Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Shakespeare

  • Did Macbeth have syphilis?

    Eleanor J. Molloy Dublin, Ireland   Gerard De Lairesse suffered from congenital syphilis. Image: Portrait of Gerard de Lairesse. Rembrandt van Rijn. 1665–67. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain. Introduction Syphilis was endemic in Elizabethan England and it was estimated that nearly 20% of the population of London were infected.1 The signs and symptoms…

  • More than “toil and trouble”: Macbeth and medicine

    Mariel Tishma Chicago, Illinois, United States   The Witches. Hans Baldung (called Hans Baldung Grien). 1510. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The image of a woman – a witch — working over a bubbling cauldron filled with stomach-turning substances is a staple of both horror and more family friendly media. One such example is Shakespeare’s…

  • Madness and gender in Gregory Doran’s Hamlet

    Sarah Bahr Indianapolis, Indiana, United States   John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52, Tate Britain, London. In director Gregory Doran’s 2009 film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, David Tennant’s Hamlet becomes a bawdy lunatic who consciously or unconsciously uncouples himself from reality. The intentionality of Hamlet’s madness is more muddled than in Shakespeare’s text because of the…

  • Manifestations of madness in King Lear

    Anoushka SinhaNew York, United States In his satirical masterpiece The Praise of Folly, the influential Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam attributes a Janus-like quality to madness, which he describes as two divergent manifestations: “one that which the Furies bring from hell” and “another…that proceeds from Folly.”1 Given the essay’s encomiastic title, it should come as…

  • If Cleopatra were alive today, she would be diagnosed as a borderline personality

    Jonathan Lewis Chicago, Illinois, United States   The death of Cleopatra Reginald Arthur, d. 1896 Roy Miles Gallery, London For anyone with the temerity to write about Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf has this amusing warning: “Shakespeare is flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him…one may hazard one’s conjectures privately, make one’s notes in…

  • Anatomical ghosts in The Merchant of Venice

    Mauro Spicci Antonio and the dangers of self-diagnosis In the last few years the steadily growing number of attempts to read Shakespeare’s plays from a medical perspective has been justified by the idea that they are not simply the immortal fruits of a genius, but also documents reflecting the historical, cultural, and social background of…