ABSTRACT
Romeo and Juliet (1597, 1599)1 is a play overtly about contesting models of medical discourse and the relationships between medicine and rhetoric that were preoccupying English practices in the 1590s. It is also concerned to draw parallels between a medical understanding of the human body and a political understanding of the social body. In the process, I shall argue, the play negotiates a pre-Cartesian breakdown into mind and body that is related to a contemporary movement to split the bodily actuality of the humors into anatomical certainty and a symbolic system that eventually becomes psychology.2 One sign of this anxiety or breakdown is melancholia, a disease that obsessed late sixteenth-century medical texts and eluded treatment as successfully as the plague. Furthermore, because medical practice is inextricably bound to rhetoric,3 the breakdown is directly related to the shift in the fortunes of rhetoric from a discursive field that deals with probably-thebest actions to a system of plausibility that cannot compete with the certainties of logic.
