• 1 * I am grateful to my Utrecht colleague Paul Franssen for his criticism and advice.

2For this approach, I take my cue from Michel Foucault who, throughout his Folie et déraison (1961), but also elsewhere, plays on the ambiguity of the French word «mal». The meaning of the word thus includes both (moral) «evil» (or «evil» in ethical terms), and «disease» in physical or mental terms. Since the association of «evil» with «madness» or «mental illness» has been sufficiently discussed — Foucault himself deals with the madness of Lady Macbeth and that of Lear — I shall focus on ethics, in relation to physical illness. In particular, I shall study the disease, relatively new to the early-moderns, known as syphilis, a topic on which Foucault has surprisingly little to say in his History of Sexuality, except, of course, by implication 1.

• 2 Stanislav Andreski, Syphilis, Puritanism and Witch Hunts : Historical Explanations in the Light of (...)
• 3 Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (London and Bristol, PA : Jessica Kingsley Pu (...)

3Much has been written on the subject of syphilis during the early-modern period. To the more recent contributions belong G.W. Bentley’s Shakespeare and the New Disease (New York : Peter Lang, 1989), which concentrates on syphilis and satire in Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens ; Stanislav Andreski’s rather speculative but nevertheless intriguing study entitled Syphilis, Puritanism and Witch Hunts which suggests a connection between the spread of syphilis during the early-modern period on the one hand, and the rise of Puritanism as well as the witch hunts on the other 2 ; and Johan Fabricius’s Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England. Fabricius discusses a vast range of English Renaissance examples, but he is also acutely aware of the immediate European context. In the final analysis, the greatest merit of Fabricius’s study is its encyclopedic scope ; its only flaw an unnecessary attempt to establish that Shakespeare was a syphilitic himself 3.

• 4 See James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York : Vintage, 1986), 12.1197 ; and L (...)

4Given the vast amount of critical attention already devoted to the disease, it is not my intention here to rewrite the history of «syphilisation» in England, to use a rather playful term generally thought to derive from James Joyce’s Ulysses although it more likely derives from Lord Byron’s Don Juan 4. Instead, I wish to study how the phenomenon known as syphilis affected the Englishman’s image of the French as the former first tried to come to terms with the new disease in the sixteenth century. In doing so, I do not wish to establish that stereotyping took place, but how. I wish to study the unfavourable image formation, or stereotyping that accompanied the arrival of the new disease in England by looking at the intellectual origins of this tendency to stereotype, as well as the intertextual network of allusions it produced in the writings of the period.

• 6 Thomas Dekker, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge : Cambri (...)

6Slack may not be altogether wrong, but he overstates the case. Among other things, this is indicated by Thomas Dekker’s statement about syphilis, which I have made the title of this paper. Syphilis, Dekker stated in Westward Ho !, a play that was first produced in 1604, a play produced just after the exacting plague that even postponed the coronation of King James, is «As catching as the plague, though not all so general» 6. A similar ability to distinguish clearly may be noted in Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters. Here Sir Bounteous Progress wants to know from the assumed doctor Penitent what the illness is that the Courtesan may be suffering from :

• 8 An exemplary analysis of the problems is provided in Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespea (...)
• 9 Keir Elam, «‘In what chapter of his bosom ?’ : Reading Shakespeare’s Bodies», in Alternative Shakes (...)

7Slack’s view about the indiscriminate appreciation of early-modern epidemics seems to rear its head also in the critical discourse on Renaissance drama. Here the purported difficulty of identification is certainly recognized 8. On occasion, however, this obstacle would also seem to authorize the critic to conflate early-modern illnesses where convenient. As a result, existing historical distinctions are disregarded, and contemporary rhetorical traditions or habits are neglected in favour of, for example, a new poetics of the body. I am especially thinking here of a recent paper by Keir Elam, entitled «Reading Shakespeare’s Bodies». In this contribution to Alternative Shakespeares 2, Elam discusses the Puritan opposition to the stage in terms of the pestilence discourse which may be discerned both in the Puritans’ anti-theatrical writings and in Shakespeare’s own work 9. To conclude his argument, in which he has, up to that point, consistently drawn on clear-cut examples of the plague, Elam employs the assumed affiliation of the plague with syphilis, essentially to enable him to incorporate into his argument about pestilential poetics the famous syphilis speech of Timon of Athens. After wishing the prostitutes Phrynia and Timandra «A pox of wrinkles», Timon proceeds :

• 12 In his Treatise of the Serpentine Disease (written between 1510 and 1521), however, he also draws t (...)
• 13 Fabricius, 7 ; and John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (1993. Rpt. New York : (...)

