Shakespeare and Animals: A Dictionary 1350002534, 9781350002531

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Shakespeare and Animals

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ARDEN SHAKESPEARE DICTIONARY SERIES SERIES EDITOR Sandra Clark (Birkbeck College, University of London) Class and Society in Shakespeare Paul Innes Military Language in Shakespeare Charles Edelman Shakespeare’s Books Stuart Gillespie Shakespeare’s Demonology Marion Gibson Shakespeare and Domestic Life Sandra Clark Shakespeare’s Insults Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin Shakespeare and the Language of Food Joan Fitzpatrick Shakespeare’s Legal Language B. J. Sokol and Mary Sokol Shakespeare’s Medical Language Sujata Iyengar Shakespeare’s Musical Language Christopher R. Wilson Shakespeare and National Identity Christopher Ivic Shakespeare’s Non-Standard English N. F. Blake Shakespeare’s Political and Economic Language Vivian Thomas Shakespeare’s Theatre Hugh Macrae Richmond Shakespeare and Visual Culture Armelle Sabatier Women in Shakespeare Alison Findlay Shakespeare and London Sarah Dustagheer Shakespeare and the Environment Sophie Chiari Shakespeare and Science Katherine Walker FORTHCOMING: Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology Katherine Heavey and Janice Valls-Russell Shakespeare’s Voyaging and Maritime Language Jo Esra

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Shakespeare and Animals A Dictionary

KAREN RABER AND KAREN L. EDWARDS

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THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Karen Raber and Karen Edwards, 2022 Karen Raber and Karen Edwards have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vi constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Raber, Karen, 1961– author. | Edwards, Karen L., author. Title: Shakespeare and animals : a dictionary / Karen Raber and Karen Edwards. Description: London ; New York : The Arden Shakespeare, 2022. | Series: Arden Shakespeare dictionary series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022009176 | ISBN 9781350002531 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350002517 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350002524 (epub) | ISBN 9781350002548 Subjects: LCSH: Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616--Knowledge–Animals–Dictionaries. | Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616–Language--Glossaries, etc. | Animals in literature. | English literature–Early modern, 1500–1700–History and criticism. Classification: LCC PR3044 .R33 2022 | DDC 822.3/3—dc23/eng/20220428 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009176 ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3500-0253-1 978-1-3500-0251-7 978-1-3500-0252-4

Series: Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

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Series Editor’s Preface

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Conventions Observed in this Volume

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List of Illustrations

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List of Abbreviations

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List of Headwords Introduction A–Z

xiii 1 13

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

449

Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Works

457

Bibliography of Primary Sources

459

Bibliography of Secondary Sources

465

Index

489

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Acknowledgements

Any project as massive as this one involves dozens if not hundreds of informal conversations, Facebook posts, listserv queries, emails and other ephemeral communications. We want to thank everyone who might have shared information in passing, sometimes without even knowing they were adding to the knowledge this book represents. We are grateful to our editors at The Arden Shakespeare, Lara Bateman, Sandra Clark and Mark Dudgeon, for their suggestions, patience and diplomacy. Karen Raber particularly wants to thank Craig Dionne, Holly Dugan, Shannon Garner, Erin Kelly, Sarah Neville, Megan Palmer and Rob Wakeman for their help with specific entries. She also thanks Allison Nixon, who assisted with formatting and editing the manuscript during its long progress to conclusion, and Elijah Two Bears, who provided significant editing support in its last phases. Karen Edwards wishes to thank Inna Matyushina and Peter New for their generous and expert advice on a complex entry; and Ile Ashworth, Francine Blanchet, Jo Esra, Anthony Fothergill, William Harvey, Naomi Howell, Eddie Jones, Charles Page, Philip Parkinson, Esther Rashkin, Jane Spencer, Margaret Yoon and Patricia Zakreski for their friendship and unstinting support when it was most needed. She wishes, above all, to thank Steve Neale for gifts beyond naming.

