ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two phrases from the play in an effort to explain why, when King Lear announces that he has hysterica passio, he does not suffer from hysteria despite the fact that for over a century. Editorial and scholarly practices have regularly asserted that such is the case, each mutually reinforcing the other and codifying further habits and responses. The chapter focuses on Lear because, as the only explicit mention of hysterica passio from a male Shakespearean character, Lear's brief and complex allusion has come to stand, however incorrectly, as the standard-bearer for what constitutes period medical precepts and beliefs. Thus it explains how an imprecise definition of hysterica passio can lead editors to misinterpret in turn the historical accounts from which Lear's comment derives Shakespeare's own source for the hysterica passio citation. The chapter highlights Thomas Percy's mischaracterization of Samuel Harsnett because Harsnett's text becomes the source for erroneous evidence of case of hysterica passio in men.
