Corrupted Bodies, Contagious Environments: Shakespeare’s Theatre of Medicine and the Breakdown of Early Modern Binary Thinking

This project traces medical binary thinking throughout four of Shakespeare&rsquo;s plays: <em>Romeo and Juliet</em>, <em>Richard II</em>, <em>Henry IV Part I,</em> and <em>Henry IV Part II</em>. It incorporates medico-religious, medico-environmental, and medico-theatrical perspectives to understand how Shakespeare imbued the early modern theatre with dichotomies surrounding corruption, contagion, and disease. It contends that Shakespeare&rsquo;s theatre of medicine is situated in a broader framework of early modern thinkers whose work reconciled oppositional binaries while simultaneously advocating for a more complex understanding of the natural world.