Birds and Other Creatures in Renaissance Literature

Shakespeare, Descartes, and Animal Studies

Rebecca Ann Bach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138673007
• eBook ISBN: 9781317203674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores how humans in the Renaissance lived with, attended to, and considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically. However, post-Cartesian readings of Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature have misunderstood Renaissance hierarchical creaturely relations, including human relations. Using critical animal studies work and new materialist theory, Bach argues that attending closely to creatures and objects in texts by Shakespeare and other writers exposes this unequal world and the use and abuse of creatures, including people. The book also adds significantly to animal studies by showing how central bird sociality and voices were to Renaissance human culture, with many believing that birds were superior to some humans in song, caregiving, and companionship. Bach shows how Descartes, a central figure in the transition to modern ideas about creatures, lived isolated from humans and other creatures and denied ancient knowledge about other creatures' minds, especially bird minds. As significantly, Bach shows how and why Descartes' ideas appealed to human grandiosity. Asking how Renaissance categorizations of creatures differ so much from modern classifications, and why those modern classifications have shaped so much animal studies work, this book offers significant new readings of Shakespeare's and other Renaissance texts. It will contribute to a range of fields, including Renaissance literature, history, animal studies, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.

1 Feathers, Wings, and Souls

If happinesse be in the season, or in the Clymate, how much happier then are Birdes then Men, who can change the Climate, and accompanie, and enjoy the same season ever.

(John Donne¹)

Oh that I had wings like a dove!
For then I would fly away, and be at rest

(Psalms 55.6²)

Birds were ubiquitous in the English Renaissance creaturely world. As I have shown, they feature often in Renaissance descriptions of life, of people, and of people’s behavior, and Renaissance bird references tend to be specific about particular kinds of birds, parts of birds, bird behaviors, and human/bird relations. Symbolic and metaphorical references to birds in English Renaissance writing assume this specific knowledge, and those references reveal how deeply embedded such knowledge was in human discourses. Francis Bacon begins his 1613 essay “Of Followers and Friends” with the sentence, “Costly followers are not to be liked, lest while a man maketh his traine longer, hee make his Wings shorter.”³ Unlike today, the word “train” had multiple bird-related meanings from falconry and other bird keeping. The word could signify “[a] live bird attached to a line, or a lame and disabled bird, given as an enticement to a young hawk during its training” or “the tail or tail feathers of a bird, esp. when long and trailing, as the elongated tail coverts of a peacock”.⁴ In Falconry discourse, “train” could mean “the tail of a hawk.”⁵ Bacon seems to be referring to a peacock’s tail feathers. This meaning of “train” might have been obvious to Bacon’s readers since it appears without explanation in his and other texts. For example, in Shakespeare’s 1Henry VI, Joan compares the English Lord Talbot to a “Peacock” and declares that the French will “pull his Plumes, and take away his Trayne.”⁶ Bacon’s essay “Of Wisdome for a Mans selfe” begins with the wisdom of “an ant.” When Bacon revised it, he added a new paragraph, full of references to many creatures, including rats, a badger, and crocodiles. Bacon ends the revised essay by describing the foolishness of self-loving men who “become in the end Themselves sacrifices to the inconstancy of Fortune, whose wings they thought by their Self-Wisdome to have pinioned.”⁷ The symbolic Fortune invoked by Bacon here is a winged goddess, and Bacon can assume that most readers understand that wings have different kinds of feathers, including the pinion, or primary, feathers.⁸ Men, he claims, are deeply mistaken when they believe that they, rather than God, can control the flight of Fortune. Bacon’s assumptions about readers’ bird-related knowledge resemble Shakespeare’s and, I would argue, most people’s in the Renaissance.

The ubiquity of bird reference in Shakespeare was noted in the mid-nineteenth century in a series of articles published by James Edmund Harting in a journal he edited, The Zoologist; Harting later revised and collected those articles in The Ornithology of Shakespeare (1871). In that book, Harting claims for Shakespeare a “special knowledge of Ornithology” and says,

The use which he has made of this knowledge, throughout his works, in depicting virtue and vice in their true colours, in pointing out lessons of industry, patience, and mercy, and in showing the profit to be derived from a study of natural objects, is everywhere apparent.⁹

Harting writes as a post-Cartesian scientist, reading what he sees in Shakespeare as empirical observation; he assumes that Shakespeare lived, as he lives, in what Bruno Latour calls “a society gazing out at … a natural world.”¹⁰ Sixty or so years after Harting published his book, Caroline F. E. Spurgeon published her famous monograph Shakespeare’s Imagery and what it tells us. In that volume, Spurgeon observes that “[o]f the large animal group, the outstanding point is the great number drawn from birds. If we except the human body, its parts, movements, and senses, Shakespeare’s images from birds form by far the largest section drawn from any single class of objects.”¹¹ Harting (1841–1928) was a solicitor turned naturalist who authored such books as The Birds of Middlesex and worked to revive falconry and to preserve wild birds in England;¹² Spurgeon (1869–1942), a Chaucerian primarily, was the first female English professor in Great Britain. Although Spurgeon’s and Harting’s overall projects differ markedly, for both writers, birds are “objects”: for Harting, part of a set of “natural objects” to be studied and preserved, and for Spurgeon, members of a “single class of objects” that Shakespeare draws his imagery from. Both, I would argue, were mistaken about Shakespeare’s relationship to birds. Shakespeare did not have “a special knowledge of Ornithology,” a science born in the late eighteenth century. Shakespeare and his contemporaries did not live with birds as objects; instead they lived intimately related to birds and identifying with birds, thinking of their own imaginations, voices, and souls in terms of birds.

