Provides an overview of the individual chapters and of the issues they raise. Also notes some prominent cases of real poisonings in the period.

The early tragedies of Sir William Davenant have been criticised for their lack of emotional depth, and exploration of excessive violence, incest, and cannibalism with no political, moral, or philosophical significance. This chapter will argue that in his first original tragedy, The Tragedy of Albovine (1629), the violent resolution of the play has both an emotional explanation and a political purpose. By examining the play in relation to the evolving landscape of early modern emotion, referring to specific medical and proto-psychological treatises, this chapter demonstrates that the violence in Albovine is the result of contagious passion which is transferred between individuals via the mouth through acts of breathing, eating, and drinking. Moreover, it will suggest that this infectious emotion is a symptom of a pestilential and decaying court and begins with the ‘parasitic’ passions exchanged between monarchs and their favourites. While Davenant’s later works are often recognised as expressions of his loyalty to the crown, his future royalist sensibilities are absent from his earliest tragedy. Instead, in Albovine, the pollutive landscape of the Veronese court and its passionate inhabitants, parallel and criticise the court of King James I, who was known and vilified for his relationship with court favourite George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham.

In early seventeenth-century English plays, it is fashionable to portray Italianate locales as rife with intrigue, featuring Italian female characters often depicted as dangerous, living emblems of venomous passion, confederates in complex plots which ultimately destroy the body politic. But the plays also tell another story, as the frequent talk of poison distils its venom through words as much as it does through deadly ointments, perfumes or liquids. In these plays, poison is as much a rhetorical process as it is a deadly substance. Focusing on Marston’s The Malcontent and Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, this paper proposes to study the relationship between poison and rhetoric in early seventeenth-century Italianate plays to show how poison works in a specular fashion, using derivation and discontinuity for dramatic effect. Associated with Italianate passions, talk of poison suggests an underlying socio-political criticism which had (at least partial) topical resonance for Jacobean audiences. These tragic or satirical plays could serve as inverted mirrors for princes, portraying counter-examples of good government, depicting in spectacular fashion the effects of a body politic poisoned by unchecked, warped Italianate (i.e. foreign and Popish) perversions. By highlighting the masculine nature of these fantasies of evil, this paper will also challenge the customary link between women and poison, highlighting instead the vicarious nature of poison. The chapter will ultimately suggest that topicality, gender bias, xenophobic and anti-Catholic sentiment contribute to making poison more a perversion of the Word than a deadly substance in these plays.

The plot device of an apparent death by poisoning which turns out to be faked using a sleeping potion was used on the early modern English stage numerous times, including famously, to tragic effect, in Romeo and Juliet. But it was also used (perhaps over-used) to comic effect in a number of plays staged in the early 1600s, including Dekker’s Satiromastix, The Fair Maid of Bristow and Dekker again in Part 1 of The Honest Whore. This chapter is concerned with two of this group where the would-be poisoner was a man, and the intended victim a married woman: Thomas Heywood’s How a Man May Chuse a Good Wife from a Bad and John Day’s Law-Tricks, or Who Would Have Thought It. Heywood’s play, with its apparently didactic messages about vice, virtue and the salvation of the soul has been used to show how Elizabethan theatre still owed much to the medieval morality play tradition. This essay argues instead that the plot device of the false poison was used to problematise the moral message, an effect seen in both plays. The essay also considers the legal implications, particularly in relation to the idea of criminal intent and mens rea which had become established in English law during the sixteenth century. The scornful attitudes expressed towards the law in both plays underscore the contentiousness of the comic conclusions.

This chapter explores the connection between the image of the poisoned ear that is associated with informers and the troubled nature of early modern authority. When The Duchess of Malfi’s Bosola makes Julia his informer, the Cardinal ominously warns her, ‘think what danger ’tis / To receive a prince’s secrets / … ’tis a secret / … like a ling’ring poison’. Though Bosola is the typically empowered informer of the early modern stage, he is too late to save Julia from the Cardinal’s murdering ruse of the poisoned Bible. As one form of poison leads to another, this killing device indicates not only a blasphemous betrayal of intimacy in the murder of his sexual partner, but also a general corruption of the idea of authority and moral truth. Such flagrant disregard for what is thought sacred, and this by authorities sanctified, is social poison in itself. Antonio describes this toxic court as a ‘common fountain’, of which he posits, ‘if’t chance / Some curs’d example poison ’t near the head, / Death, and diseases through the whole land spread’ (1.1.13–15 italics original). If the fountainhead of authority is poisoned, then so are all the wells. Looking at salutary examples in Duchess, Hoffmann and Hamlet, this chapter explores this idea and its converse: that if the poison can be neutralised at its source, then such a society may yet survive.

