The Amorous Heart

by Marilyn Yalom

  Compared to the simple figures in medieval allegories who had only one identity, Shakespeare’s characters are considerably more complex and therefore more modern; not limited to the single-minded, all-or-nothing passion found in medieval romance, Shakespearean loving has “infinite variety,” to borrow an expression he used for Cleopatra. It takes the form of naive astonishment when Miranda in The Tempest sees a male youth for the first time and exclaims, “Oh brave new world that has such creatures in it!” It exists in the amorous sentiments that Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, feels for her new husband, her former brother-in-law, who, unbeknownst to her, had murdered her first husband. Even Macbeth and his wife demonstrate a strain of conjugal love, though their partnership becomes corrupted and eventually destroyed by their unbridled ambition. Lady Macbeth is a formidable accomplice, the worst of Shakespeare’s headstrong women, yet we cannot deny that some twisted form of affection between her and her husband facilitated their horrific acts.

  These few examples suggest the distance between courtly love, with its single code of conduct, and the diverse forms that love acquired in the world of Shakespeare. The courtly lover who routinely suffered for his beloved—usually another man’s wife—has been replaced by a lover hoping to marry the lady of his choice. More often than not she is a willing accomplice in the love plot, scheming and suffering as much as her male counterpart. The old trio of husband, wife, and her lover no longer commands the spotlight except in the deranged minds of men like Othello and Leontes. On the Shakespearean stage comedies end in happy marriages—sometimes more than one—and tragedies end in the destruction of amorous, conjugal, and filial bonds.

  KING LEAR, THE GREATEST OF SHAKESPEARE’S TRAGEDIES, has at its core the theme of filial love experienced in two parallel families: the foursome made up of Lear and his three daughters—Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia—and the threesome consisting of Gloucester and his two sons, Edmund and Edgar. Put simplistically, the “good hearts” belong to Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, and Gloucester, and the “bad hearts” to Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund. The very name Cordelia means “goddess of the heart.” And Lear’s heart? His “father’s heart,” his “rising heart,” his “frank heart,” to use his own words, will live to see the revolt of his “daughters’ hearts / Against their father” and his own heart “break into a hundred thousand flaws.”

  In Act I Lear foolishly displays his need for lavish demonstrations of his daughters’ filial love. At first he is satisfied when two of them, Goneril and Regan, claim to love him more than words can tell. But when his youngest and most beloved Cordelia is asked to flatter him in a manner similar to her sisters’, she answers only:

  … I cannot heave

  My heart into my mouth: I love your Majesty

  According to my bond; nor more nor less.

  Given her hope that she will, in time, love a husband as much as she now loves her father, she cannot in all honesty promise to love her father exclusively.

  Lear’s angry response to Cordelia’s honesty is swift: he tells her that henceforth she will be “a stranger to my heart” and can expect nothing from him as a dower. His overweening self-love is the enemy of familial affection. Shakespeare lived at a time when children were beginning to assert their love choices against the wishes of their parents, and this great social transformation was reflected in several of his plays, tragically in Romeo and Juliet and comically in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lear brings the conflict between parents and children to a cataclysmic conclusion. Where is the heart in all this? Broken, shattered, the pieces caught up in a whirlpool of destruction.

  LOVE IN ALL ITS COMPLEX FORMS—AMOROUS, FILIAL, parental, brotherly, sisterly—requires a different environment, a place immune to the hostilities created by men. Shakespeare imagines such settings in The Tempest’s magical island and in Twelfth Night’s Illyria, where love flourishes as if in the Garden of Eden. But in the real world the longing to love to one’s “heart’s content” (another expression coined by Shakespeare) encounters myriad obstacles, both external and internal. Although we can do little to change the world we live in, we look to Shakespeare for reminders of the need to know our own hearts, to fathom their secrets, and to listen to the beat that signals the presence of other hearts compatible with our own.

  Chapter 14

  Heart and Brain

  IN 1628 THE ENGLISH PHYSICIAN WILLIAM HARVEY PUBLISHED a short book in Latin that was to revolutionize medicine. His seventy-two-page Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus (otherwise known as On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals) offered proof that the heart’s main function was to pump blood through the body. This radically new conception of the heart contradicted two thousand years of medical belief.

  As far back as the ancient Greeks, physicians such as Pythagoras in the sixth century BCE and Hippocrates two centuries later believed that there were four humors coursing through the human body—blood, phlegm, black bile, and choler. These humors supposedly determined a person’s character and mood. Too much blood or phlegm made you sanguine or phlegmatic. Too much black bile made you sad or melancholic. And too much choler made you angry (choleric). A proper balance between the four humors was considered necessary for an individual’s health. The heart’s role, like that of the sun in relation to Earth, was to heat the blood and thus regulate the humors. In addition, followers of Hippocrates believed that all mental functioning was situated in the heart, including human intelligence.

