Seeing the Change

“Where’s my daughter?” “Where is this girl?” As her mother’s and nurse’s opening questions suggest, Juliet’s location and linguistic identifiers are slippery from the start (1.3.1, 4). Where is she, and how should she be defined? Appropriately enough, Juliet begins (as the play stages her) just beyond the threshold that her mother and nurse summon her to cross in her first scene. And once she joins them, they both begin the precise marking of Juliet’s age “unto an hour” that ends with the Nurse’s statement: “On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen” (1.3.12, 23).

In the previous scene, Juliet’s father had initiated this fixation on her age. In his exchange with Paris, Capulet exposes the role of human desire – here both parental and patriarchal – in shaping female timelines and experiences. He tells Juliet’s suitor:

Developmentally speaking, where a girl is and where she is thought to be hang in awkward balance here as Capulet attempts to negotiate the terms of female ripeness – to hold it off for two more summers past the natural “change of fourteen years.” In his view, Juliet is a “child,” an innocent “stranger” who has not witnessed anything of the adult world. According to him, she has not seen the change of fourteen years, and this physical immaturity is matched by her general inexperience. Countering Paris’s claim, based in biological evidence, that “[y]ounger than she are happy mothers made” (1.2.12), Capulet suggests that paternal will plays a more powerful role in shaping the terms of female development: Juliet will become a mother when he is ready to “think her ripe to be a bride.” In other words, it’s not enough for a girl to be physiologically capable of pregnancy, whether the pubertal “change” has occurred at fourteen years or earlier; a father also must think a girl ripe for marriage and motherhood before she can enter either state.

In the following scene, Juliet’s mother and the Nurse continue the subjective, rhetorical work Capulet undertakes when they, too, press their needs onto Juliet’s almost-fourteen-year-old self. Both women mark the important moments on Juliet’s developmental timeline, from infancy to marriage and maternity, keying each one to an age that carries distinct memories and meanings for each of them. The richest, most extended example of this phenomenon is the Nurse’s speech about Juliet’s infancy and childhood, one that begins with her claim that “Even or odd, of all days in the year / Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen” (1.3.18–19). Just as Capulet keys Juliet’s ripeness to a father’s thoughts and desires, the Nurse constructs the timeline of Juliet’s development according to her own emotional history. But as the woman hired to breastfeed Juliet (as was the common practice in wealthy households) and to raise her, she has a more visceral, physical connection to the changes of her young charge’s body. The Nurse describes Juliet’s infancy in relation to her own late daughter, Susan: they were “of an age,” which tells us Juliet either replaced her at the Nurse’s breast, or nursed along with her for a time (1.3.21). Personal loss continues to shadow her next extended anecdote about Juliet’s weaning, which (according to the Nurse) happened exactly on her third birthday, eleven Lammastides ago. She remembers this date especially because of three agitating events that surrounded it: she saw Juliet “fall out wi’th’ dug” (onto which the Nurse had placed bitter wormwood) just as an earthquake struck (1.3.34); and it was only the day before that the toddling Juliet had fallen forward and “broke her brow” before the Nurse’s late husband scooped her up (1.3.40). The latter event supports her claim that Juliet had just started standing on her own, a developmental marker that the Nurse, through her memorial reconstruction of events, pins to the same point on Juliet’s timeline as the age of her weaning. Importantly, it is the memory of her husband that inspires this synchronizing impulse. His bawdy punning on Juliet’s fall (“Thou wilt fall backward when thou hast more wit, / Wilt thou not, Jule?”) brings back such fond memories of her late “merry” spouse that the Nurse repeats his joke twice, punctuating it each time with Juliet’s innocent, one-word response: “Ay” (1.3.42–46). She describes how her husband then “took up the child,” a visual that inevitably recalls their own lost Susan – a child once “of an age” with Juliet, but now dead and surpassed by her (1.3.42, 21).⁸

Taken all together, the Nurse’s memories of Juliet’s milestones, recollected through the lens of her own losses and joys, illustrate the complex desires that attach to and produce meaning through the changing girl’s physiognomy. The stages of Juliet’s development are measured and imagined in two different but conjoined registers: the female body reflexively initiates acts like suckling, walking, weaning, menstruating, and giving birth; but those events are concurrently shaped by the people, cultural codes, and other environmental factors that act upon it. Many factors affect Juliet’s position in relation to the Nurse’s breast and determine the movements of her growing body: the Capulets’ social status, the Nurse’s lost daughter, the wormwood, the earthquake, the late husband who lifts Juliet off the ground.

When Capulet’s wife intervenes in the Nurse’s long-winded narrative, she segues into serious talk of Juliet’s readiness for marriage. And with this topic comes more talk of age that conflates inevitable, natural stages of female development with cultural expectations and individual experience: “Younger than you / Here in Verona, ladies of esteem, / Are made already mothers,” she tells Juliet, echoing Paris’s argument from the previous scene. She goes on to calculate the age of her maternity against Juliet’s maidenhood: “By my count / I was your mother much upon these years / That you are now a maid” (1.3.71–75). The Nurse, swearing “by my maidenhead at twelve year old,” reinforces this suggestion that the timing of important physical experiences one would expect to follow the change of fourteen years (like loss of virginity and motherhood) is subject to individual desires – those of parents and others who might force themselves on girls before they have seen fourteen, but also those of girls themselves (1.3.2).

As Capulet’s wife continues, she acknowledges the role of her daughter’s brain as well as her sexually maturing body in enacting such matters. She wants her daughter to “think of marriage now,” and asks Juliet: “How stands your dispositions to be married?” (1.3.71, 67, emphasis mine). Her use of the plural “dispositions” here points to a variety of stances Juliet may be taking (or not) in relation to the state of being a bride. Juliet’s response to her mother’s question – that it is “an honour that I dream not of” – offers a glimpse of Juliet’s mind for the first time in the play, although it does not show her mother, or the audience, anything for sure about what that mind is up to (1.3.68). Q1 and the Folio read “houre,” not “honour,” an alternative that shows Juliet toying with the precisely timed calculations of female development upon which the other characters around her so clearly fixate. She imagines marriage as an “houre” – not, perhaps, as one permanent and honorable disposition.⁹ Although she is not dreaming of marriage, that does not foreclose other forms of cognitive activity, or other dreams, for that matter. But of note in this play, as we shall see, dreaming attaches more to young males than females, and signals the former’s loss of cognitive control. Juliet may sleep longer than any other character around her, but she does not have dreams, which are, as Mercutio exclaims, “the children of an idle brain” (1.4.97). Juliet’s brain will prove unusually active and focused in comparison to those of Verona’s adolescent males.

Capulet’s wife’s rhetoric suggests that she does not think of Juliet as the “child” and “stranger to the world” that her husband sees.¹⁰ But her interaction with Juliet here also suggests that she has not lived up to her duties as a good Christian mother, which included knowing a daughter’s mind once that maid has left childhood and entered into her next crucial developmental stage. The anonymous author of The office of Christian parents exhorts:

Juliet’s mother appears to be seeking this kind of familiarity with her daughter, but the play’s impending events suggest that she is too late. She seems to be rushing Juliet along in order to fit her daughter’s almost-fourteen-year-old body-mind to the experiences of her own twelve-year-old pregnant self (an unnatural age to bear children, even from an early modern standpoint). Of equal importance, Juliet is clearly not opening her mind in full to her mother about marriage or anything else, although she will open it to the Nurse (whose familiarity with Juliet has been well established) and to the stranger Romeo, both of whom will aid her in “stealing away” – body, heart, and mind.

