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“There is no tongue that moves”
29
Leo.
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating. (5.3.110-11)
Here the female practice of magic, of witchcraft, becomes
elevated from an “unlawful business” to an
art
that is natural
and thus lawful, and so various traditional boundaries
—
as well
as boundaries between the past and present, living and
dead
—
are being crossed.
25
That is, this “magical” female
medicine is now seen as also being natural and thus lawful and
necessary, a proper part of the medicinal order.
Shakespeare’s positive and sympathetic presentation here
of female medicinal power, specifically midwifery, clearly
shows his approval. Perhaps this can even be one of those
“uncritical acceptance accounts” (Evenden, 2000: 1) compiled
by Percival Willughby,
26
a prominent male midwife in the
seventeenth century, who admitted at one point the significant
role that female midwives had played in the history of early
modern English childbirth. In his complex treatise
Observations of Midwifery
(1672), some ninety thousand
words in length, Willughby related many case histories of
midwifery and claimed, contrary to the dominant belief at that
time, that female midwives were very capable and even
preferable to male midwives. As Adrian Wilson puts it:
Just as very few mothers asked him to play the role of
midwife, so too Willughby himself
—
for all his
25
The idea of
art
presented here does not appear to contradict Perdita’s
distaste for art earlier in her conversation with Polixenes, where she refers
to art more as a form of artificiality and thus falsehood. Here, however,
both to Leontes and Paulina, art denotes the act of creation of new life.
26
Evenden remarks that “[t]he single most influential source in the
historiography of English midwifery has been Willoughby’s
compilation of
some 200 midwifery cases selected from his own forty-year practice” (2000:
1). Republished in 1863, Willughby’s seventeenth-century manuscript has
been a significant source for historians dealing with early modern English
midwifery.