The Shakespearean International Yearbook

Volume 15: Special Section, Shakespeare and the Human

Tiffany Werth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780367668709
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351963435
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This eighth volume of The Shakespearean International Yearbook presents a special section on 'European Shakespeares', proceeding from the claim that Shakespeare's literary craft was not just native English or British, but was filtered and fashioned through a Renaissance awareness that needs to be recognized as European, and that has had effects and afterlives across the Continent. Guest editors Ton Hoenselaars and Clara Calvo have constructed this section to highlight both how the spread of 'Shakespeare' throughout Europe has brought together the energies of a wide variety of European cultures across several centuries, and how the inclusion of Shakespeare in European culture has been not only a European but also a world affair. The Shakespearean International Yearbook continues to provide an annual survey of important issues and developments in contemporary Shakespeare studies. Contributors to this issue come from the US and the UK, Spain, Switzerland and South Africa, Canada, The Netherlands, India, Portugal, Greece, France, and Hungary. In addition to the section on European Shakespeares, this volume includes essays on the genre of romance, issues of character, and other topics.

1 Introduction

Shakespeare and the human

Tiffany Jo Werth

Human

Shakespeare was a human being. Out of all the contested Wills—who wrote Shakespeare? Was he a he? Was he a Catholic? Republican? Radical? Feminist? Queer?—only his ontological identity as human garners critical consensus.¹ Where critics differ on Shakespeare’s humanness is a matter of degree. For some, Shakespeare not only was human; he is the quintessence of the human. He “made up” or even “invented” the human.² For others, he’s more than human, an aggregate, a “hybrid of persons,” an assemblage recognized, made famous, by name.³ Like the corporate boast of the replicant producing Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (“more human than human”), Shakespeare has become the Voight-Kampff test in debates to distinguish “the human,” and its etymological relatives, humanism, and the humanities.⁴

Shakespeare’s centrality to contemporary thinking about “the human,” humanism, and indeed his place within humanities’ curricula, likely would have surprised him. It certainly would have astonished Ben Jonson, who fancied himself the premier English humanist. The database Lexicons of Early Modern English, for instance, records no entries dated from Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564–1616) for “humanism,” and a “humanist” in this period refers more narrowly to one who studies Greek or Latin.⁵ As Ben Jonson famously wrote, Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” hardly the qualifications for a pre-eminent early modern “humanist.”⁶ In period terms, as defined by Thomas Elyot’s Dictionary (1538), a “homo” was a “living creature subject to death, and endued with reason.”⁷ Shakespeareans have been returning to these period terms, peeling back nineteenth-century assumptions regarding humanism and the Renaissance to recognize that, as a “living creature” amongst God’s creation, the early modern human was more “indistinct,” less “human,” and only one actor on a crowded creaturely stage: “delegated, mediated, distributed, mandated,” as Bruno Latour puts it.⁸