Although she does not know her daughter’s mind, Juliet’s mother believes her daughter is ready to think upon a husband. She instructs Juliet to “behold” Paris and “[r]ead o’er the volume” of his face, which includes what is “written in the margin of his eyes” (1.3.82–83, 88). In some ways, her conceit engages with early modern instructional writings that exhorted parents to monitor their daughters’ reading material. Thomas Salter, speaking especially to mothers on how to raise their daughters, advises the following in his Mirrhor of Modestie: “Lette her reade I saie and with the same print in her minde the lives of suche noble Ladies as lived in Troie, Sabina, Phocia, Argiva, and Rome.” But he also cautions mothers to keep their daughters from “the Lascivious bookes, of Ovide, Catullus, Propercius, Tibullus, and in Virgill of Eneas, and Dido, and amonge the Greeke Poettes of the filthie love (if I maie terme it love) of the Goddes themselues.”¹² Juliet’s mother is careful to present her daughter with Paris, a “fair volume” and “precious book of love,” but she also acknowledges Juliet’s cognitive independence. Her daughter is ready to “examine” and “[f]ind” things on her own (1.3.85–89 passim).

Love on the Brain

Before delving further into what Juliet’s almost-fourteen-year-old brain is doing in this play, it is instructive to look at Romeo’s as a point of comparison. There are clear, gendered differences in how their cognitive activities are described once they are in love. Juliet consistently privileges thinking over uncontrollable bodily change. Meanwhile, from the moment he enters the play, Romeo resembles the unsteady adolescent boys who populated early modern texts. As many critics have noted, he begins the play as a largely inept Petrarchan lover, complaining against the cruel Rosaline.¹³ He is fully disabled by lovesickness, a subcategory of early modern melancholy, which has overtaken him. In her work on this particular illness, Lesel Dawson describes how it was imagined to work on the body and brain of the afflicted person: “love is represented as an infectious malady; it is caught through the eyes and triggers an immediate physical reaction: the spirits grow distracted, the liver malfunctions, the blood becomes muddy, and the body deteriorates.” Constant perseverating on the image of the beloved could “corrupt imagination, pervert reason, provoke appetites, and dominate memory.”¹⁴ Mercutio’s exclamations – “Romeo! Humours! Madman! Passion! Lover!” – point to his friend’s disabling psychophysiological condition (2.1.7). Montague’s description of his son’s behavior further identifies Romeo’s lovesick, melancholic symptoms. His son weeps all night until sunrise, pens himself up in his room, “makes himself an artificial night,” and has a “[b]lack and portentous … humour” (1.1.133–34).

When Romeo first enters, bemoaning his pain, his ability to speak as an accomplished Petrarchan wit is clearly compromised by his condition: “Alas that love, whose view is muffled still, / Should without eyes see pathways to his will. / Where shall we dine?” (1.1.164–66). He is distracted, and comically so, judging by Benvolio’s implied response to him: “Dost thou not laugh?” Romeo asks (1.1.176). Indeed, when Romeo visits Friar Laurence to tell him of his love for Juliet, the Friar claims that Rosaline rejected him because “she knew well / Thy love did read by rote, that could not spell” (2.2.87–88). The Chorus concurs with this assessment of Romeo as a passive cognitive actor, announcing that “Now Romeo is beloved and loves again, / Alike bewitchèd by the charm of looks.” By comparison, Juliet appears to be in control of her body-mind. There is no description of her eye having been pierced and her mind overwhelmed by the sight of Romeo. Although she is “as much in love” as he, according to the Chorus, she must “steal love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks” (2.0.5–6, 11, 8). Juliet is not the unwitting victim of Love; rather, she must harness her brainwork and face fearful odds to steal her Romeo. The Chorus’s words here telegraph the horrific terrors Juliet will choose to navigate later in the play in order to reunite with him.

In the balcony scene, Juliet first marshals this cognitive agility in order to control the physical agitations their first meeting had sparked. She exhorts Romeo not to swear by the moon, “th’inconstant moon / That monthly changes in her circled orb, / Lest that thy love prove likewise variable” (2.1.151–52). Through her metaphor, she deliberately invokes the natural cycles that the change of fourteen years initiated, and then renegotiates their lunar associations.¹⁵ Juliet is protecting herself, but she is not avoiding her sexual maturity. Rather, she disassociates it from the moon’s monthly changes, tying Romeo to them in her place (before urging him to disavow his reliance on them). She calls instead on “summer’s ripening breath” to bring this “bud of love” to flower (2.1.163). To recall Capulet’s rhetorical revision of his daughter’s development in his initial exchange with Paris, Juliet is attempting to think herself ripe on her own terms.

Juliet continues to privilege focused cognition over uncontrollable bodily change the next morning: “Love’s heralds should be thoughts, / Which ten times faster glides than the sun’s beams,” she complains, as she waits for the Nurse to return from her rendezvous with Romeo (2.4.4–5). Romeo, meanwhile, continues to cast their love as a physiologically vulnerable experience. He tells Friar Laurence that “one hath wounded me / That’s by me wounded. Both our remedies / Within thy help and holy physic lies” (2.2.50–52). Despite Romeo’s claims that they share the same wound, the same need for healing, Juliet avoids these disabling metaphors. When she does describe love’s bodily effects, she does so in terms of healthy humoral activity, not passive illness: “Had she affections and warm youthful blood,” she says of the slow-footed Nurse, “She would be as swift in motion as a ball” (2.4.12–13).

The swiftness of Juliet’s loving thoughts merge here with her warm, young blood. Her heat does not herald the arrival of adolescent pathology, but rather figures the harmonious union of an almost-fourteen-year-old female’s changing body-mind and brainwork. This psychophysiological process stands in stark contrast to the damaging effects of Verona’s blazing heat on the unstable body-minds of the city’s young men. Benvolio, concerned that they will run into Tybalt, tells Mercutio that “If we meet we shall not scape a brawl, / For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring” (3.1.3–4). Mercutio describes Benvolio in turn as “hot a jack in thy mood as any in Italy, and as soon moved to be moody, and as soon moody to be moved” – a youth whose “head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat” (3.1.11–13, 21). Reflecting Romeo’s penetrable, debilitated body-mind, his friends seem equally at the mercy of summer’s heat and the “mad blood” it stirs. In an earlier scene, Mercutio presses on this image of psychophysiological vulnerability as he describes the lovesick Romeo: “Alas, poor Romeo, he is already dead – stabbed with a white wench’s black eye, run through the ear with a love-song, the very pin of his heart cleft with the blind bow-boy’s butt-shaft; and is he a man to encounter Tybalt?” (2.3.12–15). When Romeo does encounter his new wife’s cousin and resists fighting him, he displays the very “vile submission” to love and to Tybalt that Mercutio had predicted (3.1.68). In response, Mercutio proves his submission to the enflaming effects of Verona’s climate on his already mercurial temperament by entering into a fatal brawl with Tybalt.

Up until the moment of her marriage, then, Juliet exhibits a cognitive control and balanced body-mind that evade her male adolescent counterparts. These differences forecast the distinctions that physician Helkiah Crooke would make between fourteen-year-old girls who think upon husbands and fourteen-year-old males whose changing brains fall prey to lustful imaginations.¹⁶ Shakespeare does, of course, give Juliet a desiring body-mind as well, but it inspires her to beautifully articulate artistic heights. Critics typically describe Juliet’s lustful and poetic wedding-night soliloquy as a surprising verbal display, one that is out of the ordinary for a naive girl. In one especially influential reading, Marjorie Garber argues that “[f]or a young woman of her age and her sheltered upbringing, this innocent forwardness is as remarkable as it is appealing.”¹⁷ But Juliet’s speech is only remarkable if we fail to recognize in girls like her the dynamic adolescent brainwork that Shakespeare and his contemporaries clearly did.

