Introduction
Bill Angus and Lisa Hopkins

Part I: Sources of poison

1 ‘Balms and gums and heavy cheers’: Shakespeare’s poison gardens
Lisa Hopkins

2 Shakespeare and the snakehandlers: venom, vermin and the circulation of eco-social energy in Renaissance drama
Todd Andrew Borlik

3 Shakespeare’s ‘baleful mistletoe’
Susan C. Staub

4 Poisoning and poisonous Black bodies: Egyptian magic on the early modern stage
Nour El Gazzaz

Part II: Poisoners

5 ‘Spit thy poison’: the rhetoric of poison in Marston’s and Webster’s Italianate drama
Yan Brailowsky

6 Poisonous intent, or how to get away with attempted murder on the early modern stage
Anthony Archdeacon

7 ‘Let this deadly draught purge clean my Soul from sin’: poisons and remedies in Margaret Cavendish’s drama
Delilah Bermudez Brataas

8 Poxy doxies and poison damsels: venereal infection and the myth of the venomous woman in early modern literature
Dee Anna Phares

Part III: Victims

9 ‘Thou didst eat my lips’: swallowing passion in William Davenant’s The Tragedy of Albovine
Kibrina Davey

10 ‘The leperous distilment’: authority, informers and the poisoned ear
Bill Angus

11 Playing with poison: murder, proof and confession in early modern revenge
Jessica Apolloni

12 ‘No healthsome air breathes in’: spiritual poison in Romeo and Juliet
Khristian S. Smith

13 ‘Death’s counterfeit’: the art of undying and the Machiavels in The Jew of Malta and Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany
Subarna Mondal


Index

The most famous play in English literature centres on the poisoning of Hamlet’s father. However, it is only one of many examples of poisoning in plays of the period. Remarkably easy to stage and to act, its popularity at the time is perhaps not surprising, but it also allowed plays to explore a number of important contemporary issues. The death of Hamlet’s father occurs in an orchard, and is one of a number of sinister uses of plants which comment on both the loss of horticultural knowledge resulting from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and also the many new plants arriving in English gardens through travel, trade, and attempts at colonisation. The fact that Old Hamlet was asleep reflects unease about soporifics troubling the distinction between sleep and death; pouring poison into the ear smuggles in the contemporary fear of informers; and, as Hamlet himself painfully discovers, poisoning is remarkably difficult to prove.
This book explores poison in a wide range of early modern plays, including the legal and epistemological issues that it raises, and addresses questions of race, religion, nationality, gender, and the relationship between humans and the environment.