  Philosophers, however, had differing views about the heart’s functions. Plato believed it was primarily the seat of emotions and the brain was the seat of intelligence. Aristotle granted the heart even greater importance: it was the central organ of life, the origin of all pleasure and pain, the source of the body’s heat. It also produced pneuma, the air that animated the soul. As for the intellect or what the Greeks called nous, in Aristotle’s scheme it was not assigned to any specific organ.

  The influential Greek physician Galen in the second century CE contested the supremacy of the Aristotelian heart. He believed the heart worked in conjunction with both the liver and the brain. Rational thought was centered in the brain, emotions in the heart, and nutrition in the liver. Though Galen recognized the unusual muscular strength and endurance of the heart, he judged it as secondary to the liver, where, he thought, blood is formed and then carried by the veins to all parts of the body. Galen’s ideas dominated medical education and practice long after his death through numerous Arabic and then Latin translations.

  During the Middle Ages, thinkers attempting to reconcile medical ideas with Christian doctrine joined the debate between Aristotelian and Galenic models of the heart. If the heart was the seat of the soul, according to Judeo-Christian pronouncements, just how did the soul gain entry into the heart?

  Alfred the Englishman’s De motu cordis (On the Motion of the Heart) is an example of the way medieval thinkers answered this question. Because the body, “whose material is solid and obtuse,” and the soul, “which is of a very subtle and incorporeal nature,” have such different properties, he postulated the presence of “a certain medium which, participated in the nature of both.” That “medium” entered the body through the air we breathe and mixed with the blood in our hearts. Christian philosophers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries thought of bodies as connected to the universe rather than as independent entities. In this interconnected system between humans and the cosmos, hearts were the crucial agents that assisted the “spirit” in and out of the blood.

  The Renaissance brought about a new understanding of the heart as both medical practitioners and artists began to observe the body with their own eyes rather than blindly repeat earlier theories and to reproduce the body’s components more accurately in drawings, paintings, sculpture, and book illustrations. The famous notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), covering some five thousand pages, contained hundreds of sketches of the human body, several showing the heart. Leonardo profited
from the practice of human dissection, which had been revived as early as 1315 in Italy but could be banned once again at any time according to the mood of the pope. Leonardo conducted many of his dissections on animals, and his knowledge of cardiac anatomy was based largely on the ox heart. His brilliant written observations and sublime drawings were the fruits of his longstanding dedication to cardiac research.

  Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564), born shortly before Da Vinci’s death, is considered the father of modern anatomy. He set a new standard for scientific investigation in his masterpiece, De humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body), first published in 1543. As a student of medicine and then professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua, Vesalius was allowed to dissect cadavers, thanks to a judge who supplied him with the bodies of executed criminals. During the sixteenth century dissection was still practiced discreetly. When I visited the University of Padua some years ago and was led into the lower depths of a very old medical building where dissections had taken place, I was told that cadavers were originally brought into the amphitheater through an underground passage at night.

  Vesalius’s groundbreaking book, known simply as the Fabrica, was an immediate success and reprinted in many editions—some pirated, some abridged, some translated, some amended by Vesalius himself. What was the cause of its unprecedented success? Surely not Vesalius’s turgid Latin prose. Rather, it was his use of the scientific method. He drew conclusions based on his own observations, experimentation, and discoveries. Though he had started his medical career as a confirmed Galenist like all the other European doctors, he went on to reveal where Galen had simply been wrong. For example, there is no bone at the base of the heart. The heart’s septum (the partition dividing a body space) is not porous. Men and women have an equal number of ribs; Galen claimed that men had one fewer, based on the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Though he retained some aspects of Galen’s physiology, Vesalius did more than any other sixteenth-century scientist to dethrone Galen from the position of authority he had enjoyed for thirteen hundred years. The interior landscape of the human body was changed forever.

  Another reason for the success of the Fabrica was its two hundred illustrations. These were made by several artists, one of whom, Jan van Calcar, had already worked with Vesalius in 1538 to produce the very large plates of the Tabulae anatomica sex (The Six Anatomical Tables). Five years later Vesalius’s Fabrica, published in a superb folio edition by a Basel printer, set a new artistic standard for medical works. For three hundred years before the publication of Gray’s Anatomy, medical students looked to Vesalius for their lessons in anatomy.

  Still, even as Vesalius was making great advances, unfounded ideas about the human body continued to thrive. One of the most peculiar beliefs associated the female uterus with the heart. Because the heart was popularly considered the seat of love and the uterus known to bear the product of lovemaking, the uterus was endowed with qualities that had long been attributed to the heart, such as love, joy, and receptivity. Indeed, a 1522 publication contained the image of a heart-shaped uterus—the same form that represented amorous love in books of romance.

  This particular misconception survived for several decades. In the 1560s an English midwifery manual described the uterus as “not perfectly round… but rather like the form of a man’s heart, as it is painted.” This comparison with the heart obviously derived from the medieval artistic tradition rather than from the new anatomical knowledge gained from dissection. The association between the heart and the uterus persisted not only in midwifery manuals but also in other serious medical works published in England and on the continent. The anatomical studies initiated by Vesalius were not enough to abolish older, fanciful interpretations of fetishized body parts like the heart, the uterus, and the penis. Indeed, Vesalius himself was responsible for an engraving in the Fabrica that depicted female vaginal anatomy as heart-shaped.