The discrepancy in cognitive agility between Juliet and her Romeo is fully on display after they consummate their marriage. Juliet begins the scene speaking as if she has the deluded perceptions of a brainsick lover. She claims that the lark is a nightingale and the daylight is a meteor and that, therefore, he need not go. Romeo, content to let love trump judgment, follows her lead, claiming, “I have more care to stay than will to go” (3.5.23). But Juliet resists the lure of delusion and returns to the factual situation at hand, urging Romeo to leave. As she looks down on her husband descending from her window, she has a flash of foresight:

Her unfailing sight, uncanny divination, and elevated perspective here connect her to allegorical figures like Edmund Spenser’s Phantastes. He dwells in the first tower chamber of The Faerie Queene’s Castle of Alma (a space that represents the brain’s imaginative faculty) and can “things to come foresee.”¹⁸ Whereas Juliet correctly predicts Romeo’s death, her husband reads their paleness by the book, attributing it to their present humoral imbalance: if he “look’st pale” to Juliet, then “trust me, love, in my eye so do you. / Dry sorrow drinks our blood” (3.5.58–59).

Before ever meeting Juliet, Romeo did have a brief (though far less specific) flash of Phantastes’ and Juliet’s foresight: “my mind misgives / Some consequence yet hanging in the stars / Shall bitterly begin his fearful date / With this night’s revels” (1.4.106–9). Romeo’s brainwork is vague and diffuse when compared to Juliet’s sharp, detailed view of the future. Later in the play, he claims to have had a similar vision to hers of his impending death. Whereas she was fully awake and alert when she foresaw him at the bottom of a tomb, however, he receives his vision through the much less reliable and passive medium of a dream:

Romeo has no control here over his body-mind. He is subject to the false flattery of sleep, his spirits lift him with ungrounded “cheerful thoughts,” and when he attempts to use his brainwork to interpret the vision that sleep delivers, he is tragically only half correct. Juliet will find him dead, but his heart and brain, clouded by the stuff of dreams and illusions of imperial grandeur, cannot accurately foretell the story’s end.

“Minded by herself alone”

Although she is married and has consummated her vows by act 3, Juliet still embodies the kind of girl that I defined as this book’s focus in the Introduction: a female who has reached puberty, but whose thoughts are not yet absorbed by the demands of a husband and household. Juliet’s marriage is hasty, secret, and short (she is a mere “three-hours wife” when Romeo is banished [3.2.99]). There is no time for her mind to be “bound in the cave of care” that Robert Greene’s Mamillia describes as the cognitive endgame for all wives.¹⁹ As soon as she marries Romeo, she repairs to her parents’ home, not her husband’s. And while her body is confined to increasingly claustrophobic spaces – her bedchamber, the Friar’s cell, the Capulet tomb – her brainwork continues to expand its reach as she negotiates her options.

This is not to say that marriage leaves Juliet’s mind entirely unbound. She fixes her fate to her husband’s, siding with Romeo over her blood family when she learns that he has killed Tybalt. But as her cave of care takes shape in this extraordinary scene, it does so via her intentional acts of cognition. Once the meaning of Romeo’s violent act and banishment presses upon Juliet’s mind, all three of her brain’s principal faculties work together to focus and intensify each other’s activities. As the Nurse mangles her delivery of Tybalt’s death, Juliet assumes Romeo has been slain. She registers the impact of this imagined event through her senses and imaginative faculty. The image of the “piteous corpse” that the Nurse describes pushes Juliet to exclaim, “To prison, eyes”; and, as she urges the Nurse to clarify Romeo’s fate, she declares that “[b]rief sounds determine of my weal or woe” (3.2.54, 58, 51).

When she learns that Romeo is alive, but that he killed Tybalt, she directs her brainwork to reshape the tragedy that is quickly unfolding, and to aid her shifting allegiance from the Capulets to her three-hours spouse:

Juliet summons up her faculty of judgment to strip Romeo of his villainy and her cousin of his kindness: “But wherefore, villain, didst thou kill my cousin? / That villain cousin would have killed my husband.” In two neat lines, she turns “my cousin” to “That cousin”; and the outsider “villain” who killed him, she owns as “my husband.” Juliet’s brainwork allows Romeo to take his place as her spouse, even as she untethers her cousin – reduced now to “Tybalt” – from her blood. She also redirects her humors in the service of her reasoned reassessment of events: “Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring! / Your tributary drops belong to woe, / Which you, mistaking, offer up to joy.” The fact that she is physically apart from Romeo here makes her mental accommodations of “him that is my husband” all the more apparent. With the exception of their wedding night, he lives only in her mind for the rest of the play.

Juliet engineers a similar kind of psychophysiological reinvention to deal with Romeo’s banishment: “Some word there was, worser than Tybalt’s death, / That murdered me. I would forget it fain, / But O, it presses to my memory / Like damnèd guilty deeds to sinners’ minds!” (3.2.108–11). Within forty lines of the Nurse’s news that Romeo has been “banishèd,” the word has moved through Juliet’s brain, from front to back – first heard, then assessed, and finally delivered into the storehouse of her memory. The fact that she retains the word (even when she “would forget it”) is significant, for it marks Juliet’s memory as decidedly not that of a child. As one seventeenth-century writer explains: children’s perpetual movement is one reason why “the Images of the objects are not so deeply ingraven in their memories, or else it maie bee for this cause, that young children have the Organ of the memorie too moyst,” so that they “cannot imprint and strongly engrave the Images of the objects deepe enough in their memory.”²⁰ I turn to the newly activated abilities of the adolescent memory more fully in Chapter 4; for now, it is enough to note that Juliet displays them here. She also is able to call things forth from it for reassessment by her rational faculty: “That ‘banishèd’, that one word ‘banishèd’ / Hath slain ten thousand Tybalts” (3.2.113–14).

Juliet’s careful brainwork and humoral self-control appear to escape the Nurse’s comprehension here, for when the Nurse goes to Friar Laurence’s cell in the next scene, she focuses only on Juliet’s disabling grief. She describes her as an inarticulate mess, “Blubb’ring and weeping, weeping and blubb’ring”: “O, she says nothing, sir, but weeps and weeps, / And now falls on her bed, and then starts up, / And ‘Tybalt’ calls, and then on Romeo cries, / And then down falls again” (3.3.87, 98–101). The Nurse insists that the two lovers are experiencing their misery on equal terms, but Romeo displays none of the directed brainwork we have just witnessed from Juliet. What we do see is Romeo’s full mind-body incapacity, as Friar Laurence points to him lying on the floor of his cell: “There on the ground, with his own tears made drunk” (3.3.83). It is not surprising that the Nurse fails to read Juliet’s mind here. Juliet is doing and willing things that do not fit her Nurse’s – not to mention her parents’ – individual frames of reference for what an almost-fourteen-year-old girl should want and think. But this does not mean that an audience would have seen these abilities as unusual for a girl of her age. Juliet’s mind does become increasingly illegible to her loved ones, each of whom need something different from her. But Shakespeare gives her brainwork more extensive stage time as the play proceeds and allows it, through Juliet’s own words, to materialize for the play’s audience.

Once her parents and the Nurse turn on her, and her husband leaves Verona, Juliet is on her own (with the exception of Friar Laurence) and must, as she will say before taking the infamous death-sleep potion, “my dismal scene … act alone” (4.3.19). In this sense, she represents the adolescent girls of this study who are mature yet unattached – freer than their childish or wifely counterparts to move and think in ways that were unique to this particular stage of girlhood. It may seem strange to think of Juliet as more free when she is at her most cornered; but when we look at how her brainwork begins to show itself in this part of the play, this description makes sense. Physically unmoored from her spouse, and emotionally disengaged from her parents’ hold, she is free to embark on even more extraordinary acts of imagination, understanding, and memory.

