ABSTRACT
One of the so-called “non-natural” factors that, Galenic medicine held, contributed to bodily health, air-its fragrance, temperature, humidity, movement, translucence, and pressure-could communicate disease and healthfulness. Carla Mazzio has elegantly argued that what she calls “the history of air” must also be a “history of affect,” since air can reach us only through “indirection or metonymy,” immeasurably (in both the word’s senses: air can neither be quantified, nor limited [153-54]). At the same time, we might also say that air is immediate when it becomes foggily visible, fragrantly olfactory, breezily aural, or, most frequently, moistly, coldly, or warmly tactile; this last sense informs Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, which broadcasts the fanciful Latin derivation of woman (mulier) from “soft air” (mollis aer). Matthias Bauer briefly provides a corrective to the facile statement, familiar to most of us, that Cymbeline’s derivation of the Latin word “mulier,” meaning “woman,” from “mollis aer,” meaning “tender air,” is farfetched, outlandish, or utterly false. Bauer notes that the etymology is not entirely “false”—mulier may indeed derive from the comparative “mollior,” tenderer, softer-what Shakespeare adds, macaronically, is the air (188). Metaphysically, he observes, air serves as the medium to unite body and soul. Moreover, he suggests, air in Cymbeline is important as the medium for the sound that imparts the “true meaning of the letter,” the association between the piece of air and the peace brought by air throughout the play and by the play, which is itself a “piece of air,” language borne on breath for a short time (190); this peace/piece “transforms the (at least potentially misogynistic...etymology into something entirely appreciative” (189). Although Bauer aptly associates tenderness, uprightness, and femininity in the play through the quality of air, air in Cymbeline not only bears the truth (as Bauer suggests), but additionally punishes those who betray it.