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Series Editor’s Preface

The Arden Shakespeare Dictionaries aim to provide the student of Shakespeare with a series of authoritative guides to the principal subject areas covered by the plays and poems. They are produced by scholars who are experts both on Shakespeare and on the topic of the individual dictionary, based on the most recent scholarship, succinctly written and accessibly presented. They offer readers a self-contained body of information on the topic under discussion, its occurrence and significance in Shakespeare’s works, and its contemporary meanings. The topics are all vital ones for understanding the plays and poems; they have been selected for their importance in illuminating aspects of Shakespeare’s writings where an informed understanding of the range of Shakespeare’s usage and of the contemporary literary, historical and cultural issues involved will add to the reader’s appreciation of his work. Because of the diversity of the topics covered in the series, individual dictionaries may vary in emphasis and approach, but the aim and basic format of the entries remain the same from volume to volume. Sandra Clark Birkbeck College University of London

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Conventions Observed in this Volume

Headwords and cross-referencing Headwords that represent alternative spellings or names refer readers to the main entry for that item. To aid in cross-referencing, the first appearance in an entry of the name of any animal that appears under another headword is bolded, with the exception of ‘human’ and ‘animal’. Words appearing in quotations are not included in this rule. Entries of length are divided into three sections: (A) provides definitions and descriptions along with sources of information in early modern England and contemporary commentary; (B) demonstrates uses and ramifications in plays; (C) offers a digest of criticism and scholarship particularly in the twentieth to twenty-first centuries. Shorter entries omit the division into three sections.

Criteria for entries Entries include all mammals, fish, birds and insects, whether specific (ram, gelding) or generic (sheep, horse); all groupings of animals or other creatures (flock, herd); mythic or folkloric beasts and monsters (Grimalkin, Minotaur); parts of animals or other creatures (quill, horn); products derived from animals (civet, pearl); abstract concepts of note in relation to animals (human, inhuman, tame, wild); techniques related to animals (horsemanship, husbandry); individual characters strongly associated with animals (Caliban, Dauphin); foodstuffs derived from animals (pork, beef); and mythical gods and characters associated with animals (Actaeon, Philomel).

Quotations All quotations are indicated by an abbreviated title (see list), act, scene and line numbers (e.g. CYM 3.1.24). All quotations are taken from Arden Series 3 editions; in some cases where Arden series 2 is referenced, the distinction is specified ‒ see the List of Abbreviations.

Citations All citations of secondary works are in parentheses and include author’s last name, date, and, where the relevant discussion is more limited than the complete text cited, inclusive page numbers (e.g., Name, 2011, or Name, 2011, 32‒5). Where an author has two or more works in a single year, these are listed as a, b, c and so on. The review of scholarship in each C section mainly includes works dating from the twentieth through the twentyfirst century; earlier texts are included where deemed appropriate. viii

Conventions Observed in this Volume

Taxonomy Where possible, we have provided taxonomic information on individual animal species. Since all early modern references to animals predate Linnaean taxonomic systems, however, this information should be understood to be a best guess; in cases where the identity of the animal in question is clear, we have offered the binomial designation; where only the family or genus can be determined, we have noted that fact, and we have additionally indicated where our guesses (and those of other sources) cannot be confirmed.

Division of labour All entries are credited primarily to one of the two authors by initials. Raber wrote the Introduction and compiled the Works Index; Edwards finalized the bibliographies.

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List of Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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A monkey, sixteenth century, by Albrecht Dürer. Five salamanders and a stag beetle at left, sixteenth century, by Albrecht Dürer, watercolour. Five dogs turned towards one another, sixteenth century, anonymous, watercolour. Seated hare, turned towards the right, by Joris Hoefnagel (1542‒1600), after Albrecht Dürer, pen and ink, brush with watercolour. Four horses, sixteenth century, by Hans Sebald Beham, engraving. Two studies of a lion, 1521, by Albrecht Dürer, silverpoint. Ostrich, c. 1500, by Albrecht Dürer, pen and brown ink, watercolour. Screech owl, 1508, by Albrecht Dürer, watercolour. Rhinoceros, 1515, by Albrecht Dürer, woodcut.

25 65 136 214 233 273 309 312 357

List of Abbreviations

1. Shakespeare’s works ADO ANT AWW AYL COR CYM E3 ERR HAM 1H4 2H4 H5 1H6 2H6 3H6 H8 JC JN LC LLL LR LUC MAC MM MND MV OTH PER PHT PP R2 R3 ROM SHR

Much Ado About Nothing Antony and Cleopatra All’s Well That Ends Well As You Like It Coriolanus Cymbeline Edward III The Comedy of Errors Hamlet The First Part of Henry IV The Second Part of Henry IV Henry V The First Part of Henry VI The Second Part of Henry VI The Third Part of Henry VI Henry VIII Julius Caesar King John A Lover’s Complaint Love’s Labour’s Lost King Lear The Rape of Lucrece Macbeth Measure for Measure A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Merchant of Venice Othello Pericles The Phoenix and the Turtle The Passionate Pilgrim Richard II Richard III Romeo and Juliet The Taming of the Shrew