When Juliet goes to Friar Laurence for guidance, determined to commit suicide if need be to escape her impending marriage to Paris, the Friar describes her as having the “strength of will to slay thyself” (4.1.72). Romeo, in comparison, later will portray thoughts of suicide as unbidden visitors: “O mischief, thou art swift / To enter in the thoughts of desperate men!” (5.1.35–36). His distracted mind does not measure up to the mental fortitude that was allegedly the natural provenance of men’s superior bodies. As Helkiah Crooke writes of adult males and females: “It behoved therefore that man should be hotter, because his body was made to endure labour and travell, as also that his minde should bee stout and invincible to undergoe dangers, the onely hearing whereof will drive a woman as wee say out of her little wits” (274). Romeo and Juliet, in other words, do not respond to their dire circumstances in the ways that typical adult male and female body-minds would. And this is exactly why we should attend to the specifics of their status as adolescents who are not yet in the fully mature gendered stages that Crooke and his contemporaries imagined.

The Friar recognizes the cognitive strengths that motivate Juliet to act on her own, and he does so while explicitly situating her between childhood and adulthood. The only things that would stand in her way, he says, would be an “inconstant toy” or “womanish fear” (4.1.119). The former points to childish distraction, and the latter to adult female deficiency. Juliet wills herself to imagine and enact dangers that would drive a woman – but apparently not a girl experiencing the change of fourteen years – out of her little wits. At the same time, she has outgrown her younger self, a child who resembled the impressionable female consumers that proscriptive domestic handbooks warned away from inappropriate tales. Juliet recalls how that less developed girl feared stories of being buried “with a dead man in his tomb – / Things that, to hear them told, have made me tremble.” Now she has changed into one who “will do it without fear or doubt” (4.1.85–87).

Even when Juliet imagines herself going out of her mind – waking up alone in the Capulet monument and being driven to madness with fear – she methodically choreographs the scene in her head. She is obviously full of emotion, but her feelings help focus her inventive vision. Before she drinks the Friar’s potion, she describes the terrifying future event into which she now projects herself:

Whereas Romeo cannot control the “desperate thoughts” that plunge him toward suicide, Juliet imagines dashing out her own “desp’rate brains” – fighting until the end with a gruesome drive. She casts herself as a girl who will “madly play” with human remains, vocabulary that evokes the performance, and not the actual experience, of an unruly mental state. At the same time, the audience hears her testifying to her perception of Tybalt’s ghost entering her room. The rhetorical work she does here to describe what is, for her, a lived experience invisible to all other spectators is remarkable: through her brainwork, Tybalt begins as a mangled corpse, then becomes the instrument that she will pluck and use to destroy herself, and finally morphs into a spirit seen only in her mind’s eye, transported from the tomb to her bedchamber – “Methinks I see my cousin’s ghost” – a dynamic cognitive interaction with the afterlife that seems to embolden her. Previously, we had heard her describe the brainwork that enabled her to replace her “villain cousin” with “my husband”; here, she shows herself capable of holding both cousin and husband in the same mental space. Her brain works triple-time to remember why she is willing to face her worst fears – “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo!” – even as she invites her cousin’s spirit – “Stay, Tybalt, stay!” – to accompany her as she embarks on her terrifying journey.

The Friar recognizes and even encourages Juliet’s mental determination. Then again, he fears the trouble he will get into should he marry her to Paris. Once again, how one reads the changing girl’s body-mind depends on the needs of the individual interpreting her. Capulet, meanwhile, a father invested for different reasons in controlling his daughter, sees nothing but illness in Juliet’s isolated brainwork. In an earlier scene, Paris goes to Friar Laurence to tell him of Capulet’s plan to move forward with his marriage to Juliet after Tybalt’s death. Whereas the Friar, secretly alarmed by the plan, reminds him that “you do not know the lady’s mind” (4.1.4), Paris attends only to her pathological grief:

Juliet’s father and almost-husband express a conventional early modern belief: that a girl left alone, with no spousal intercourse, was in danger of deteriorating into “green-sickness carrion” (3.5.156). Such is the term Capulet uses to describe his daughter when she refuses to wed Paris. Greensickness, or chlorosis, as Helen King explains, was emerging in the sixteenth century as a disease of virgins whose bodies lacked the ameliorative effects of penetrative heterosexual sex and/or regular menses.²¹ Mental derangements allegedly followed, caused by the noxious vapors created by her putrefying menses and/or sperma, the female equivalent of male sperm that, according to Galen and others, women contributed toward conception when they reached orgasm. It is not surprising, given Paris’s investment in supporting his would-be father-in-law’s perspective, that he should perpetuate this idea of the weak female body-mind in need of the sexual cure. He continues to promote this pathologized image of her even after she is presumed dead, mourning that “with … grief / It is supposèd the fair creature died” (5.3.50–51). Women – hindered by their little wits – do die in this way after all, even in the world of this play. Lady Montague succumbs to such a fate, or so her husband claims: “Grief of my son’s exile hath stopped her breath” (5.3.210).

But Juliet is spectacularly faking her death, and the audience is in on it. The views put forward by those characters who are operating within a more conventional gendered register seem especially misguided when applied to this girl on the verge of fourteen. Paris and Capulet may fear that Juliet is “too much minded by herself alone,” and that her body suffers accordingly, but early modern viewers of the play – and a select few of the play’s characters – know better. They were witnessing what she (decidedly not a small-witted woman) could do on her own when she mobilized her brainwork. The “wayward girl” whom Capulet will reclaim only once she appears to concede to her father’s will clearly has a mind of her own that Shakespeare was keen to recognize (4.2.47).

Hysterical Acts

When Juliet imagines (not dreams, as Romeo does) her revivification, she invokes two sensational female types that early moderns connected to female illness: the woman who is mistakenly buried alive and the demonically possessed girl. Medical writers claimed that in both cases the female suffered from suffocations of the womb, a condition that was tied to the sexually mature female body.²² In their accounts of live burials, early moderns did not typically view the woman as a counterfeit, but rather a witless victim of her raging pathology. In the case of the alleged demoniac (who, when documented, is often a teenager), the role of the mind in the dramatic physical manifestation of symptoms was more controversial and unclear. In both cases, however, the females are described in spectacular and theatrical ways, and it is not always obvious how or if the etiologies of their symptoms’ performances differ, or who/what controls these displays.

Early modern medical writers (following their ancient Greek and medieval Arabic forefathers) posited that the uterus played on the brain in a variety of detrimental ways. In his section on the “wonderfull consent betweene the wombe and almost all the parts of womens bodies,” Crooke describes how “Betweene the Brayne and the wombe there is very great consent.” Hence it is, he explains, that with “affects of the mother come paynes which some women often feele in the backe-parts of their heade, their frenzies or franticke fittes, their dumbe silence and indeede inabilitie to speake, their strange fearfulnesse, sometimes loathing their lives yet fearing beyond measure to die” (252). He continues with a description of the consent between heart and womb, which could lead, in cases of the suffocation or strangulation of the matrix, to “light faintings, desperate swoondings,” and the illusion of death, with women transpiring through the pores of their skin, sometimes for days. In such cases, he warns, one must beware of burying the woman alive:

One wonders if Crooke was borrowing a page from Juliet’s playbook here, or if stories of women beating themselves to death in their graves were so common that Shakespeare and Crooke were accessing the same sources. Such stories had been circulating since Pliny the Elder’s time at least.²³ But the “reports” Crooke acknowledges could be coming from any such person “as we have no great reason to mistrust.”

