The Eight Animals in Shakespeare; or, Before the Human

Abstract

The poverty of the single-digit sum in my title, I trust, raises a brow. After all, the ubiquity of those we conventionally shepherd into the enclosure of the term animals stands out as a feature of both Shakespearean material and early modern texts generally. The animal footprints in this archive result from the frequency with which early moderns encountered living and butchered animals in their daily routines. Hardly an urban, rural, or domestic scene was painted without them. For illustration, Jan van der Heyden's cityscape of Amsterdam's main public square dramatizes the civic visibility of dogs and horses (alongside the town hall and the New Church) and muddies any distinction between beasts of burden and creatures of leisure—especially beneath that vast early modern sky (see next page). In a prescient intimation of modernity, Thomas More's Utopia imagined a noncitizen, butchering class performing its labors, deemed too brutal for citizens to witness, out of sight (75). Early modern humans had more contact with more animals than most of us now do. For a species with weak ears and a terrible nose, out of sight is out of mind.

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