Shakespeare’s humanness as a trope with distinctive resonance for contemporary critics might be better understood, as this volume argues, by correspondence, a criterion of sympathy. We can only conjecture what Shakespeare thought of himself as a human, so as a case in point, we might look to prospero, a character from The Tempest who has been sometimes aligned with Shakespeare.⁹ For our purposes, whether prospero is or is not a stand-in for Shakespeare matters less than what, in the world of the play, distinguishes him as a “human” inhabitant on an island populated with nonhuman living creatures. When prospero, himself human although endowed with more-than-human powers, chides Ariel, he reminds the spirit how, after the death of the “foul witch,” Sycorax, the island “then” was “not honoured with / A human shape” “save for the son that she did litter here,” the “freckled whelp,” caliban.¹⁰ Prospero’s language grudgingly acknowledges Sycorax and Caliban to be of “human shape.” Yet his word choice retracts that human honor even as it concedes it: calling Caliban a “whelp” from a “litter” animalizes him and his “dam” (1.2.285). Prospero’s reluctance to categorize Caliban and his “blue-eyed hag” mother as fully human, even as he grants they are, raises two implications for how the play regards what it means to have “human shape” (1.2.271). First, the ever-hierarchical prospero privileges (“honours”) human form, categorizing or casting it in opposition to an animal and monstrous other. Later, however, Prospero recasts what it means to be “one of their kind”—by “their” referring to the Neapolitans—when Ariel points out Prospero’s treatment of the shipwrecked men, saying that he would feel “tender” towards their plight “were I human” (5.1.23, 19, 20). Prospero hears the rebuke; the nonhuman must remind the human to be humane. Relenting, prospero recalls his human kinship, sympathizes with the bewildered, shipwrecked Neapolitans’ passions, and leaves off his vengeance: “My charms I’ll break” (5.1.31). As so aptly illustrated by the stage prompt that locates him aloft directing the lost nobles wandering the isle, Prospero is sometimes more than, sometimes less than, human. He slips into, out of, below, and above a human register and thus enacts a frequent shift in perspective consonant with the fifty-four variants of “human” (humanely, humanity, inhuman) used in Shakespeare’s texts.¹¹ That is, for Shakespeare, “the human” exists not absolutely, or even pre-eminently, but relationally.

And the

I turn next to a consideration of the all-important words that connect the journal title’s two nouns: “and the.” Here “and” connects a proper and a definite noun; “the” marks out a singularity in one noun (“human”) that functions as a collective, a broad category within which the proper noun may be grouped. The phrasing thus articulates a grammatical weighing apparatus. That is, Shakespeare may be human but the conjunction and definite article ask that we consider how the two nouns interact. This linguistic balance calls to mind the instrument symbolized by the zodiacal sign of Libra, a pair of scales. Engaging this instrument as a conceptual framework, this volume asks how might we “scale” (balance, weigh, measure) “Shakespeare” of, with, and against, “the human”? For, like Prospero, Shakespeare has been read as equally more- and less-than human.

Reconceptualizing the relationship between Shakespeare and the human in terms of a “scale” of nature, or what Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici calls a “scale of creatures,” gives us a different set of criteria for thinking about “the human” than the more critically common phrasings of a “chain of being” or even a ladder of life.¹² While scala in Latin means ladder, in English the word “scale” encompasses multiple connotations. In addition to its sense as a balance or instrument for weighing, it would also have invoked for its early modern audience things as seemingly disparate as a drinking cup, the horny membrane of fish, reptiles, some mammals, and siege ladders.¹³ This volume explores how these different etymologies for “scale” pressure our contemporary rendering of what “the human” entails.

As a system for natural classification, the Latin scala naturae, “scale of nature,” dates from Aristotle. The centrality of this classical categorization of nature, here visually illustrated in Ramon Llull’s reprinted Liber de ascensu, et descensu intellectus—Lapis, Flamma, Planta, Brutum, Homo, Coelum, Angelus, Deus—has shaped modern scholars’ attempts to classify how early modern humans saw and placed themselves in relationship to the world around them (see Figure 1.1). In the sixteenth century, this classically inherited scala became the subject of renewed scrutiny. What historian of science Brian Ogilvie calls a “culture of describing”—a marked fascination with cataloguing, organizing, and mapping the natural world—recalibrated the criterion of classification.¹⁴

Figure 1.1 Detail from Ramon Llull’s Liber de ascensv, et descensv intellectus. Valentiae impressus anno 1512 (Palma Mallorca: Ex typis Michaelis Cerdá, & Antich, & Michaelis Amorós, 1744). This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California