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List of Abbreviations

SON STM TGV TIM TIT TMP TN TNK TRO VEN WIV WT

Sonnets Sir Thomas More Two Gentlemen of Verona Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus The Tempest Twelfth Night Two Noble Kinsmen Troilus and Cressida Venus and Adonis The Merry Wives of Windsor The Winter’s Tale

2. Others AR2 AR3 Ch. F Ind. GNV KJV NH OED Perry Q

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Arden Second Series Arden Third Series Chorus Folio Induction Geneva Bible King James Version Natural History (Pliny) Oxford English Dictionary Perry Index, Aesopica Quarto

List of Headwords

Actaeon adder Adonis alligator anchovy angling, angler animal ant, pismire ape, monkey asp, aspic ass baboon bacon bait, baiting bandog, see mastiff Barbary barbary hen, see guinea-hen barnacle, see goose bark, barking basilisk, cockatrice bat beagle bear, bear-baiting beast, beastly bee, beehive beef beetle bird birdlime, lime bitch, see brach blind-worm bloodhound, see hound boar Bottom brach breese, breeze brock buck bug, bugbear bull bumblebee, see humblebee

bunting butterfly, moth buzzard calf Caliban camel canker capon carp cat, kitten cat-a-mountain caterpillar cattle, kine caviar, see roe centaur Cerberus chameleon chewet, see chough chicken Chiron chough, chewet civet-cat claw cock cockatrice, see basilisk cod, ling colt cony, rabbit coral courser cow, heifer, heckfer crab Crab cricket crocodile crow cuckoo cur cygnet, see swan dace

Dauphin daw deer Diana, Dian dive-dapper doe dog dolphin dormouse, see mouse dove, turtledove dragon drone duck eagle eel egg elephant estridge see ostrich ewe eyas, nyas falcon falconer fawn ferret finch fish, fisherman fitchew see polecat flea flock fly fox frog, paddock, tadpole fry fur game geld, gelding gennet, see jennet glow-worm gnat xiii

List of Headwords

goat goose, geese, barnacle Gorgon grasshopper, locust greyhound griffin, gripe Grimalkin grub gudgeon guinea-hen, barbary hen gurnet haggard halcyon handsaw, heron hare hart, stag hawk hedge-hog, hedge-pig, urchin heifer, heckfer, see cow hen herd, herdsman herring, pilchard hind hive, see bee, wasp hog, see swine honey, honeycomb horn, horse, horsemanship, manage hound human, humane, humanity humblebee hunt, hunting Hydra Iceland dog, see dog inhuman, inhumanity jackanape jade jay jennet, gennet kine, see cattle kite kitten, see cat lamb lapwing xiv

lark leech leopard, libbard leviathan lion, leonine lime, see birdlime ling, see cod lizard loach locust, see grasshopper loon, lown louse, lousy, nit lym, see dog mackerel maggot magpie, maggot pie, pie mallard malt-worm mare marmoset martlet mastiff, bandog mermaid minnow Minotaur mite mole, mold-warp monkey, see ape monster, monstrous moth, see butterfly mouse mule, muleteer mutton neat newt night bird, see nightingale night crow, night-raven nightingale night-owl, see owl nit, see louse osprey, aspray ostrich, estridge otter ounce ousel, woosel owl, howlet, screech-owl, scritch-owl

ox oyster paddock see frog palfrey panther, pard parasite pard, see panther parmaceti parrot peacock pearl Pegasus pelican Phaëton Philomel, Philomela phoenix pie see magpie pig, see swine pigeon pike pilchard, see herring pismire, see ant polecat, fitchew porcupine, see porpentine pork porpentine porpoise, porpas prawn puppy, see dog purr puttock, see kite, buzzard quail quill rabbit, see cony ram rat raven rhinoceros robin, ruddock roe (deer) roe (fish) rook sable salamander salmon

