“Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time”: Catiline His Conspiracy and the queer temporality of drinking human blood

In Act 1 of Jonson’s Roman tragedy Catiline His Conspiracy (1611), the conspirators drink the blood of a murdered slave as a ritualistic declaration of loyalty and commitment to action. Situating this scene within the context of the play’s overwhelming concern with the corporeality of time, and tracing representations of drinking human blood through literary, religious, and medical early modern texts, this paper argues that the practice radically destabilises emerging discourses of time and its relationship to the body.
Over the last decade, temporality has been a prominent topic in queer theory (Halberstam, Muñoz, Edelman), as well as an emerging focus in early modern studies (Harris). Blood functions within multiple and contradictory forms of temporality in early modern culture: as a marker of linear genealogical time, but also, through death or menstruation, as a moment of rupture in this line; as a biological manifestation of cyclical time, linked also to the circulatory nature of both money and infection. Drinking human blood is not inherently taboo in early modern culture; classical as well as contemporary writers (Ficino, Bacon) advocated it as a means of prolonging life or curing epilepsy, and the symbolism of the Eucharist evokes eternal life through Christ’s death and resurrection. Both examples offer their own disruption of straightforward temporality, but when the practice is removed from religious or medical contexts it can most clearly be seen as abject, self-consciously taboo, and as a radically destabilising expression of queer temporality.