Renaissance Beasts

Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures

Erica Fudge, Erica Fudge

• Éditeur: University of Illinois Press
• Année: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252091339
• Sujet: Literatur
• Sous-sujet: Literaturkritik

Animals, as Lévi-Strauss wrote, are good to think with. This collection addresses and reassesses the variety of ways in which animals were used and thought about in Renaissance culture, challenging contemporary as well as historic views of the boundaries and hierarchies humans presume the natural world to contain.Taking as its starting point the popularity of speaking animals in sixteenth-century literature and ending with the decline of the imperial Ménagerie during the French Revolution, Renaissance Beasts uses the lens of human-animal relationships to view issues as diverse as human status and power, diet, civilization and the political life, religion and anthropocentrism, spectacle and entertainment, language, science and skepticism, and domestic and courtly cultures.Within these pages scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss numerous kinds of texts--literary, dramatic, philosophical, religious, political--by writers including Calvin, Montaigne, Sidney, Shakespeare, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke. Through analysis of these and other writers, Renaissance Beasts uncovers new and arresting interpretations of Renaissance culture and the broader social assumptions glimpsed through views on matters such as pet ownership and meat consumption. Renaissance Beasts is certainly about animals, but of the many species discussed, it is ultimately humankind that comes under the greatest scrutiny.

1

Unpicking the Seam: Talking Animals and Reader Pleasure in Early Modern Satire

Kathryn Perry

Whether they are apocalyptically angry or merely scornful, satires can be recognized by the nature of their engagement with readers. They work toward constructing an alliance between the satirist and the like-minded reader, distancing the reader from the target under scrutiny. Regardless of the seriousness of the subject matter, this alliance typically depends on the satirist’s ability to give the reader pleasure as well as to generate feelings of disgust, bitterness, or alienation. The pleasure taken in satire is not simply the pleasure of laughter; it is more fundamentally the pleasure of unruly fantasy, which might incorporate the manipulation of representations that point to the world outside the text or the dream of triumphing over an opponent through the power of rhetoric.

The satirist’s interests, defined in this way, can be powerfully served by zoomorphism, by configuring satire as what Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior call an animal act, in which the human shares space and consciousness with the beast.¹ Early modern English culture was saturated with animal metaphors and personae, and early modern English satire was compulsively zoomorphic. This could take a variety of forms. In the exchange of invective or abuse, the most direct form of satire, the target might be called an animal; the satirist might set out to expose the beasts within apparently civilized human society; or the satirical text, in the form of a fable or a longer, episodic narrative, might use talking animals as characters. In this chapter I discuss the first two categories, but my main interest is in talking animals and the nature of the pleasures early modern readers may have taken in them. Investigating talking animals as a source of pleasure is one way to find out how these chimerical literary and cultural constructions, surprisingly common in early modern satire, work.

The fundamental assumption on which this chapter is based is that the principal pleasure to be had from any talking animal text is the game of playing with recognized animal attributes, making apt, unlikely, or outrageous correspondences with human types or behaviors. The pleasure for authors is in reimagining the correspondences between the human and the animal; the pleasure for readers is in detecting them. The game may be ahistorical, but the cluster of attributes, often incompatible, associated with each species is historically inflected. Moreover, the attributes of a “rhetorical” animal, to borrow Harriet Ritvo’s term, have very little in common with its “material” counterpart.² Early modern representations of the sparrow as lecherous or the pelican as self-sacrificing are no more unreasonable than the way the hippopotamus (responsible for more human deaths every year than any other African animal) is represented in contemporary children’s culture as comic and benign.

From the beginning of the twentieth century, talking animals have been absorbed into the world of children’s literature, film, and television, where they reign supreme. Talking animal texts occupied a different, though possibly analogous position in the hierarchy of early modern literature: rather than being set apart in a separate literary sphere, they were ranked at the bottom of the literary ladder and labeled “low.” In both the early modern and modern periods, there is an insistence on the simplicity, triviality, and transparency of talking animals and their suitability for innocent readers. The most common form taken by early modern talking animal texts was animal fables, which could be used to instruct the young and socially subordinate, doctrinally (via homilies) or grammatically (via Latin primers).³ Talking animals in these texts sugar the instructive pill; they exist to entertain. However, talking animals are unruly constructions, and “low” can easily become riotous or scatological, in the tradition of carnival formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin. As we shall see, Bakhtin’s idea of carnival makes sense of many of the attributes of talking animals: his concept of the grotesque body, for example, is recognizable as the animal body or the human body in its animal aspect.⁴

The simplicity or “lowness” attributed to talking animal texts can become a specialized kind of pleasure when readers assume talking animal texts to contain encoded representations of recognizable and powerful individuals.⁵ In these cases, the supposed simplicity or “lowness” of the animal vehicle is often remarked upon; it simultaneously attracts and deflects penetrating readings. In his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534), written in the Tower, Sir Thomas More puts the tale of the Ass and his overscrupulous conscience into the mouth of Mother Mawd. The doubly humble form of the tale—an animal fable told by a woman servant—is protective coloring, discouraging unfriendly readers from taking it seriously. At the same time, More draws attention to the hidden gravity of the tale, which is clearly a commentary on his own predicament: “she was wont … to tell us that were children many childish tales / but as plinius sayth that there is no boke lightely so bad, but that some good thyng a man may pyk out therof / so thinke I that there is al most no tale so folysh, but that yet in one mater or other, to some purpose it may hap to serve.”⁶

