Procreation and male vulnerability in King Lear

Abstract

Shakespeare’s time witnessed a growing interest in medical notions about female body and the emergence, in several discursive fields, of complex metaphorical and allegorical fantasies about female’s bodies. This article addresses the presence of such fantasies in two of Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet and King Lear, and discusses, in a preliminary way, the connections between reformist religious language about postlapsarian humanity, the emergence of medical investigation and description of female bodies, sexuality and diseases and also Shakespeare’s own appropriation of these images in his plays.