The Complexions of Shakespeare’s Voices

In this essay I want to complement Paster’s observations by attending to voice as a medium for communicating complexions—a word that, for us, has been narrowed to refer mainly to skin tone and facial features.7 It takes effort to restore voice to complexion in its now obsolete sense of “bodily habit or constitution” (Oxford English Dictionary (OED), I.†2a) such as we find in Levinus Lemnius’s The Touchstone of Complexions (1576, 1581, 1633), which gives throat, breast, and lungs first importance in explaining the whole-body effects of humors: “For out of the heade continually do Humours distill and (lyke soote oute of a Chymney) fall downe into the Throate, Eares, Nose, Eyes, Breast and Lunges.” First published in Spanish in 1575, it was quickly translated into all the major languages of Europe and was eventually suppressed by the Spanish Inquisition in 1587. First is Lady Percy’s celebration of her husband’s serving as the “glass” or mirror in which “the noble youth” of England fashioned themselves. [...]in an early modern performance the audience could witness the cool, moist phlegmatic humor natural to a boy actor being transformed, by the actor’s artifice, into the hot, moist humor that has characterized Hotspur in Part One.