Blood

Trigger Warning: The following entry contains reference to sexual violence.

The connotations of the word blood today are fairly universal: danger, honour, family. We might even, perhaps, have become desensitised to this most essential of bodily fluids, exposed as we are to grisly battle scenes and to blood, guts and gore in video games, films, TV shows, music lyrics, art, the list goes on. Blood for a Renaissance audience, however, was not just for entertainment: it was everywhere. Streets were full of butchers’ run-off, bearbaiting and cock fighting were rife, traitors’ heads were displayed on spikes. They loved blood, as we do, but blood arguably held even more potency four centuries past. What, then, did blood mean to a Renaissance audience? And how has it impacted our understanding and relationship with blood today?

Anon. Bloodletting, 16th Century. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

The potency of blood in the Renaissance can be split into three categories: medical understanding, social standing, and (for the purposes of my interests) dramatic portrayal. From a medical perspective, whilst beliefs about the physical substance of blood would have varied, late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century English society predominantly subscribed to Galenic humoral theory (whose implications for the period’s emotional understanding are explored elsewhere in this series). According to Galen, there were four key substances within the body that effected not just your physical health but your temperament (these being phlegm, yellow bile, black bile, and blood). Blood was considered the most vital and was believed to form all life-giving elements within the body (such as sperm, menstrual blood, breast-milk, etc.). Keeping one’s blood in balance was a key medical concern of the time — one used up blood when undertaking physical activities (typically the male realm), whilst if too much time was spent idle, blood could build up and putrify. Menstrual blood was seen as just this: a plethora of corrupted blood that needed to be expelled. It was subsequently believed to hold a whole host of negative properties, including the ability to dull weapons, kill crops, and to harm spouses and children. Crucially, Renaissance physicians also believed that blood carried not only your physical humours, but ‘vital spirits’ –  your moral, spiritual DNA. As such, one could interpret a man or woman’s morality by observing their blood (thin, pure, intense red, warm, fast-flowing blood was, for instance, ‘laudable’ and spirituous). Already we can see gendered differences emerging in terms of what a reference to blood might have suggested in the period. Whether in conversation, court testimony, pamphlet literature, drama, poetry or prose, a woman’s blood was latent with suppositions of idleness, putrification, and even disease, whilst a man’s burst vein might be interpreted as a sign of his good character and religious piety.

In terms of social standing, we still hold true today notions of a ‘blood-bond’, ‘blood brothers’, or a relation ‘by blood’ as markers of honour and a familiar tie. Similar notions of family responsibility and legacy were prominent in the English Renaissance, and this is, perhaps, what led to the early modern fascination with the history plays. There was an urge to understand where we came from, the power of the family line, and the God-given rights of sovereignty to which early modern English society subscribed. This social standing was intimately connected to the biological ramifications of blood; when one gave one’s blood for one’s country, it was not just the physical form but the ‘vital spirits’ of the soul that were sacrificed. When one shamed one’s family, it was not merely the social whisperings of shame that were damning; the very biological make-up of the lineage was betrayed. For the theatres of the period, the ramifications of these medical, social, and familial anxieties were complex. Not only did blood on the Renaissance stage hold to our modern-day connotations of danger and honour, but also to gendered realities of blood-shed, disease, religious insight, continuation of purity, alignment of God and country, even necessary purgation.

Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. The Changeling (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1653).

A compelling dramatic example of how the medical, the social, and the theatrical intersected to construct the meaning of blood, can be found in the final act of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 collaboration, The Changeling. Here, we see Beatrice Joanna stagger on-stage, bleeding to death after being stabbed by her lover De Flores.

Oh, come not near me sir, I shall defile you,
I am that of your blood was taken from you
For your better health, look no more upon’t,
But cast it to the ground regardlessly,
Let the common sewer take it, from distinction,

The Changeling, sig. I2r-I2v.

Beatrice Joanna’s words are directed to her father, warning him that the very presence of her blood may ‘defile him’, and aligning herself with the Renaissance practice of bloodletting: ‘I am that of your blood was taken from you / For your better health’. In the first instance, the language of social etiquette is used (‘defile’, ‘cast’, and ‘distinction’), yet alongside it flow medical undercurrents as Beatrice Joanna references phlebotomy, the practice used to rid an individual of an excess of putrifying blood. As already discussed, medical beliefs of the period also held that sperm was blood intensified under heat — once ‘deflowered’ a woman’s blood held traces of this substance. Here, Beatrice Joanna draws a link between her lost virginity (an infection of the blood if you will) and the defilement of the family honour. Her blood must act as the purification needed to purge her family’s name, an idea furthered by the reference to ‘the common sewer’.

Dramatically, Beatrice Joanna’s bleeding-to-death is ultra-visible, centre stage, in direct contrast to the unstageable rape she experiences earlier in the play. The use of stage blood to create a gruesome, thrilling effect was very much a possibility in the seventeenth century and we believe that viols of sheep’s blood were likely used (it doesn’t coagulate as quickly as cows’), inserted into small guts made of animal intestines or pre-soaked into sponges. The moment of Beatrice Joanna’s death is part of wider trend throughout the Renaissance on the English stage: a sexual encounter off-stage and a bleeding to death centre stage (see also, for example, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus, and The Broken Heart). Perhaps in such instances, blood is symbolic of a disruption of a ‘natural order’ in a way that extends beyond the final act of stabbing.

Even today, the word blood triggers a thrill in the most seasoned horror film fanatic. It has the power to shock and appal and in this abject irresistibility lies its power. Renaissance theatre goers were fascinated with it, both in its life-giving and -taking danger, and in its powerful associations with legacy, country, and honour. Although its connotations and illicit cultural symbolism may have changed over the centuries, the term’s straddling of the medical, social and literary continues to maintain the place of blood as a key symbol in the English language. 

Hetty Hughes is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at King’s College London.

Selected Bibliography.

Middleton, Thomas and Samuel Rowley. The Changeling (London, 1653).

14 May 2021.