13Anyone who has looked into the topic of Renaissance syphilis will know that the disease was a thoroughly international affair. It was international not just because of its gigantic spread on either side of the Atlantic, but also in the various conjectures about its true origin. The Spanish physician Ruy Diaz de Isla (1462-1542), for example, saw Haiti as the true place of origin 12. Ruy Diaz also explains how the French defined syphilis as the Pox of Naples, whereas the Italians and Neapolitans termed it the French disease, while in Portugal it was called the Castilian disease. We witness the beginning of a list here which would only grow in the course of the years. The natives of Portuguese India called syphilis the Portuguese disease, as did the Japanese, while the Turks labelled it the Christian or the French disease, and the Russians the Polish disease 13. Curiously, no nation ever thought of calling syphilis «the English disease». This left an obvious vacancy in the international slander list of sexual perversions which, as we know, was only filled with the notion of «le vice Anglais» several centuries later.

• 14 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978. Rpt. New York : Vintage Books, 1979), 3.
• 15 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York : Columbia University Pres (...)
• 16 The «displacement of responsibility» also took place on a smaller, local scale. The early-modern Lo (...)

14One may indeed be flippant about the international scope of the syphilitic discourse, but there is a deeper, and also more serious logic beyond this rather innocent patriotic, pre-nationalist concern over purity and cleanliness, and the consequent gesture of projection. Thinking or speaking about illness and health, as Susan Sontag has noted, brings with it a strong tendency to employ the vocabulary of topography. And speaking of illness in particular often brings with it a practice of geographical displacement. Insightful in this respect is the opening section of Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, which is really a conceit of her own. In this opening section, Sontag speaks of the «kingdom of the well» and the «kingdom of the sick» 14. And everyone, Sontag notes, holds «dual citizenship». «Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place». In the course of our lives, Sontag suggests, we identify and recognize the stranger to ourselves, to modify the title of Julia Kristeva’s study of the foreigner 15. Finally, extending the geographical analogy to allow for the individual’s perception of his or her illness, Sontag remarks that talking of such perceptions she will, by the same analogy, be dealing «not [with] real geography, but [with] stereotypes of national character» (3). In my discussion of the Englishman’s geographical manipulation of the serpentine disease, of what John Hale calls the pervasive «displacement of responsibility» (Civilization of Europe, 556), my interest will be in how it affected stereotypes and the representation of the assumed national character of the French in English literature and Shakespeare in particular 16.

• 17 See, respectively, The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1885-86), V.282 ; and T (...)

15For that purpose, it is useful briefly to return to the catalogue of those nationalities branded as the harbinger of syphilis. A list like the one provided by Ruy Diaz might suggest that there was a clear-cut international attribution of origins. Nothing seems further from the truth. In early-modern English literature, the Neapolitans and the French are both listed as assumed culprits. Even in the work of single authors do we find multiple attributions. A typical example may be found in Thomas Middleton’s Anything for a Quiet Life, where Ralph dislikes the plain term «pox» for being «no word of art», and instead proposes «morbus Gallicus or Neapolitanus» ; and in Thomas Heywood’s Marseilles-based comedy The Captives it is actually noted how the disease of Naples has turned French 17. But what can one expect when a shipload of prostitutes from Italy is shipwrecked on the French Mediterranean coast ?

• 19 See Geoffrey Eatough, Fracastoro’s «Syphilis» : Introduction, Text, Translations and Notes with a C (...)

18As the personification of the disease in the person of Veroles already suggests, in the majority of instances Shakespeare, like his English contemporaries, associates syphilis with the French, thus following at least the title of Girolamo Fracastorio’s famous Latin syphilis treatise entitled Syphilidis, seu Morbi Gallici (1530) 19.

• 20 The standard work on the climate theory and English Renaissance literature continues to be Waldemar (...)