List of Headwords

satyr scamel scorpion screech-owl, scritch-owl, see owl sea-monster seel serpent shark sheep, shepherd shough, see dog shrew shrimp silkworm slug snail snake snipe spaniel, water-spaniel sparrow spider squirrel staniel, stannyel starling

stockfish swallow swan, cygnet swine, pig, hog tame tench tercel, tercel-gentle, tassel-gentle thrush tiger tike, tyke, see dog toad tortoise trout turkey, turkey-cock turtle, see dove

vermin viper, viperous vulture wasp waterfly water-rug, see dog weasel wether whale wildcat wolf wood-bird woodcock worm wren wryneck

unicorn urchin, see hedgehog veal, see calf venison venom

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Introduction

Once you go looking for animals in Shakespeare’s poems and plays, they seem to multiply exponentially: rather than invisible or marginal, they emerge from both the physical and figurative influences that shape the plays to take centre stage, sometimes outdoing their human counterparts with their rich and diverse roles. Indeed, Shakespeare’s world relied on animals of all kinds and experienced them in so many ways it is difficult to catalogue them: some creatures like lice, kites, wasps or moles were a plague or a threat. Others provided food, clothing, transportation and labour of every kind, including intellectual and emotional labour as metaphors, similes, emblems, symbols and especially through the important work of defining what it meant to be – or not to be – a human being. While there was no universalizing concept of either ‘the animal’ or ‘the human’ as general and essentializing categories in Shakespeare’s world, there was an abundance of ways in which beasts, birds, fish and monsters operated as fun-house mirrors to humans of various kinds. A man might be as noble as a lion, or as craven as a cur; a woman suspected of loose behaviour might be called a fitchew, a heifer or mutton, while any woman might be called a dove, a goose or a hind. Comparisons to animals clarified qualities of character, lineage and behaviour. References to animals in classical, mythic, religious and historical sources conveyed contexts for humans’ place in society or the cosmos; such sources could also predict or explain individual choices. Yet Shakespeare also clearly viewed human and animal suffering as a real connection linking the lives of all species. Men butcher one another like cattle in wars; human mothers care for their young like birds or fierce tigers; meanwhile, animals lament the loss of their young in much the same way that human beings do. For Shakespeare, as for his contemporaries – and arguably for every writer then and now – animals provided a language and an imaginative repertoire of imagery for thinking about and representing the world. At the same time, that language and imagery dictated the way in which early modern animals lived and were treated, creating assumptions about their capacities and inner lives that persist to this day. Some types of dogs were curs and therefore subject to abuse; others were faithful servants earning love and reward. Some animals like the wolf were irredeemably wild and vicious, and thus enemies to be killed, while others, like the lamb, were theologically depicted as pure and innocent, requiring protection. Some, like ants or bees, were thought to mirror human social life, earning respect and fascination, while others, including the locust or the fly, were rarely admired except as forces of destruction and agents of decay. In short, animals circulated in symbolic and material economies that structured life for all creatures, human and non-human. This volume assembles the most inclusive range of descriptions of Shakespeare’s use of animals and animal-related items, characters, entities and practices possible. Our 1

Shakespeare and Animals

objective is to provide a resource that can help the reader understand the full scope of animals’ presence in Shakespeare’s works and world.

I. Animals as objects of study Renaissance thinkers embraced new systems for acquiring and evaluating knowledge about the world. Classical authors like Aristotle and Pliny offered models for understanding nature based on empirical observations. Where animals were concerned, this involved closely observing both physiology and behaviour. Classical sources that garnered renewed interest during the Renaissance included Aristotle’s History of Animals (c. 350 BCE ), which emphasizes the differences between individuals and groups of animals within the categories that unite them – thus, while all creatures with feathers that fly are considered birds, Aristotle is interested in their subtle differences in shape, coloration, size, along with migratory patterns, reproduction, diet and so on, treating such information with logical rigour to determine what classes divide the universal category of birds. A later important work, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (AD 77) likewise applies the techniques of philosophy to the natural world, with several books dedicated to animals. Pliny’s is a more encyclopaedic approach, covering topics like the medicinal uses of animals and their by-products, anecdotes and lore about an animal, agricultural practices, and gives advice culled from other authors on topics like beekeeping or farming fish. In Europe, where medieval bestiaries had celebrated the rich diversity of God’s creation, early modern natural philosophy balanced the new philosophical methods with traditional religious goals. Thus, in his 1607 translation and adaptation of Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium, Edward Topsell justifies his History of Four-Footed Beasts by insisting that ‘the knowledge of Beasts, like as the knowledge of the other creatures and works of God, is Divine’ (1658: Ep. iii). What’s more, Topsell points out, his book’s account of ‘the love & faithfulness of Dogs, the meekness of Elephants, the modesty or shamefastness of the adulterous Lioness, the neatness and politure of the Cat and Peacock’, among other lessons, ‘doth work or teach the minds of men’ not only the virtues and vices, but the nature of their own humanity (Ep. iii). In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus would create a formal system for the taxonomy of species; before that, as we see in Renaissance natural histories, observers and writers gathered animals into groups according to custom, to the classical texts by Aristotle or Pliny, or according to their own individual logic. This means that identifying early modern creatures can be difficult. Topsell, for instance, translated, redacted and added to a portion of Conrad Gesner’s original four-volume work on animals, fishes, amphibians and birds; Topsell included his own opinions on his precursor’s identifications and information, but did not organize entries in any new fashion. Like Gesner, Topsell included fictional creatures like the basilisk or the unicorn, and referenced folklore, the Bible and medieval accounts of quadrupeds. This kind of compendious collection of information aided a transition from the unsystematized knowledge of animals 2

