ABSTRACT
Doctors and healers play few major roles in the drama of Shakespeare. In fact, only Helena, in AWs Well That Ends Well-3. completely unorthodox healer-has a leading role in a Shakespeare play. Yet, as his career developed, Shakespeare began to present medical practitioners with increasing frequency and seriousness as minor characters in his plays. Comparison of Shakespeare's Elizabethan with his Jacobean plays on this point suggests the outline of this development. Among the twenty-three or so plays written before 1603,1 only two, both comedies, contain characters who are physicians or healers. Dr. Pinch, in The Comedy of Errors, identified in the text as a schoolmaster, is consulted about the supposed madness of Antipholus of Syracuse. Both Pinch and Dr. Caius of The Merry Wives of Windsor are played as comic-type characters, pompous and medically incompetent. Although a sick king/sick country motif haunts the history plays of the 1590s, and although Ophelia and Hamlet both exhibit signs of madness, no physicians are summoned in any of Shakespeare's histories or tragedies of the Elizabethan period.