In Mother Hubberds Tale (1591) Edmund Spenser adopts the same device as More, putting a talking animal story into the mouth of an old woman. Spenser insists on the “base” style and “meane” matter of the tale,⁷ but his protestations of innocence and triviality were not believed by officialdom or by the majority of readers at the time, who assumed Mother Hubberds Tale to be an encoded attack on Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief minister. A letter written by Sir Thomas Tresham soon after the publication of Mother Hubberds Tale confirms that it was suppressed by the authorities and suggests the frisson of pleasure to be had from a dangerous jest. Tresham writes that “Tales, I meane no Tayles, are nowe on the soden in greate request; especiallie mother Hubburds tale. … The whole discourse of that ould weoman ys (as I heare reported) to showe by what channce the apes did loose their tayles. Thowghe this be a jest, yett is itt taken in suche earnest, that the booke is by Superior awthoritie called in.”⁸ The condemnation of writers of beast satire by moralists such as T.B. for “girding” or gibing at “the greatest personages of all estates and callings under the fables of savage beasts” tends to suggest that many contemporary readers may have taken pleasure in the subversive possibilities of the form.⁹

The body of this chapter amplifies the issues raised in the introduction, beginning with a discussion of how the boundaries between the human and the animal—the boundaries that talking animals breach—were prescribed in the early modern period. In practice, the boundaries often collapsed in the exchange of invective or the creation of monsters. The chapter continues with a closer look at carnival and the business of “girding” at authority, and at the ways in which the body of a thinking animal can become the satirist’s subject. It concludes with speculations on how the pleasures of talking animals can be understood at the moment of reading and on how the seam between the human and the animal is unpicked.

BOUNDARIES

The ways in which relationships between the human and the animal could be known and represented are illuminated by Michel Foucault’s definition, in The Order of Things, of a Renaissance episteme grounded in the assumption that the world is governed by laws of adjacency, emulation, analogy, and sympathy. The human being is the point where all things meet: “There does exist, however, in this space … one particularly privileged point: it is saturated with analogies. … This point is man: he stands in proportion to the heavens, just as he does to animals and plants, and as he does also to the earth, to metals, to stalactites or storms.”¹⁰

The natural world, including animals, was held to correspond with the human world through the inexhaustible and orderly play of signs, demonstrating similitude and dissimilitude with bewildering variety. The history of human and animal relationships constructed by Keith Thomas offers evidence for the orthodoxy of this model. He describes theologians preaching a doctrine of human ascendancy and uniqueness. Animals were believed to serve humans discursively, as well as physically, providing a vocabulary and set of categories with which human qualities could be described and classified. Rather than being detached from the human world, the natural world was understood to be “redolent with human analogy and symbolic meaning.”¹¹ The encyclopedic folios on the animal world produced by Edward Topsell at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in which he synthesizes contemporary knowledge about animals from the works of authorities on natural history, philosophy, and religion, are a monument to this orthodoxy.¹² Topsell’s aim, in each case, is to uncover the true nature of the animal by discussing its name, habitat, and anthropomorphized characteristics, revealed through anecdotal evidence. The practical uses to which humans can put the animal, along with its symbolic significance, are an integral part of that knowledge.

The language in which these orthodox assumptions were expressed was surprisingly flexible. A favorite example demonstrating the relationship between the human and animal worlds, and one with political applications, was the beehive. In The Boke Named the Governour (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot lauds monarchy as the perfect system of government, ordained by nature: “For who can denie but that all thynge in heven and erthe is governed by one god, by one perpetuall ordre, by one providence? One Sonne ruleth over the day, and one Moone over the nyghte; and to descende downe to the erthe, in a litell beest, which of all other is moste to be marvayled at, I meane the Bee, is lefte to man by nature, as it semeth, a perpetuall figure of juste governance or rule: who hath amonge them one principall Bee for theyr governour, who excelleth all other in greatnes.”¹³ Elyot not only observes the principle of emulation in nature, with the heavens, small insects, and, centrally, humans, ruled by one monarch, but also interprets the naturally occurring hierarchy of the beehive as a lesson for occasionally wayward human societies. He goes on to discuss the expulsion of stranger bees and the formation of new swarms, concluding, “I suppose who seriously beholdeth this example, and hath any commendable witte, shall therof gather moche matter to the fourmynge of a publicke weale.”¹⁴

In this case meaning flows in one direction: from the animal to the human. Sometimes meaning flows in both directions, and the animal and human worlds reflect one another. Charles Butler’s treatise on bees, The Feminine Monarchie (1609), interprets natural order in this way. A comprehensive natural history and guide to beekeeping, it is unusual in that it recognizes that the monarch of the hive is a queen, not a king. Its subtitle announces Butler’s aims and methods: wherein the truth, found out by experience and diligent observation, discovereth the idle and fond conceipts, which many have written anent this subject. However fresh his observations, the only way Butler can know and represent the workings of the hive is by comparison with human society: “Besides their soveraigne the Bees have also subordinate governors and leaders, not unfitly resembling Captaines and coronels of soldiers.”¹⁵ By understanding the bee world in terms of the human world, Butler’s language is not so distant from that with which post-Darwinian biologists address lay audiences when they attribute hum...