In her study of hysterical diseases – that is, diseases of the uterus and not hysteria as the nineteenth century came to define it – Kaara L. Peterson points to Crooke’s anecdote here as an example of the many revivification narratives that surfaced in early modern English discourses in connection with these disabling female conditions. She reads the misinterpretation of Juliet’s feigned death by the play’s characters in terms of a larger early modern concern with misdiagnosing hysterical syncope.²⁴ Peterson focuses this part of her argument on the Friar’s description of how his potion mimics death, but I see Juliet’s mental projection of herself into the tomb as a more provocative echo of these revivification tales. There is an uncanny sympathy between the brain-beating Juliet (as she imagines herself) and the women who beat themselves to death in Crooke’s cautionary tale. We know from her scene with the Friar that she is aware of such stories, although we do not know from where she has learnt them. Perhaps she has heard them from the loquacious and uncensored Nurse. “[F]or sure,” as Salter cautions, “there is no one thing so unsemely, for a yong maiden of good callyng, or more hurtful to her good fame and name then to bee seen and heard emong suche [servants] as I before mentioned, tattlyng, and tellyng of foolishe tales by the fire side.”²⁵ Or, perhaps, she has read the story herself. Arthur Brooke’s Juliet (a source for Shakespeare’s) has read some of “the Lascivious bookes” that Salter singles out as detrimental to girls. Weighing Romeus’s vows, she claims: “What, was not Dido so, / a crowned Queene: defamd? /… / A thousand stories more, / to teach me to beware: / In Boccace and in Ovids bookes / too playnely written are.”²⁶ Or, perhaps, Juliet has invented this particular story of a live burial – one that features a girl’s desperate adolescent brains.

Writing in the mid-seventeenth century, the physician Gideon Harvey conflates these females who seem to be dead with those who appear possessed. In his chapter on “a Bewitched Consumption,” he writes:

Harvey’s description of Amorous Girls and their hysterical behaviors underscores just how difficult it was for early modern observers to determine the causes of a girl’s strange fits. Did her paroxysms come from the involuntary furies of the uterus, or did they “possibly” arise from “merry Phansies or rare Visions of their Sweet-hearts”? The latter, as we have seen through Juliet’s testimony, could be invented and manipulated by the female teenage brain. What exactly is causing the deathlike trances of these amorous girls? Juliet is inspired to embody this role by thinking on her husband, but she is also propelled (to recall the Friar’s words) by a “strength of will” that puts mind over matter.

In cases where these entranced girls begin speaking with angels or devils, the specter of a third possible cause is raised: that they are divinely or demonically possessed. Although Harvey appears to disdain belief in such supernatural etiologies, his depiction of Mary Waite (he gives her full name earlier in the chapter) suggests that others do not. Waite’s brethren are so taken in by her words that they record her “new Revelations” upon Parchment, granting her a stature of biblical proportions. Still, Harvey fixes her mental visions and bodily pains solidly within the realm of knowable natural causes: “the choaking in her Throat, griping, and pinching of the heart, (Cardiaca passio), her trancing, imaginary beating of her head, (which is no other than a sudden Convulsion of the Dura mater) … her strange visions and imaginations, &c. are all genuine Symptoms of an Hysterick Passion, or Fit of the Mother.”²⁸ Of special note here, Harvey takes the theatrically horrific spectacle of the hysterical female beating out her brains and recasts it as a “genuine” internal and pathological experience: the “imaginary beating of her head” is “no other than a sudden Convulsion of the Dura Mater.”

But, as Harvey’s and Crooke’s narratives illustrate, in both cases of hysterical trance – those that result in a deathlike state and those that escalate into alleged possession – the female body-mind commands a captive audience of amazed visitors.²⁹ These are potential performances, and it is not clear who is controlling them. Juliet casts herself twice in the role of the suffocating hysteric, once in her mind (as she envisions her horrid and enraged brain-bashing) and once in her body (as she drinks the potion and feigns death). But in neither case is she coded as suffering from an authentic fit of the mother. If these changes of fourteen years could be imagined, willed, and even performed, then how might early moderns have understood the teenage brainwork behind these physical manipulations?

“In her minde and mouth”

Although she ends the play as a morbid spectacle, with the promise of becoming a golden monument that Montague will raise in her honor, Juliet spends the bulk of the play alive and testifying for the audience to her unseen brainwork. The mind of Mary Glover, the real fourteen-year-old girl to whose case I now turn, would remain an enigma. Within a decade of Juliet’s first stage appearance, Glover captured the attention of Londoners with her dramatically possessed body-mind. In 1602, she accused her elderly neighbor Elizabeth Jackson of cursing her following a dispute. Glover’s ensuing fits, complete with extreme physical contortions and otherworldly voices, along with her violent reactions to Jackson’s presence, were convincing enough to warrant a trial and conviction of the woman for witchcraft. “By the time it was through,” writes critic Michael MacDonald, “the disturbed antics of a fourteen-year-old girl had become a contest of power between the church and the criminal courts of the City of London.”³⁰ Catholic and Puritan leaders promoted the contentious belief in possession and exorcism; Bishop Bancroft, whose interests lay in weakening these religious groups, had a vested interest in finding a natural cause of Glover’s fits. Multiple writers, with competing religious, political, and professional interests in either proving or disproving Mary’s authentic possession, chronicled Glover’s symptoms and eventual “cure.”

Modern scholars know of Glover’s case most commonly from the physician Edward Jorden’s 1603 Briefe discourse of a disease called the suffocation of the mother (a work that Bancroft likely commissioned). The pamphlet was in part an attempt to make up for Jorden’s public humiliation in the courtroom. Although he does not mention Glover’s name, Jorden claims on the title page to be writing the pamphlet because of a recent case in which a hysterical illness of the womb was mistaken for demonic possession. Jorden had testified against Glover’s possession, but had not been able to prove that her fits were the result of natural causes.

In what follows, I focus primarily on two other written documents about this case: one, the unpublished manuscript of the medical practitioner Stephen Bradwell, Mary Glovers Late Woeful Case, Together with Her Joyfull Deliverance; and the other, a published account written by the Puritan preacher John Swan of Mary’s alleged dispossession, A True and Breife Report of Mary Glovers Vexation, and of Her Deliverance by Fastinge and Prayer. Bradwell, a physician who believed in Glover’s bewitchment, specifies the precise day that the fourteen-year-old Glover experienced menarche. His argument that she was truly possessed hinges upon the event, in fact. He takes his reader through Glover’s not-yet-ripeness to the arrival of menarche, and scripts this maturing process as entirely orderly and natural. Nothing about her body-mind inclined toward the pathological, he argues; ergo, her symptoms sprang from her authentic bewitchment. Much as Capulet, his wife, Paris, and the Nurse attempt to shape the terms of Juliet’s age and ripeness to naturalize their own belief systems, Bradwell interprets Glover’s change of fourteen years in ways that support his own preferred ideological leanings and his position of authority over his subject. Written from a purely religious standpoint, John Swan’s account focuses more on the spiritual stakes of Glover’s speech and behavior during and after her exorcism. He gives much more space to the girl’s brainwork – troubling and elusive though it appears – as he negotiates its central role in retaining and testifying to the religious experiences of his Puritan readers.