19The role of the climate theory in creating the cluster of associations around France cannot be underestimated, because it is within this Classical discourse of climatological influences that contemporary assumptions about the French origin of syphilis were first granted pseudo-scientific justification. The theory divided the known world into three climatological zones (hot, cold and temperate) and argued that the nature of the respective inhabitants of these zones might be read as a product of the climatological conditions. 20 For the English, the French belonged to the southern region. This relative South in the European climate theory was, among other things, associated with solar heat and, by extension, with physical heat, excitement, impatience, and anger. It applied to Greek women, but also to other southerners in general. As Jacques Agenas Ferrand put it in his Erotomania :

• 23 John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. M. L. Wine, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London : Edwar (...)

25To begin with, in the wake of defining the syphilitic disease as of French origin, a host of other traditional symptoms, presumably because these could assert themselves in the case of a higher immune deficiency level, were «Frenchified» accordingly. As by an epidemic, the literature became impregnated with phrases including «French pocks», «French scabs», «French itches», «French measles», «the French canker», and the «French consumption». Of course, we are also witnessing here a special process of euphemization. Not medical, but no less euphemistic were expressions for the disease such as «the French — O justus justa justum !» and «the French et cetera» 23.

• 24 Gamini Salgado, The Elizabethan Underworld (London : Book Club Associates, 1977), 52.
• 25 Also in the anonymous First Part of Hieronimo, «bending in the hams» is taken as a combined sign of (...)

26However, the disease was also grafted onto the stereotypical view of the French as a nation given to manners, etiquette, and good breeding. Thus, in the early anonymous broadsheet entitled A Mirror for Magistrates of Cities (1584), syphilis is referred to as the «French welcome» 24. On one level, of course, the idea of alluding to the much-dreaded disease as a kind of welcome or salutation was ironic. But the phrase also served to describe the syphilitic’s tendency to bend over forward for obvious reasons, like Shakespeare’s Monsieur Veroles in Pericles 25. A similar connection occurs in Romeo and Juliet where Mercutio, corrupting the linguistic purity of the English language, greets the Italian «Signor» Romeo in French to comment on the latter’s foreign-style breeches : «Signor Romeo, bonjour. There’s a French salutation to your French slop». Via a slight detour, the allusion to the French language, the greeting in French, and French sartorial manners, the dialogue leads to the wordplay on venereal disease :

• 26 The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Alexander Dyce, 11 vols. (London, 1843-45), VI.1.2 (p. 324)

27There is an unmistakable connection here with Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher’s The Double Marriage where the disease is called the «French cringe» 26.

• 27 The Faire Maid of the Exchange, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. R. H. Shepherd, 6 vols (...)
• 28 Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women, ed. J. R. Mulryne, The Revels Plays (London : Methuen, 1975), (...)
• 29 See Ben Jonson, VI (1954), III.5.27.

28On another level, the idea of referring simultaneously to the disease and to forms of courtesy (like the stereotypical «French salutation» 27) sprang from the common fear that the disease might be contracted through kissing. This explains why Biancha in Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women speaks of the disease in connection with the «French courtesy» 28. And it would appear that Ben Jonson in The Magnetick Lady alludes to this very association when he ambiguously notes that France is «The very seed-plot of all courtesies» 29.

• 30 A rewarding text is Mercutio’s dialogue with Romeo above, or John Taylor’s «The Whore», identified (...)

30With this broad network of allusions, with everyday intercourse (ranging from etiquette and manners to cannibalism) thus soiled by the French disease (and I have not yet touched on the use of French expressions or French loan words in English as an act of undermining English linguistic purity 30), it is extremely difficult to establish where such collective associations ended. Anyone acquainted with English Renaissance literature will be familiar with the notion of the «French crown». It is generally said to refer to a coin, but also to the head without hair — marking the second stage of syphilis, also known as alopecia — or the head covered with tubercles about the forehead and temples and behind the ears, in the form of a crown, that other mark of the second stage of the disease known as le chapelet. But given this triple pun on the coin, what may we infer about the situation in Shakespeare’s history plays where English kings desire the crown of France ? When soldier Pistol, after the bloody Battle of Agincourt, plans to return home to England where «Nell» has died «I’ th’ spital of a malady of France» (V.1.77-78), we are entitled, I believe, to read a degree of irony into that observation. The audience have just been made to sympathize with the battlefield dead, and still have the Te Deum and Laudamus ringing in their ears. At this juncture it is difficult indeed to empathize with the unheroic consequences of a lethal case of syphilis. But are we supposed to discern a note of irony too in The First Part of Henry VI when Joan of Arc makes the Duke of Burgundy acknowledge the havoc that has been wrought on their country with the words : «See, see, the pining malady of France» (III.7.49) ?

