The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals

Karen Raber, Holly Dugan, Karen Raber, Holly Dugan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000093438
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire de Shakespeare

Shakespeare's plays have a long and varied performance history. The relevance of his plays in literary studies cannot be understated, but only recently have scholars been looking into the presence and significance of animals within the canon. Readers will quickly find—without having to do extensive research—that the plays are teeming with animals! In this Handbook, Karen Raber and Holly Dugan delve deep into Shakespeare's World to illuminate and understand the use of animals in his span of work. This volume supplies a valuable resource, offering a broad and thorough grounding in the many ways animal references and the appearance of actual animals in the plays can be interpreted. It provides a thorough overview; demonstrates rigorous, original research; and charts new frontiers in the field through a broad variety of contributions from an international group of well-known and respected scholars.

PART 1

Animal Metaphors

History, Theory, Representation

Shakespeare’s animal metaphors often raise more questions than answers. Was there an actual bear involved in early productions of A Winter’s Tale,and if so how did they care for it and mitigate the risks it may have posed? What do Beatrice and Katherine mean when they claim they’re doomed to “lead apes in hell”? To whom is Hamlet referring when he tells Gertrude to be “like the famous ape”? Other animal metaphors in Shakespeare’s works remain frighteningly familiar, such as Iago’s racist description of Othello as a Barbary horse or Demetrius description of Lavinia as “a dainty doe” just before he rapes her. In these instances, Shakespeare’s animal metaphors attach to characters differently, connecting animal bodies with human ones in powerful ways through allusions to nature and its structures of power.

We begin with Rebecca Bach’s “Avian Shakespeare,” which argues for the importance of attending to historical differences in our approach to animals by looking closely at Shakespeare’s avian metaphors. Bach reminds us that early modern men and women lived intimately with birds; their flight patterns, mating calls, and colorful shapes provided a rich web of associations for articulating human emotion and meaning. Shakespeare’s avian metaphors are not unique, but rather trace a differently oriented animal world than the one that we are used to inhabiting. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s theory of “nature culture,” Bach investigates the many bird metaphors that appear in Shakespeare’s plays and finds that Shakespeare’s avian metaphors create a world in which nature is culture. Although, as Latour argues, we have never been modern, Bach reminds us that we have always been avian.

Next, Daniel Brayton wades into “Shakespeare’s Fishponds,” exploring the reality of the pisciculture that surrounded early modern London’s theater district. Brayton argues that Southwark’s fishponds shaped metaphors about other industries in that realm, including plays, animal-baiting, and sex work. The “stews” of Southwark contributed a catch-all term for describing sordid behaviors; fish metaphors provided important codes for navigating this realm, both for those who lived and worked nearby and for those visiting the neighborhood, hoping to see a play, while snacking on oysters, or to participate in other activities.

Perhaps Shakespeare’s best-known (and most controversial) animal metaphors are his canine ones. In “I am the dog,” Brian Alkemeyer argues that Shakespeare’s canine references index historical shifts in pet cultures: rather than debating whether Shakespeare did or did not love dogs, as have generations of critics, Alkemeyer instead argues that the grounds for this debate invite us to account instead for the profound historical shift in human animal relationships that occurred in the early modern period. Alkemeyer explores how canine fidelity migrated from a quality with negative associations that marked dogs as pitiful and pathetic towards a positive one that defined them as “man’s best friend.” As Alkemeyer shows, for such a trait to be valued, dogs had to be “reinvented as exemplary beings,” providing a new shaping paradigm for the relations between servants and masters.

Crystal Bartolovich shares Alkemeyer’s focus on dogs and continues to interrogate the animal’s position of privilege within contemporary human–animal relationships. In “Learning from Crab,” Bartolovich takes up the case of Shakespeare’s most famous animal actor in order to explore the limits of Donna Haraway’s theory of instrumentality. Humans’ ethical use of animals—the structures we create to care for and bond with animals in our care—can obscure a more global analysis of oppression. Bartolovich reframes questions about pet culture through an analysis of the social structures of capitalism, exploring the limits of posthumanist thinking within critical animal studies. Her argument, like Alkemeyer’s, reminds us there may be nothing “natural” about loving dogs; furthermore, she argues that such affective bonds may limit our ability to move beyond “local” or micro-historical instances of human–animal interaction and towards a more planetary model of thinking.

Finally, Karl Steel broadens the grounds of analysis yet more forcefully, returning us to the questions with which we began this segment: how might we use Shakespeare’s animal metaphors to understand the larger issues of history, representation, and theory that shape the field? Shakespeare, Steel argues, may not be the best author to do so. Because they were made to generate human-inflected meanings, Shakespeare’s animal metaphors, Steel provocatively argues, seem predictable, especially when compared to the wide array of fabulous creatures in premodern literature. Steel queries whether we value Shakespeare’s animal metaphors for their similarity to ours, rather than their alterity. Whereas Shakespeare’s animals may seem boring, Shakespeare’s beastly metaphors are “terrifying” for the way they attach to humans who embrace difference in order to attack conventions of sociality and community. In concert with Bartolovich, Steel’s essay contends that critical animal studies must include an analysis of systems of oppression that constrain both humans and nonhumans. For Steel, the term “beast” does this best in Shakespeare’s works, whereas his “animal” remains an indistinguishable plural.