Before turning to these accounts, written in response to Jorden’s skeptical treatise, I will discuss some of Jorden’s descriptions of females who suffer from “fits of the Mother.”³¹ These are helpful for understanding the significance of Bradwell’s and Swan’s differing accounts of Glover’s ripening body and allegedly possessed mind, and for appreciating Shakespeare’s nuanced treatment of Juliet’s brainwork amidst the change of fourteen years. Jorden, like Crooke, followed ancient and medieval medical writers when he described how “the principall partes of the bodie may bee affected from the matrix” to produce “hystericall affect” (C3^r, D^r). The suffocation of the womb expressed itself in various ways depending upon which of these parts it affected: the liver (seat of the natural faculty), the heart (seat of the vital faculty), or the brain (seat of the animal faculty). Harm to the liver resulted in unseen symptoms, like stomach pains and headaches. If the heart was the primary victim, the body would react more visibly with either a dangerously fast or slow heartbeat. One of the symptoms of chlorosis, for example, was palpitations, “as you may observe in Maides that have the greene sickenesse, by the shaking and quivering of their ruffes”; and a slow heartbeat could lead to “Syncope or swounding, the very image of death,” with the body “lying like a dead corpse” for up to three days (D^v–D2^r).³²

When Jorden turns to the womb’s effects on the animal faculty, “placed principally in the braine,” his cause-and-effect analysis becomes much murkier as the problem of individual will emerges:

But how can one tell the difference between willed acts of brainwork and involuntary bodily symptoms? And how can an observer know if one, neither, or both are in play? When people appear possessed, for example, the etiology of their symptoms is unclear, as are their intentions. There are those, Jorden writes, who “have counterfaited possessions, either upon meere deceit or inticed therto through the conceite of some disease wherewith they have been troubled” (D4^v). Adding to this confusion is his claim that disturbances of the mind are often to blame for physical diseases, “even to the overthrow of our owne bodies.” For evidence of this he turns to “Historiographers, and Phisitions” who have infinite examples of such “as have dyed uppon joy, griefe, love, feare, shame, and such like perturbations of the mind” (G2^v). As we have seen with Juliet, however, these cognitive states are not necessarily unwilled, uncontrolled, or even unfeigned – especially when they originate in a changing girl’s brain and body-mind. Grief may have killed Lady Montague, but it did not kill her pubescent daughter-in-law. Rather, it propelled her into action (and deception).

Jorden acknowledges that the mind can act willfully upon the body when he discusses counterfeit possessions. This was his initial reading of Glover’s symptoms at her trial, a fact that Bradwell fixes on in his critique, writing that Jorden “earnestly, at that time, contended, that Mary Glovers dissease, was but the suffocation of the mother; and whatsoever els, in it, was extraordinarie, was but feigned of her part; or voluntarily performed, to make her case seeme more strange then it was.”³³ Although Jorden does not name Glover in his treatise, Bradwell explicitly identifies him and claims that he meant “to bring her upon the stage, by so lively a description,” language that foregrounds the connection between Glover’s symptoms, the ensuing trial, and elements of theatrical spectacle (35).

But when Jorden turns to the maiden body-mind in his published treatise, he makes no space for such willed performances. Fits of the mother frequently cause deprivations of the imagination, judgment, and the external senses of sight, hearing, and taste, he explains. According to Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna, among others, “an alienation of the minde” – which included a “depraved” imagination and deprivation of “their right judgement” – is “the essence of this disease” (E^v). This mental alienation (he writes) is beyond a female’s control, as are the most common natural causes of the disease: excess blood and excess sperma. The victims, as he goes on to describe them, are often “strong and lustie maidens, who … have their vaines filled with plenty of bloud, which wanting sufficient vent distendeth them in bulk and thicknes, and so contracteth them in their length, whereby the matrix is drawn upwards or sidewards,” compressing the neighboring parts and causing shortness of breath (F3^v). If this blood is not evacuated through menstruation or through the loosening of the veins via sexual intercourse, it further degenerates, and the symptoms escalate. In addition to the risk of retaining too much blood, maidens and widows especially are prone to retaining sperma, which, when corrupt, is the more dangerous of the disease’s culprits, for “a substance so pure and full of spirits as this is, must needes prove most malitious unto the bodie when it is corrupted.” For this reason, women who are “enjoying the benefit of mariage,” but whose menses are suppressed, do not suffer from the same intensity of symptoms that an unmarried maiden might experience (F4^r).

Mary Glover’s maiden body-mind was a case in point, Jorden testified. But the problem with this diagnosis – according to Bradwell, to whose treatise I now turn – was that she had not yet begun to menstruate. While prepubescent girls could experience some unhealthy buildup and blockage of blood, they did not yet have the abounding amounts of it that medical writers described as the key instigator of menarche and of potential uterine disease in the female. Furthermore, their bodies were not yet mature enough to have developed the amounts of sperma necessary to produce a dangerous level of putrefied seed. Bradwell writes that in England it is impossible to find a maiden younger than eighteen suffering from a poisonous level of humoral surplus, and that “whosoever looketh upon those instaunces, which D Jorden hath laide downe,” would find no women younger than that age (98). Michael MacDonald, who has brought attention to Bradwell’s manuscript with his invaluable edition, argues that Mary’s unripe body would have cast doubt on Jorden’s diagnosis, and that it likely was her youth that inspired him to focus more on the role of her brain in producing her symptoms, a move that may have contributed to the later development of hysteria as a disease of the mind.³⁴

I would like to use MacDonald’s provocative suggestion as a way in to reading the changing body-mind of Mary Glover – not that we or any of her observers can truly know its operations or how she was experiencing it. As Diane Purkiss argues, even when adolescent girls speak in the possession texts that have come down to us, their words should be heard as a fusion of internal struggle and external expectations, familial and even national.³⁵ Frances Dolan’s analysis of female testimony and confession in early modern witchcraft trials is especially relevant here as well: trusting that such public speech marks a woman’s agency requires that we trust the texts that convey her words to us, “texts that are not only hostile but hectic, cluttered with the tropes and plots through which one might construct a story to call one’s own but through which it is hard to identify the fragment or fantasy of a self.”³⁶

We can, however, identify fantasies about the teenage girls who frequently populate these texts, and discern patterns in their depictions of how girls’ minds supposedly came into play in these spectacular scenes. Michael Witmore explains that individuals under the age of fourteen were usually prohibited from providing evidence in trials, as they had not yet achieved the age of discretion. This legal boundary applied to both males and females, a reminder that the change of fourteen years was not viewed solely in terms of menarche. The development of judgment, and the ability to tell truth from fiction, were – from the legal point of view at least – gender inclusive. As Witmore argues, girls and boys under the age of fourteen were seen to have an “incomplete possession of reason on the one hand, and seemingly excessive subjection to the body and imagination on the other, [which] created a frighteningly rich matrix for fantasy, mischief, and deception.”³⁷ In the case of fourteen-year-old female body-minds, however, “seemingly” becomes an especially problematic descriptor.

Stephen Bradwell, a member of the College of Physicians and the son-in-law of the respected physician John Banister, had testified on Glover’s behalf that she was possessed. While he fastens on the moment of Glover’s menarche to disprove Jorden’s theory that she was suffering from a pathological uterine condition, he also attempts to bring her mind’s operations in line with his medical diagnosis. Having not yet “attayned to seminall or menstruall ripenes,” Glover was “therefore not a subject disposed for passion to worke upon” (65). Whereas Jorden had claimed that perturbations of the mind like extreme fear or rage could incite fits of the mother, Bradwell argues that “Marie Glover had neither of those capriecies in her braynes” (64).

