What does it mean to know? “Epistemology” describes a way of knowing, and, as you might expect, many different epistemologies exist. One episteme that has come to define the Western world is heteropatriarchy, a power-knowledge system organized around white, masculine supremacy. In the seventeenth century, French philosopher René Descartes theorized that the mind is separate from the body. As Genevieve Lloyd helpfully summarizes, “Cartesian [i.e. Descartes’s] method is essentially a matter of forming the ‘habit of distinguishing intellectual from corporeal matters’. It is a matter of shedding the sensuous from thought.”[1] Grounded in Descartes, heteropatriarchy hierarchizes mind over body, aligning man with the former and woman with the latter. Moreover, this epistemology makes its knowers suspicious of the body, casting it as a site of unruly passion in opposition to the rational capacities of the (white, masculine) mind. Given this context, I would like to examine the role of sensuous, bodily knowledges – those that Cartesian dualism denies – in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet (1595), a play seemingly entrenched in Cartesian logics.
Act One of the play introduces audiences and readers to the Nurse, Juliet’s caregiver, confidant, and former wet-nurse. In the play’s third scene, the Nurse recalls a moment in time that is etched in her memory. She recalls when she weaned an infant Juliet from her breast:
“But, as I said,
On Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen,
That shall she, marry, I remember it well.
‘Tis since the earthquake now eleven years,
And she was weaned – I never shall forget it –
Of all the days of the year, upon that day;
For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.
My lord and you were then in Mantua –
Nay, I do bear a brain! But, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see if techy and fall out with the dug! (1.3.21-34)[2]
In her own words, she retrieves this information from her “brain,” the Cartesian site of rationality. However, as her diction reveals, her body is doing just as much of this retrieval work. Here, Diana Taylor’s concept of the “repertoire” is useful, a term which refers to “embodied practice[s]/knowledge[s]” such as spoken communication, ritual ceremony, and choreographed movements. Unlike archival records, which Taylor describes as “supposedly enduring materials” like “texts, documents, buildings, [and] bones,” the Nurse engages her bodily senses – those fleeting, unprocessed impressions that Cartesian dualism diametrically opposes to impartial rationality – to recall Juliet’s age.[3] Without necessarily intending to do so, she catalogues the sensory inputs that permeate her body during this blip in time, inviting us to inhabit her flesh, if only for a moment. She conjures the warmth of the “sun,” the cooing of the “dovehouse[’s]” inhabitants, and the steady pressure induced by Juliet’s suckling – made discontinuous by the bitterness of wormwood – to access her memory of Juliet’s age.
In contrast to the Cartesian and, thus, heteropatriarchal claim that bodies are sites of illogical disorder, the Nurse’s body produces and stores knowledge in this passage, operating on the same level as comparatively privileged archival information, such as birth records and geological reports.[4] In this moment, both archive and repertoire corroborate one another. Not only does Juliet’s factual age align with the Nurse’s corporeal memory, but the “earthquake” also offers a material trace of that day, whose memorial marks otherwise reside on/in the flesh.
Beyond functioning as an archival counterpart to the Nurse’s repertoire, however, the earthquake also signals the cosmic import of this ephemeral moment. As a play centered on the operations of destiny, perhaps the earthquake presages the doom that will result the next time Juliet’s body unites another’s, namely her “star-crossed lover[’s]” (Prologue.6). In another sense, this pairing opposes the heteropatriarchal binaries that stem from Cartesian dualism – such as mind/body, man/woman, political/domestic, and cosmological/earthly – elevating a moment defined by the female body and domestic care to a level of cosmic significance.
Moreover, the destructive earthquake literalizes the turmoil that an infant Juliet likely feels as her wonted source of comfort transforms into a loathed object. Here, Juliet’s passions, conceived of by Cartesian dualism as unrefined and unproductive, are expressed, whether intentionally or not, in the natural world. They are expressed sans language, the dominant mode of Western knowledge production that Taylor claims “has come to stand for meaning itself” (25). Perhaps the earthquake tells us something more about the Nurse’s feelings, too, who otherwise expresses fondness over her “pretty fool’s” maturation.
The Nurse’s performance harbors all of this and more, if only one takes the time to sense it. However, at the end of her speech, Lady Capulet tiredly commands, “Enough of this. I pray thee, hold thy peace” (1.3.50). Lady Capulet, Juliet’s biological mother, does not perceive the sensuous knowledges contained in the Nurse’s speech, or if she does, she values it as much as heteropatriarchy, the play’s dominant power-knowledge system, does. Of course, the Nurse propagates heteropatriarchal values herself, engaged, as we all are, in the “oppressing ↔ resisting”[5] dialectic theorized by Latinx feminist philosopher María Lugones (7).[6] However, the passage quoted above contains multitudes that heteropatriarchal epistemes are blind to, compelling us to attend more sensitively to the Nurse and sensuous knowledges in the play.
Image citation: Romeo and Juliet. Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, performances by Pat Heywood and Olivia Hussey, Paramount Pictures, 1968.
[1] Lloyd, Genevieve. “The Man of Reason.” Metaphilosophy, vol. 10, no. 1, 1979, p. 23.
[2] Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Dympna Callaghan, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.
[3] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.
[4] Contemporaneous British writers such as Gabriel Harvey wrote about an earthquake around the same time that the Nurse would have weaned Juliet, meaning that historical British documentation also supports the Nurse’s sensuous, fictional knowledge.
[5] Taylor, Diana. “Acts of Transfer.” The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, Duke University Press, 2003, p. 18.
[6] In other words, we are always engaged in a tense relationship between resisting oppressions and propagating them.