Tellingly, I think, more contemporary scholars have been most comfortable paying close attention to the pervasive bird references in Shakespeare when women are compared to birds.¹³ Perhaps the unmistakable falconry imagery in The Taming of the Shrew accounts for this, but that comfort might also come from living in a world in which birds and women are still associated at times, at least in the realm of dead metaphors such as “chick” and “bird.” And the word “chicken” still functions, again as a dead metaphor, to describe cowardly, and therefore effeminate, men. These terms derived originally from an older world in which chickens were part of most households, but in our world they barely conjure actual bird bodies.¹⁴ In the Renaissance, “chick” was a diminutive endearment, the pet name that Prospero calls Ariel when he bids him farewell.¹⁵ This usage makes the word more akin to today’s pan-gender usage of the word “baby,” and the functional kinship of “chick” to “baby” suggests the intimacy between chickens and people in Renaissance households. “Chicken” and “chick” were used as names for loved children, as we see in Macbeth when Macduff mourns the killings of all his “pretty Chickens, and their Damme / At one fell swoope.”¹⁶ Writing about the numerous dead metaphors related to the human body that Spurgeon took note of, Francis Barker says, “The proliferation in the dramatic, philosophical and political texts of the period of corporeal images which have become dead metaphors for us—by a structured forgetting rather than by innocent historical wastage—are the indices of a social order in which the body ha[d] a central and irreducible place”¹⁷ Today’s dead metaphors relating to birds can be read in a similar manner; they can point us to the related “structured forgetting” of the “central and irreducible place” of birds in England’s “social order.”

Today’s dead metaphors generally compare women, not masculine men, to birds.¹⁸ Renaissance English, however, does not limit bird terms to women and effeminate men. Instead, men were as likely to describe themselves and other men as types of birds that denoted masculinity and power, birds such as elite hawks, eagles, and wild geese. In the world in which Prospero first called Ariel “chick,” birds were essential to human life and human identity, and we can learn about human life and texts by attending to birds and the specificity of bird reference in Renaissance texts. This chapter will consider, first, one of what were a number of material bird-human connections in the Renaissance: the quill in hand. Quills were part of a culture of writing that related writing and the imagination to flight, and when writing with quills, humans consciously took on the powers they attributed to creatures who could actually fly. Quills were most commonly made of goose feathers, and as we have seen and will see, geese signify multiply in Shakespeare. In this chapter’s second section a close reading of a dialogue in Romeo and Juliet in which geese are prominent actors demonstrates the fruitfulness of attention to geese. Attention to the geese in that dialogue also shows how the distinctions between wild and domestic geese mattered in the Renaissance, and how wild geese could figure elite masculinity. Finally, in this chapter, material bird bodies will reappear in a consideration of the spiritual and medical use of pigeons in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Donne’s autobiographical text demonstrates the identification of birds and humans in a particularly striking material way.

“Their Conceits Have Wings” or Quills Make Humans Fly¹⁹

In Renaissance England and Europe, writing practices connected writing with birds, specifically with bird wings and beaks. The links are both material and metaphorical, and they point in many directions: to the ubiquity of birds in early seventeenth-century England, to the easy distinctions humans made between kinds of birds, and to the powers of birds that humans wished to emulate: voice, flight, vision, and aerial attack. The bird-identity of Renaissance pens is also an instance of how fundamental geese were in the English Renaissance. Writing involved humans’ use of many kinds of birds, and writing practices and ideas about writing invoke distinctions between kinds of birds and also kinds of people. Moreover, these distinctions were related to one another. Writing with a quill was a feature of a world where some people and some birds flew higher and killed more effectively.

In the Renaissance, pens were fashioned from the particular feathers of particular birds, most often of geese. Juan Luis Vives’s School Dialogues (1539) feature a writing teacher who begins his instruction with the bird-identity of the writing instrument: “We write with goose quills, though some use hen’s quills.”²⁰ The Venetian writing-master Giovannantonio T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Texts
• Introduction: Inequality for All
• 1 Feathers, Wings, and Souls
• 2 The Creaturely Continuum in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• 3 The Lively Creaturely/Object World of The Rape of Lucrece
• 4 Falstaff and “the Modern Constitution”
• 5 The Winter’s Tale’s Pedestrian and Elite Creatures
• 6 Human Grandiosity/Human Responsibility
• Bibliography
• Name and Author Index
• Subject Index