Working with a broad conception of sympathy, which he finds articulated in a wide range of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English texts, encompassing literature as well as “natural-scientific, religious, philosophical, and medical” writing (16), Eric Langley contends that Shakespeare's works represent “an increasingly defensive and reactionary introspection … in response to a perceived threat from the world's assailing, infectious influences” (36). In short, sympathy—whether construed as contagion or compassion—is not only recognized as dangerous in the period but also provokes a protective and distrustful reaction. In Langley's view, the modern “bounded self” emerged in the face of an early modern hypersensitivity to “transmission” and “sympathology,” thus closing down “the inter-animate open subject” (35, 9).
The book is divided into three loosely structured parts, entitled “Sympathy,” “Bittersweet,” and “Tenderness.” Part 1 traces conceptions of sympathy in Thomas Vaughan, William Gilbert, Henry More, Walter Charleton, Sir Kenelm Digby, Robert Hooke, Margaret Cavendish, James Howell, James Hart, and others, before briefly turning to Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Julius Caesar to identify “a model of affective subjectivity in which the subject renders itself up to communication, is increasingly pathologically informed but therefore is increasingly psychologically untenable” (87). Part 2, “Bittersweet,” focuses on antipathy and the implications of early modern pharmaceutical medicine or the pharmakon, paradoxical substances that contain contrary essences of cordial and poison (103). Langley finds these opposing forces of bitter and sweet, or fair and foul, persistently expressed in The Winter's Tale, Titus Andronicus, Coriolanus, King Lear, and All's Well That Ends Well, noting that Shakespeare employs the “pharmaceutical metaphor to capture the double nature and inherent ambivalence of all communication” (151). The second chapter in this section turns to Othello and identifies Iago as the quintessential flatterer or false friend, who “personifies the duplicitous power of … poisonous medicine, and, by association, operates with the pharmacal power of a plague” (187).
In part 3, “Tenderness,” Langley plays with the words tender, attend, and extend to characterize the vulnerable “extended-subject” in The Tempest before turning to Shakespearean figures who refuse to “tenderly extend,” such as Henry V in the Henriad and the subject of Sonnet 94. These bounded selves are symptoms, Langley argues, of the culture's “increased sense of permeability, leakage, or penetrability,” which breeds a “reactionary pseudo-nostalgia” for an autonomous individuality (260). The book concludes with a meditation on Jacques Derrida's perspective on epistolary communication as a frame for discussing Shakespearean letters, with a focus on Hamlet's “tenders.”
In his introduction, Langley acknowledges the influence of Teresa Brennan and Michel Serres, but his textual analysis is most profoundly shaped by Derrida in his insistence on the “impossibility of maintaining discrete either/or differences” (115) in any of his close readings. While the study is impressively learned in its wide-ranging references to primary texts, there are some notable holes in its secondary citations. Gail Kern Paster appears in the footnotes (as “Kern Paster”), but her influential book Humoring the Body is conspicuously absent. Langley makes no reference to René Girard's significant work on the Plague, although there are Girardian echoes throughout. Also missing is any reference to recent scholarship on early modern sympathies by Seth Lobis and myself.
Despite the impressive array of early modern materials amassed and presented in Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies, readers looking for a carefully delineated historical argument may be disappointed. Langley shows little interest in the period's medical conflicts (such as the differences between Galenic and Paracelsian notions of disease, which are not directly addressed until chapter 4). He has a tendency to quote primary materials without providing context, often burying both the author and the date of the source in the footnotes. At times, the quotations prove misleading, as when, for example, Langley makes an assertion about Shakespeare and then provides a quotation from a mid-seventeenth-century medical text on surgery as evidence of his claim (154). This approach flattens out historical and generic differences, encouraging the reader to overlook subtle distinctions and find only resemblances. I admire the erudition of Shakespeare's Contagious Sympathies but I find that Langley's methodology and theoretical investments ultimately inhibit the possibility of saying something new or unexpected about the texts he cites.
