Toxic Masculinity on the London Stage, 1600–1610

The idea of toxic masculinity might feel like a very modern, even twenty-first century notion, but similar concerns about male behaviour, also often characterised in terms of poisons and poisoning, can be identified in the literature of 400 hundred years ago, not only in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Winter’s Tale but also lesser-known plays that were popular on the London stage in the 1600s. Poison-related tropes, and the recurrent plot device of a man trying to poison a woman, expressed comple