Bradwell grounds his entire argument on the timing of Glover’s first menses; and yet, as we saw with Juliet, the change of fourteen years is paradoxically impossible to predict: “all are not ripe in one certaine yeere,” Bradwell writes, “but some earlier, some later, according to the temperament, region, diet, and education” (98). He recognizes all of these factors in his opening line:

Immediately, we learn Glover’s age, neighborhood, health, and respectable social station. (Her uncle William Glover had been sheriff and was an alderman of the city at the time.) Her adversary is marked, in contrast, by her old age and lower class. Bradwell also makes a point of framing his discourse around the specifics of the calendar. He gives the precise timeframe of Glover’s trials, “from the last of Aprill to the xvith of December 1602” (3). He continues to mark the events of Glover’s bewitchment along a detailed timeline: “Eighteene dayes togeather she had these fittes three or fower times a day. … The wednesday after her first falling ill, her fittes were so fearefull, that all that were about her, supposed that she would dye” (4).

Bradwell makes infrequent mention of Glover’s mind in this early part of his narrative. When he does gesture toward her cognitive activities, it is to contend that she is an unwitting actor (one who bears little resemblance to the willful Juliet). When she places first her right and then her left finger into her mouth during one particular fit, for example, it is because she has “an imagination, that without so doing, she could not againe recover the use of her tongue” (18); and when she goes into trances, speaks “Hang her” through her nose, and does not flinch when pricked or burned, he describes her as “voyd of understanding” (23).

Bradwell seems confident in his analysis that Glover’s bizarre physical actions were devoid of any cognitive engagement. But when he tries to argue that her speech was impromptu, and not part of a deceptive script she has studied in order to fool her audience, he appears to be on shakier interpretive ground. During her ordinary fits, which included wailing and convulsions, Glover would pray for God’s help. This prayer, Bradwell claims, “out of doubt, was not before learned, but at the present then conceived, both because she repeated many things, and somtimes uttered her petitions, in sort and setting togeather, sutable to the ignorance of a simple mayd” (16). She speaks like an ignorant girl; therefore, she must be one. The physician doth protest too much here as he bends Glover’s mind to fit his theory of authentic possession. Later, when describing how she spoke through her nose whenever “the Witch” came near her, Bradwell uses a similarly circular reasoning about her lack of conscious action: “If the maid had uttered this voyce willingly … then would she have set forth the voyce suddainely, with moving or spreading of the Nostrills, and some contention of the brest” (133).

Bradwell appears to be on much firmer ground when he comes to the heart of his argument, one that focuses on what Glover (apparently) cannot feign: her age, “nature,” and position on the timeline of female ripeness. He brings an arsenal of ancient medical authorities to bear against Jorden’s diagnosis of suffocation of the mother: “Hippochrates carefully constituteth this Cannon … for the guiding of phisitions, enquiring into the diseases of weomen.” First, they should begin with God “(who is the principall cause in the diseases of man kinde) and next, to discerne the natures and ages of women, togeather with the oportunities of tymes, the season of the yeere, the places, and the windes” (94). Bradwell first dispenses with the question of nature, time, and season:

Mary’s natural heat, combined with the fact that her symptoms began in May, appears to weaken “the D” Jorden’s argument that she suffers from a natural disease that was typically brought on by cold weather (and, Bradwell implies, a cold temperament).

Next, Bradwell turns to the strongest weapon in his arsenal: Glover’s relationship to the change of fourteen years. Jorden, he writes, rests all of the principal causes of Glover’s fits “upon these two; bloud and seed; increased and retained above natures dew,” but the fourteen-year-old Glover, on the verge of menarche when her trials began, could have neither of these in great quantity:

Bradwell casts the change of fourteen years as an entirely normal and moderate process. Although he uses military imagery to describe how nature enforces a draft of sorts, a procurement of blood and seed as part of her first address to womanhood, the girl’s body remains ordered in its response. Blood and seed, “beloved” of nature, would never usurp nature’s authority in a surprise attack in these early days. Just as we saw Crooke describing pubertal change as the sun bursting forth in an ordered fashion to rule in the horizon of the body, here nature and the fourteen-year-old girl work in productive relationship with each other.³⁸ It is only over time that her body potentially turns against nature – that corruptions are bred, and “the faculties, with the insited heat and spirit, cannot anie longer chase or overrule them” (97). Incitement of the otherwise healthy adolescent body may in certain cases “abuse naturall heat,” but if a girl is “not pampered with full and daintie faire, not courted and enchaunted with companions of luxurious spirites,” she should be able to maintain a state of thermal balance well into her twenties. He quotes the Spanish physician Ludovicus Mercatus on this point, an authority upon whom he notes Jorden himself relies: “In maydens (saith he) which are not immodest, nor have exceeded the xxvth yeere of their age, verie seldom do these diseases grow, out of corruption of the seed” (98).

Bradwell brings the stage of female adolescence, described here as extending from age fourteen to twenty-five, into clear view, and he privileges it as a time of baseline health, not pathology. He does acknowledge that menstrual suppression is a less controllable, more common condition than the corruption of sperma, since maidens have “narrow veynes” that can become stopped up with abounding blood; but when blood putrefies and works evils upon her body, it does not do so “on a suddaine, but litle and litle.” From here, he delivers what he considers to be the fatal blow to Jorden’s diagnosis of uterine suffocation:

Glover explicitly hovers near the pubertal threshold at this crucial point in Bradwell’s argument. Nature’s dew can defraud the female body, but only over time. Glover’s “unripenes” protects her from the potential corruptions that “this dew of womanhood” can bring over time. A few months later, when she experiences menarche, her body is still fresh enough to enjoy its early benefits.

Bradwell is invested in showing the natural resilience of the newly menstruating female body, but he concurrently exposes the manmade stakes at play in shaping this stage of girlhood. Menarche exemplifies nature’s ordered, predictable, and even ameliorative work in Bradwell’s narrative. He goes on to cite the Hippocratic aphorism, “That gyrles ar quit of convulsions, both epilepticall and propper; as also of other disseases of childehood; at such time as there monethes doe first breake forth” (103). Mary’s failure to improve after her first period, combined with her worsening fits, then, serve as further proof that she was authentically possessed. While it is unlikely that Bradwell invents the timing of Glover’s menarche (he seems to be dependent on others making him privy to such information), he undoubtedly crafts the story of its arrival to better dramatize the battle between good and evil that animates his theory of demonic possession. She “enjoyed the first dew of womanhood” the very day after the “heavie visitation” by the Devil he claims she suffered at the end of July. Puberty’s first dew ideally heralds physical health and wellness; but her painful demonic “visitation,” figured here as a kind of unnaturally heavy menses, preempts the positive arrival of menarche. Nature has been usurped here – not by the girl’s own corrupted blood and sperma, but by Satan himself. There is no space in Bradwell’s tale of unwilled and unnatural possession for the physical or cognitive gifts Glover otherwise may have been given as she experienced this change of fourteen years.

This is not the case in John Swan’s True and Breife Report of Mary Glovers Vexation, and of Her Deliverance by Fastinge and Prayer. Little is known about Swan, who is identified as a “student in Divinitie” on the title page of his account of Mary’s dispossession. As MacDonald explains, it was “printed clandestinely to avoid [Bishop] Bancroft’s censorship,” with no printer’s name and address given, and no record of it in the Stationers’ Register.³⁹ Swan, like Bradwell, writes to disprove Jorden’s disavowal of Glover’s possession and – especially important to the Puritan Swan – of God’s power to heal her through the prayer and fasting of a holy community. While he includes many of the same graphic details of her possession that Bradwell does, his account focuses almost entirely on the dispossession that occurred on December 16 between “8. of the clocke in the morninge, and not ended till after 7. at night” (A1). Perhaps because he is writing from a religious standpoint and does not spend time arguing over medical theories that hinged on her physiological condition, Swan gives much more space to recording Glover’s words. Although he does describe the distorted movements of her body, he spends pages recording her prayers. These seem to bear no resemblance to the simple conceits Bradwell describes as Glover’s repetitive petitions, and that he claims are suitable to an ignorant maid. In fact, when Swan explains that one of her later prayers is more drawn out in length “partly by way of repeating thinges,” he puts her in the most sanctified of company. He praises the fact that she has “beatten still uppon the same matters,” comparing her to Jesus, “who being in anguish, went againe and prayed & spake the same words. Marke 14.39” (39).