1
Avian Shakespeare

Rebecca Ann Bach

Looking for birds in Shakespeare leads one to discover the many ways Renaissance humans lived intimately with birds. They lived so intimately with the avian world that they saw the humans around them in terms of and in relation to birds, a bit like the way that some of today’s American humans may see humans in terms of and in relation to dogs and cats. Actual birds also occupied human imaginations and human language in ways that are unfamiliar to many of us, even those of us who imagine, speak, tweet, and instagram in terms of and in relation to dogs and cats. We do not, after all, write using dog body parts in the way that all Renaissance writers used feathers to express themselves. Readers and playgoers in the twenty-first century may skip over many Shakespearean references to birds easily, either because we do not understand them or because they lack significance for us. In this chapter, I hope to show that understanding the avian references in Shakespeare’s plays explains aspects of his human culture, and what Bruno Latour would call his “nature-culture,” that we otherwise might miss. Elsewhere, I have argued extensively for the pervasiveness and significance of birds in the Renaissance world of creaturely bodies, a world where all bodies were subject to God and were seen as similar in their mortality.¹ This nature-culture, in which humans as a whole were not categorically different than other mortals, is the world Shakespeare inhabited. Thus, his avian references are triply significant at least: they show us what the avian world looked like to humans; they show us the lives of birds inside Renaissance “nature-culture”; and they also show us the many ways that human life was conceived of and negotiated in relation to bird life.

Just as Renaissance humans understood that human life was essentially hierarchical, they read avian life as hierarchical.² The bird hierarchy reflected and encoded hierarchies in human life—in texts, commoners were called geese, and noblemen called themselves eagles. But the bird hierarchy was material in ways that human hierarchies were not. In a world that believed in and valued God’s all-seeing eye and angels with anatomical bird wings, the way that birds like eagles and falcons tower over others and most birds fly could manifest their superiority physically³; and this informed how birds were understood and valued. Renaissance humans knew what different birds ate: some hunted and ate other birds, some ate only dead flesh, and some were eaten by humans and other birds. Humans, who ate pigeons, chickens, geese, and ducks and who hunted some birds with the cooperation of hawks, easily thought about their own human hierarchies in avian terms, and their references are alive with the material interactions of humans and birds.

This kind of knowledge and thought about avian hierarchy appears in Richard III when Lord Hastings comments to Richard on the jailing of Richard’s brother Clarence: “More pity that the eagle should be mewed / While kites and buzzards prey at liberty” (1.1.132–33). Hastings is responding to Richard’s suggestion that the Queen’s brothers are responsible for Clarence’s arrest. Hastings calls Clarence “the eagle,” who will be caged, “mewed,” like an elite person might cage a hunting falcon. Clarence is going to be jailed by his brother, the King, while the Queen’s brothers, characterized by Hastings as lesser carrion birds, “kites and buzzards,” hunt freely. Hastings’s metaphorical avian world, in which some birds fly freely while some are caged by humans, nods to a host of Renaissance human hierarchies. In Hastings’s speech, Clarence’s caging marks him as more significant than the Queen’s brothers, not just because Hastings calls him an eagle, the highest ranging of birds, but also because only high-ranking birds like elite falcons were mewed, and, therefore, only high-ranking humans are characterized as mewed. “Kites” also hunt, like the more elite falcons that elite humans mewed and hunted with, but they were seen as virtually untrainable by humans, and thus, they were characterized by humans as hurtful predators, akin in Clarence’s speech to a buzzard, who eats only dead creatures. The OED tells us that, from the Medieval period on, “buzzard” signified “a worthless, stupid, or ignorant person,” and a kite signified, figuratively, “a person who preys upon others, a rapacious person.”⁴ Indeed, Shakespeare uses “kite” this way when Lear snaps back at Goneril, “Detested kite, thou liest!” (King Lear 1.4.229). In the Renaissance, falcons were to kites as nobles were to commoners and other people who might be despised. Reducing Goneril to a “kite” is a status insult as well as a moral one.

The OED characterizes the usage of kite for a rapacious person as figurative, but Shakespeare also often refers to birds actually feasting on human bodies. In Shakespeare’s plays, kites kill other birds, and they also eat corpses. For example, Macbeth complains bitterly that, if Banquo can rise from the dead, “monuments”—graves and vaults that hold human bodies—will become “the maws of kites” (3.4.72–74). The OED explains that “maw” used to signify generally as “the stomach of an animal or of a person.” Macbeth worries about kites feeding on people, and he was created as a character in a world where people’s bodies were believed to have stomachs like kites’. In a similar reference to kites eating men, Coriolanus mocks Aufidius’s men by claiming, when they ask where he lives, that he lives “I’th’city of kites and crows” (4.5.41). He means that he lives on a battlefield...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part 1 Animal Metaphors: History, Theory, Representation
• Part 2 Scales of Meaning
• Part 3 Animal Worlds/Animal Language
• Part 4 Training, Performance, and Living with Animals
• Part 5 Animal Boundaries and Identities
• Appendix
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index