• 31 Ben Jonson, edited by C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1925 (...)

31I am aware that a detailed description of the imaginative and verbal effects of the disease that was new to Europe might create a rather gloomy impression. To counter the gloom, one could argue that instances occur in the literature of authors who openly criticize their contemporaries’ blatant tendency to heap the blame on the country across the Channel. They do so in an attempt to implicate the English and to accuse the nation of projecting its own licentiousness onto the French. Fabricius discusses this issue at some length, and has a considerable number of examples. According to Robert Greene the disease «lepte from Naples into Fraunce and from Fraunce into the bowels of Englande». Greene, himself a fatal syphilitic, is also one of the earliest authors to question the stereotype if not the role of France as a participant in the game : «they say the Poxe came from Naples, some from Spaine, some from France, but whersoeuer it first grew, it is surely now rooted in England». He argues that «Morbus Anglicus» might be a more accurate phrase than «Morbus Gallicus» (232). Ben Jonson in Every Man out of His Humour follows suit when Carlo Buffone responds to the phrase «French pox» with the words : «The French poxe ! our poxe. S’blood we haue ’hem in as good forme as they, man : what ?» 31. Similarly, in A Prooved Practice for All Young Chirurgians (1588), William Clowes noted : «This I will say that the disease it selfe was neuer in mine opinion more ryfe among the Indians, Neapolitans, or in Fraunce, or Spayne, then it is at this day in the realme of England» (Fabricius, 108). Utterances such as these certainly seem to bring a welcome touch of self-criticism to the English discourse of syphilis, but anyone familiar with Renaissance stereotyping must acknowledge that what we are witnessing is a satirical strategy of inversion that had few if any long-term consequences. These are short-lived surprise tactics : polarity is maintained, but inverted, and any sense of continuity between the two facile extremes is illusory. These remarks capture a flicker of discontent, but they are too brief truly to shed light on the structure of stereotypes, or effectively to dislodge them. Does not a closer look at these examples reveal that in none of the cases where England and the English are the butt of the attack, is France ever entirely exonerated ? These examples signal the English act of distortion and misrepresentation, but they also sustain it. France remains the place from where le mal vient aux hommes et aux femmes.

• 32 Thomas Dekker, Newes from Hell (London, 1606), STC 6514, sig. D4^r.
• 33 Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse and a Short Apologie of the Schoole of Abuse, ed. Edward Arber (...)
• 34 Schoole of Abuse, 32. For a discussion of this inversion strategy see my Images of Englishmen and F (...)

33Although the Germanic races were considered to be dipsomaniacs — and the dramatic literature of the period provides ample material to support this view — Dekker on several occasions noted that «drunkennes, which was once the Dutchmans head-ake, is now become the Englishmans» 32. Stephen Gosson, too, belongs to this tradition. In his Schoole of Abuse, for example, he argued that the English had «robbed [...] Dutchland of quaffing» 33. In a sense, the strategy that we see at work seems enlightened, but in reality it is a facile one, as becomes clear when in the same section of The Schoole of Abuse we find Gosson, turning a rhetorical gesture into a habit, accusing the English of robbing «Greece of Gluttony, Italy of wantonnesse, Spaine of Pride» as well as «Fraunce of deceite» 34.

• 35 On Le Pen and AIDS, see Isabelle Rieusset, «Convivialité ou boucs émissaires : Le devenir des struc (...)

36By concentrating on the early-modern English response to syphilis, I have tried to outline an independent discourse characterized by the associative formation of interrelations into a web of assumptions that seem internally to cohere, although its relation to the world that triggered them is tenuous at best. Defined in this way, the rather harmless pre-nationalist syphilitic discourse of the early-modern period may fruitfully be seen not only as an obsession with pollution and purity of the type that was to assume such terrifying proportions in the nationalist and fascist agendas of later centuries, but also as the embryonic form of a preoccupation that currently features as AIDS in the party programme of the extreme right 35. Today still, it is not the disease that counts so much as the ideas about that disease, ideas which may cohere into an imaginative model that looks particularly convincing, and therefore holds a rather dangerous appeal.