Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough by John J. Ross

That is key to his protean greatness.įortunately, with his next chapter, Dr. By the time the chapter has wallowed in the squalor of brothels and the welter of unpleasant symptoms and still more unpleasant nostrums, you feel like crying, in our contemporary phrase unknown to the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon: “TMI!” Shakespeare truly contained multitudes and insomniacs and Freudians - among others - find evidence in his work that he was one of their number. Ross writes, with admirable scientific method, that “the only medical fact known with certainty about William Shakespeare is that his handwriting deteriorated in his last years.” He does acknowledge that the cause for this was possibly “essential tremor, a common condition which affected the late Katharine Hepburn” and that “patients often find that alcohol alleviates essential tremor.” But, unfortunately, this is an excuse for a great deal of specious literary analysis of drunkenness in the plays, linking it to Shakespeare’s documented heavy drinking bouts, the last of which hastened or caused his demise.īut all this is only a sideshow to even more questionable identification of language and imagery in the sonnets and dramatic works as referring to syphilitic symptoms and consequences of mercury and other common treatments of the day.

Unless you can really demonstrate that this - or any other disease - had an effect on what someone wrote, as is the case with Friedrich Nietzsche, isn’t this obsessive interest just prurient? There was a time a few years back when it seemed that all anyone was interested in about Gustave Flaubert was not “Madame Bovary” but whether he was syphilitic, just as the fact that Washington and Jefferson were slaveholders appeared to be all that people knew about these Founding Fathers.

Shakespeare's Tremor and Orwell's Cough by John J. Ross