ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. By way of conclusion to the book on the various colors of early modern health and happiness, it offers some brief remarks on William Shakespeare's most fully realized account of life's brevity, and its connection to real or imagined joy: the Sonnets of 1609. The book considers how impairment and suffering characterize the lives that are drawn in the Sonnets. Scholarly discussion of children in early modern culture has tended to emphasize their place in larger societal structures. The book focuses on the metaphorical and medical vocabulary of 'canker' and explores the permeable boundaries that emerge here between selves and others, and demonstrates the contested nature of bodily 'wholeness'. The book shows how able-bodied or 'gambol masculinity' involves impairment rather than maturity, since Shakespeare's athletic bodies are touched with deformity and decay.