Popularized as an era where the ruling idea is that of a “great chain of being” by scholars such as Arthur Lovejoy and E. M. W. Tillyard, who emphasized its representation of order and hierarchy, it became a critically influential “world picture.”¹⁵ While the assertion of a Renaissance “world view,” a universal order (Lovejoy and Tillyard) or “episteme” (Foucault) has attracted criticism, a reappraisal of such arguments might shift perspective in order to nuance modern critical discussion.¹⁶ In particular, this volume proposes that we shift metaphors from a “chain of being” in favor of a “scale of creatures.” Although visual illustrations (such as those in Didacus Valdes’ Rhetorica Christiana (1579) or Robert Fludd’s Integrae naturae Speculum (1617)) depict the human linked by chain to God above and to the animals below, the period’s verbal language varies in its depiction for how humans placed themselves in relationship to the natural world.¹⁷ In the rare instance when that relationship is characterized as a “chayne,” the emphasis falls on what the Church of England bishop, and later Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot calls a “strong dependance” whereby God “coupled all creatures” so that man, after the Fall, “hath not that soueraignty in all degrees.”¹⁸ Named as “the vast chain of being” by pope in his Essay on Man, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century texts more frequently invoke the Latin-derived scala naturae as exemplified by Milton’s Raphael, who refers not to a chain of being but rather to “the scale of nature.”¹⁹

Conceptually, “scale” avoids some of the static implications inherent to words like a “model” or “world picture” for/and of nature. Although originally a “model” indicated a set of plans for a building, and from modulus a unit of measure, its attributed sense as an adjective connoting something exemplary or an ideal and complete pattern, makes it, like a “world picture” suggestive of a stable, well-ordered, state.²⁰ The metaphor of a ladder or chain, moreover, in English usage represents, as Gabriel Egan has argued, a “ranking order.”²¹ Although as Egan notes the “chain” model implies a tension between the links above and below, as a concept it tends to limit relationships between categories in either vertical or horizontal proximity.²² The metaphor makes it more difficult to conceptualize hybridity or connection between seemingly distant links on the chain, such as human and shell, or rock and divinity. “Scale,” by contrast, in its English context, countenances connection, or, to use the early modern term, “sympathy,” between and across disparate categories as much as order, degree, separation, and hierarchy.²³ The two metaphors comprise different ways of ordering the world: one based on notions of wholeness, hierarchical arrangement, and stability; the other based on principles of dynamic correspondence and division. By reading the scala naturae as a macrocosm/microcosm, where sympathetic correspondences, attractions, and aversions might connect—or dissolve—categories, a more variegated nature comes into view.²⁴ Indeed, a closer look at the various connotations for “scale” affords a better view into the complex tensions and frequent contradictions of early modern attitude toward “the human,” and her or his environs, than does a “chain of being.” The multivalent meanings of “scale” prompt a re-evaluation of the relationship between the categories, and place, of various living and nonliving forms, making it easier to see how categories might bend, jump, or “swerve” beyond their neighbors. As the Table of Contents demonstrates, this issue invokes the classical taxonomic categories in its premise but advocates reading them as a dynamic scale rather than a fixed chain, or even ladder, of degrees.

To “scale,” within the sixteenth-cen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• SPECIAL ISSUE: SHAKESPEARE AND THE HUMAN
• 1 Introduction: Shakespeare and the Human
• 2 Airy Spirits: Winds, Bodies, and Ecological Force in Early Modern England
• 3 Humans: Exceptional Humans, Human Exceptionalism, and the Shape of Things to Come
• 4 Birds: Shakespeare's Tweets: A Choir
• 5 Hybrids: Animal Law and the Actaeon Myth in Titus Andronicus
• 6 Fleece: The Craziest Transport: Fleecing the Non/human Merchant of Venice
• 7 Bees: The Shakespearean Hive and the Virtues of Honey
• 8 Plants: Shakespeare's Mulberry: Eco-Materialism and "Living On"
• 9 Water: Absorption, Uncontainment, and Cleopatra's Barge
• 10 Shells: Pericles and the Fantasy of Shell-Dwelling
• 11 Rocks: "Sure and Firm-Set Earth": Shakespeare, Stone, and Structuration
• 12 Tail: "Poore wretch ... laid all naked on the bare earth": Human Negative Exceptionalism Among the Humanists
• Notes on Contributors
• Index