Early modern drama does not ‘give good report of the worm’ but tends to vilify reptiles as well as amphibians and arachnids to underprop anthropocentrism and a hierarchical taxonomy that denigrates closeness to the earth. This chapter dissects the negative depictions of snakes, spiders, and toads in early modern drama, exposing how they conspire with Tudor vermin laws and justify the persecution of poisonous or allegedly poisonous creatures. Early modern naturalists classified more species as venomous or attributed higher toxicity to them than we now know to be the case; moreover, representations of venomous creatures could reinforce not only mistrust of the differently abled but also xenophobic attitudes. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra both perpetrates and spoofs a zoological orientalism, sensationalising the portrayal of Eastern and African fauna as biologically other in ways that mirror early modern caricatures of the racial otherness of the populace (and vice versa). Antony and Cleopatra draws a sharp divide between civilised Rome and savage Africa, but in post-Reformation England, Italy’s geographic proximity to Africa made it exotic by association. The chapter considers Cleopatra’s suicide scene alongside early modern accounts of Italian snakehandling acts. Whereas Protestant naturalists sought to debunk snakehandling as a dubious form of Catholic street theatre, Shakespeare de-sacralises a doctrinally suspect miracle play-cum-carnival show and transforms it into secular art. The chapter uncoils an important parallel to Stephen Greenblatt’s influential work on theatre and exorcism with an ecocritical update: social energy can flow from and circulate back to impact the more-than-human world.

William Palmer had been convicted of murdering his friend and gambling associate John Parsons Cook along 'scientific' lines, secretly employing carefully calibrated, minute doses of strychnine to poison without a trace. The prison governor was wrong in a larger sense as well. Beyond the particularities of the Palmer case, determining the means used by poisoners to accomplish their ends was of vital importance in responses to criminal poisoning in Victorian Britain. If the detection of things not immediately present to the senses was the hallmark of poison detection, it should be noted that the presence/absence fault-line is also central to a more limited legal conception of expert testimony. The world of Victorian criminal poisoning constituted an exemplary region of the invisible and impalpable. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.

This chapter focuses on the painstaking attempts to construct a 'modern' conceptual and legislative framework for containing the threat posed by criminal poisoning. The richness of poison's cultural terrain, its deep historical and imaginative resonances, presented the science of poison detection with both opportunities and obstacles. Arsenic's dual existence, as an article of everyday life and as an instrument for the criminal assault on life, was a tension that had to be lived with. But even the bedrock assumption about arsenic, that if ingested in a small but well-defined quantity, it would prove universally fatal, was called into question shortly after the passage of the Arsenic Act. The source of this qualification, moreover, threatened to undermine the larger process of 'disciplining' poison that has been the focus of this chapter.

Ralph Knevet’s Supplement survives in a single autograph manuscript, Cambridge University Library MS Ee.ì.¢ì, apparently prepared as a fair copy for printing. The full title of the work, as given on the manuscript's title page, is A Supplement of the Faery Queene in three Bookes.This chapter examines the authorship and the format of the manuscript, before discussing the editorial decisions made for the present edition.

This chapter discusses the life of Ralph Knevet, a member of the Norfolk gentry and client of the Knevet and Paston families, and his earlier works Stratiotikon (1628) and Rhodon and Iris (1631). It also examines the contexts and contents of his Supplement of the Faery Queene including its conformity to the Spenserian model, its narrative structure, and its suppression of Spenser’s visual forms of representation.

The core feature of toxicological meaning, its exemplary 'plain matter of fact', derived from the results of chemical analysis. This chapter focuses on the relationship between legal and chemical standards of proof and evidence. Poison posed special problems for managing evidence in the courtroom, problems that participants looked to chemical materialism to resolve. By tacking between legal and chemical theory, and between the manipulation of words for things and the manipulation of things as words, the chapter seeks not merely to shed light on the representational strategies underlying toxicological proof, but to suggest ways of reconceptualizing toxicologists' frustration with their 'mistreatment' in the courtroom. Poisoning trials, which provided medico-legal expertise with a stage on which to display its declarative capabilities, were also events in which the foundations of toxicological proof came under close scrutiny.