  WILLIAM HARVEY PUT TO REST ALL THE FALSE IDEAS ABOUT the heart from Galen, Vesalius, and other previous authorities. He showed for the first time that arteries pump blood from the heart throughout the body and that veins return the blood back to the heart. The heart, not the liver, is the source of blood’s movement, with the heart’s regular contractions driving the flow of blood. Each pulse beat signals a contraction of the heart, as it pushes blood out into the arteries. All the blood in the right ventricle goes to the lungs and then through the pulmonary veins to the left ventricle that, in turn, pumps blood to the rest of the body.

  Readers may be asking themselves why I am devoting so much time to medical history. What relationship is there between the amorous heart and the medical heart? Very little, if any. And that’s the point. Once the scientists took over, as they did increasingly from the Renaissance onward, the metaphoric heart had to defend itself from being reduced to a mere pump.

  IN SHAKESPEARE’S MERCHANT OF VENICE BASSANIO, ONE OF many suitors for the hand of Portia, must choose between three caskets—gold, silver, and lead. If he chooses the correct one, he will win the fair Portia. While he ponders over his choice, a song is heard in the background that begins with this line: “Tell me where is fancy bred / Or in the heart, or in the head?” If we take “fancy” to mean romantic inclination—as in, “take a fancy to someone”—we find ourselves confronted with a new question concerning the source of love: Is it a product of the heart or the brain? What part of the body generates “fancy”? Or, put more broadly, what is the relationship of the material body to the emotion of love?

  Men and women in medieval times had no trouble answering those questions, since the heart was universally accepted as the unambiguous home of love. The dart of love came through the eyes without injuring them and struck the heart full force. All the pleasure and pain of “fancy” dwelt in the heart.

  The new medical discoveries starting in the Renaissance challenged longstanding ideas about the seat of human emotions. By 1598, when The Merchant of Venice was first performed, it was no longer a given that the heart had an exclusive claim to love. Not long after Shakespeare raised the question of love’s connection to heart or head, seventeenth-century physicians and philosophers weighed in on the subject, launching a controversial debate that was to last throughout the Scientific Revolution and into the eighteenth century.

  Once Harvey had demystified the heart’s anatomy and functions, French and English thinkers began to treat the brain as the abode of love. Descartes in France and Hobbes and Locke in England identified all aspects of consciousness with the brain, thus depriving the heart of any association with love.

  For Descartes (1596–1650) the defining feature of man was his mind, spirit, or soul—words he used somewhat indiscriminately. Though the heart was vital to life, it was understood to be a mere organ of the body that had little to do with emotion or thought. This separation of body and soul (of mind and spirit) became the keystone for his philosophical dualism. His well-known formula, “I think, therefore I am,” situated man’s essence in his head and dismissed the affective claims of the heart. In earlier times advocates for the heart might have written, “I feel, therefore I am.”

  Although Descartes could easily pinpoint the heart’s location within the chest and the brain’s within the head, he didn’t know where to situate the immortal soul. Classical authorities, like Plato and Galen, had placed the soul in the head, whereas others, like Aristotle and Hippocrates, favored the heart. Catholicism clearly associated the soul with the heart, but because the heart was material, like the rest of the body, Descartes could not conceptualize it as the seat of the soul.

  He came up with the bizarre idea elaborated in Les passions de l’âme (The Passions of the Soul) (1649) that the soul had its home in the pineal gland, located at the center of the brain. He wrote, “The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’
s substance.”

  The pineal gland provided a point of interaction between the material body, subject to the laws of nature, and the insubstantial soul, subject only to God. Descartes set in motion a debate over the mind-body problem that has continued in many forms until our own time.

  In this same work Descartes attempted to figure out exactly how the brain, the soul, and the heart interacted to produce emotions. With the precision of a mathematician, he isolated five passions: love, hatred, joy, sadness, and desire.

  As for love, Descartes wrote that when one sees a love object, a thought forms in the brain that is then carried to the heart by the blood. The blood, “rarefied many times in passing and repassing through the heart,” sends toward the brain what Descartes calls “spirits.” “These spirits, strengthening the impression which the first thought of the lovable object has formed there, compel the soul to dwell upon that thought. And this is what the passion of Love consists in.”

  And this is what the passion of love consists in? God forbid! Anyone who has ever been in love will find such an analysis lacking, if not totally ridiculous. Descartes was wrong on two counts. First, his view of physiology was incorrect, even if he had learned something from Harvey’s medical discoveries—shown by his reference to blood passing and repassing through the heart. Second, he presented love as nothing but physiology. This reductionistic analysis of love tells us as much about love as a recipe tells us about the taste of cake.