In the climactic moment of her dispossession, Glover displays another set of positive cognitive activities. Swan describes how her body came to life, she opened her eyes, and stretched her hands high, uttering: “he is come, he is come …the comforter is come, O Lord thou hast delivered me.” Swan goes on to describe how “[a]s soone as her father (who stood not very nighe) heard her so crye: he also cryed out and saide (as well as his weepinge would give him leave) this was the crye of her grandfather goeing to be burned” (47). Glover’s grandfather was a well-known Marian martyr whom John Foxe included in his Acts and Monuments. Swan scripts Glover and her act of ventriloquism as enacting a powerful record of the religious past, both her family’s and her country’s. She speaks history even as the spectacle of her suffering relives it for her faithful audience.

But is her brain actively at work here, or is she simply a mindless mouthpiece? A return here to the Mirrhor of Modestie is instructive. Salter acknowledges the ability of maids’ minds to retain the stories they read, and instructs parents to guide them toward virtuous texts: “if she love to bee delighted in vertue, let her reade that worthie booke of Martyres, compiled by that famous Father and worthie man of God maister Foxe.”⁴⁰ Clearly there were a number of ways Glover may have received the history of her grandfather – through reading, listening, or engaged prayer. But whatever the source(s), here it is Glover, with her fourteen-year-old body-mind, who is tasked and endowed with keeping that history alive for a wider community.

There is a hint, during one such prayer, that her will may be working outside the bounds of Swan’s carefully constructed religious narrative. In the midst of a two-page prayer of hers that he records, Swan marks her use of “my” in one particular sentence – “O lord now sheew thy strength, and let us see thy saving helpe, put thy power to my* power, & thy will to my* will” – and intercedes with an explanatory marginal note: “Her words were so: and are well beinge thus interpreted: Ad more of thy power to the power thou hast already given me, and thy full will to accomplishe, to that right desire which thou hast formed in me” (32–33). Swan’s interpretive gloss here suggests that he was faithfully recording Glover’s words. If this is the case, then her prayer and Swan’s impulse to emend it are especially revealing. She speaks of her will and her power as separate from God’s and intrinsic to her; Swan turns both into gifts from God, giving God “full will” while changing hers into a “desire.” Whether or not she was counterfeiting her performance, Glover’s spectacular words and gestures offer a potential glimpse of her adolescent brainwork. Swan’s ambivalent negotiations of it suggest that he and others deemed it central to the fulfillment of certain community needs and desires, even as they may have sought to control the meaning of its productions.

Both impulses are evident in the final anecdote Swan recounts of an exchange he had with Glover the day after her deliverance. Curious to learn more about the prayers she had uttered while possessed, “I asked her whether she ever did praye so before, or whether shee could praye so agayne? To which her answere was, I pray God enable me to pray as I shall have occasion” (59-60). Glover is the only person able to answer such questions, and her interpreter must grapple with whatever evidence she chooses to present: Did she already know the prayers she produced (a potential indicator of deception in Jorden’s text)? Has she been able to pray the same since her dispossession (which would suggest that her memory was at the very least able to retain the words as she spoke them)? Her answer – that she prays God to “enable me to pray as I shall have occasion” – does not settle the matter. Instead, she gives a decidedly ambiguous response that features the cognitive abilities God may “enable,” and the future occasions she may have to use them.

More stunning is the exchange that follows – or, more accurately, that Glover refuses to facilitate:

Swan tries to change the mood of his encounter with the girl (as he relates it to his readers) by shifting “merilie” to the subject of Glover’s spectacular oral contortions. But his jocular tone does not detract from the violence of his suggestion that he might place his entire fist into her mouth. It is little wonder that she responds by offering him nothing.

A few pages later, the gendered tensions that inform this moment become more explicit. Glover is no longer in his presence, so Swan is able to dole out his moral with no threat from her of narrative obstruction. He directly addresses his readers:

Swan’s conflation of Glover’s time in the spotlight with Mary Magdalene’s initial status as a fallen woman, a “gazing stocke,” is telling. Paradoxically, the time Glover spent as a “spectacle to men and angells” (to recall Bradwell’s words) may have put her maidenly reputation at risk, even as it granted her a spiritual magnetism that captured the attention of her faithful Christian community. Keeping his attention on Glover (now in absentia), he commends “unto this our Mary (to be had alwayes in her minde and mouth) the songe of a more blessed Mary, the mother of our blessed Saviour” (66). If Glover puts the song that he suggests into her “minde and mouth,” then she can emulate the example of the purest and best of Marys – and perhaps mitigate the effects of that less blessed, “old grandmother of hers Mary Magdalene.”

But a few pages earlier, when he describes speaking to her directly, the choice of what this girl will put inside her mind and body appears to be hers alone. With her unmoving countenance, Glover does not respond in tone or kind to Swan’s “merry” question about her erstwhile gaping mouth, and whether or not he might be able to put his fist in it. In her analysis of female testimony, Dolan suggests that we should not “discount the agency of silence.”⁴¹ This moment, in which a fourteen-year-old girl faces her questioner’s verbal (and potentially physical) demands and offers him “nothinge,” is a profound case in point. It recalls Juliet’s own determined and largely illegible cognitive acts, which ultimately protect her from the intrusions others would force onto her body and into her mind. When Juliet awakens from her deathlike sleep, before she sees her slain Romeo, she displays the strong, enabled brainwork that Swan’s brief encounter with Glover merely glimpses: “I do remember well where I should be, / And there I am” (5.3.149–50). She does not become the desperate, hysterical brain-basher, the figure into which she had projected herself while imagining her potential future. Instead, she affirms her memory’s strength and verifies that – whatever changes she has seen – she is now exactly where she imagined and willed herself to be.

Considered together, the examples of Juliet Capulet and Mary Glover allow us to return better informed to my earlier question: If the dynamic changes of fourteen years could be imagined, willed, hidden, or even performed, then how might early moderns have understood the teenage brainwork behind these physical manipulations? As we have seen, Shakespeare creates a heroine who uses her cognitive agility to direct her body-mind in ways that are unknown to most of the play’s characters. But Juliet also tells the play’s audience what is going on inside her head – how her mental faculties, spirits, and affections are moving together, and what they are capable of inventing and putting into practice. Although this brainwork confounds her parents’ and would-be husband’s wills, it also protects her marriage vows and initiates the stage work that will culminate in the final spectacle at the Capulet tomb, a discovery that inspires the two families to mend their differences and that brings a “glooming peace” to Verona (5.3.304).

The spirit of this latter point will resurface in different forms throughout this study. Girls’ brainwork often challenges oppressive ideologies and serves an ameliorative community function. While Glover’s case exacerbated contentious religious and political fissures among her different London communities, her brain was tasked, among other things, with retaining and telling the history of her martyred Protestant grandfather to an audience of pious witnesses. Even as writers like Swan and Bradwell are at times uncomfortable with how Glover’s brainwork may be at play, they also acknowledge its role in negotiating larger ideological projects and principles. In the same vein, Juliet’s dynamic cognition is recognized as a primary instigator of the play’s trajectory toward civic peace. For this, she earns top billing in its final line: Verona will be remembered for the story of “Juliet and her Romeo,” one powered largely by the brainwork of an almost-fourteen-year-old girl (5.3.309).