Like Furnace: Sighing on the Shakespearean Stage

Sighs, sometimes accompanied by tears and groans, are everywhere in Shakespeare’s plays and yet have received almost no attention in scholarship on the passions and early modern theater. References to sighing are often taken as a commonplace rather than as potential cues to embodied action or clues to a character’s emotional state, and yet, sighing had anatomical, humoral, spiritual, and pathological significance in early modern culture. Constant sighing was viewed as a key external symptom of melancholic afflictions such as lovesickness. With such ideas in mind, Chalk explores the representation of sighing on the Shakespearean stage in relation to medical and philosophical writings on the phenomenon. Visceral, vital, non-verbal, and affective, sighing was more than merely metaphorical: its use in Shakespeare often signifies the physicality and theatricality of the passions as necessarily performative phenomena.