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. 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 William Shakespeare's Cymbeline, which broadcasts the fanciful Latin derivation of woman from 'soft air'. This chapter takes seriously the derivation of woman from air by considering the figures of Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream; the witches in Macbeth; Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra; and Innogen in Cymbeline as gendered beings mediated through the early modern and Aristotelian element of air. In these plays, drawn from different points and genres in Shakespeare's career, air communicates disease or health, and also, the chapter argues, gender and sexual deviance in women.
