempt – the collective texts by Catholics, Puritans and Anglicans. In sons, and the scornful return of his hand, is the witnessing of a classical tragedy. And thanks the latter category John Donne’s 1623 sermon final blow. This is when the crying stops. Titus to Shakespeare, gathering in theatres and on the text ‘Jesus Wept’, George Herbert’s 1633 in fact responds with laughter.

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