Introduction

that preceded it, and the Linnaean and related taxonomies that followed, although it was no simple stepping stone from one type to the next. Yet such works made available a vast body of knowledge and emphasized debate and correction based on observation. A renewed interest in science and philosophy was not, however, the only or even the main impetus for studying animals. Good animal husbandry was essential to the economic wealth of individuals and nations. Feeding, breeding and caring for cattle, sheep, horses and other domesticated species was the topic of numerous husbandry manuals throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. John Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandry, first published in 1523, had a huge influence on English agriculture and was reissued in several editions. While Fitzherbert’s manual is full of practical advice for the farmer and herdsman, he includes a section on horse breeding, not always included in early husbandry manuals, and therefore a sign of the book’s wider audience among both educated yeomen and higher-ranked gentry like Fitzherbert himself. Thomas Tusser’s A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557), a handbook for the small householder or farmer written in rhymed couplets, was reissued many times, until Tusser revised and expanded it as Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Husbandrie in 1573. Although Tusser focuses less on animals than some manual writers, he includes advice on fighting moles and other vermin, keeping hogs, treating the ailments of cattle, the uses of dogs, how to help bees survive winter, and dozens of other seasonal chores. Conrad Heresbach’s Four Bookes of Husbandrie was translated into English from the German by Barnabe Googe in 1577: like Tusser’s book, it too gave practical advice to the small farmer, and was reprinted in multiple editions. Other works of note include the English translation of Charles Estienne’s Maison Rustique (1600), Leonard Mascall’s The Husbandlye Ordring and Governmente of Poultrie (1581) and his The Government of Cattel (1596) and Gervase Markham’s many seventeenth-century treatises on similar animal- and farmingrelated subjects. Treatises addressed specially to horse breeding, riding and management also became popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including those written by John Astley, Gervase Markham and Thomas Blundeville, who translated the famous sixteenth-century riding master Federigo Grisone’s work, Gli Ordini di Cavalcare (1551), into English in 1565–6. John Caius’s De Canibus Britannicis (Of English Dogs) appeared in Latin in 1570 and in English in 1576. Even insects and snakes had their admirers: Thomas Moffet (or Muffet) edited the Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum (Theatre of Insects), a compilation of knowledge of insects, in the late sixteenth century, although it was not published until much later. Topsell added its English translation to the 1658 edition of his History of Four-Footed Beasts.

II. Exotic animals in trade, discovery and travel Early moderns engaged in global trade, travel and the discovery of new lands to explore or exploit. Along the way, they encountered animals: sometimes these were the creatures they expected to find based on biblical or other ancient sources, but sometimes these 3

Shakespeare and Animals

animals were new to Europeans and thus needed to be incorporated into pre-existing categories or contexts. Shakespeare knew about the crocodile, the great Nile reptile, from the Bible and from classical accounts of Cleopatra and Egypt, but he would have only heard about the alligator because of European travel to the New World of the Americas. Turkeys, guinea pigs, iguanas and other animals discovered by European voyagers made their way back to Spain, Portugal and France, and eventually – if sometimes only by repute – to England. Meanwhile, camels, rhinoceroses, leopards and a multitude of African animals were known to Renaissance English writers from the accounts of travellers, the inclusion of those animals in books like Gesner’s, or their depiction by European artists like Albrecht Dürer, whose 1515 woodcut of a rhinoceros was widely copied and disseminated (although even Dürer never saw an actual rhinoceros and his woodcut is wildly inaccurate). A few such creatures survived difficult and lengthy journeys at sea and over land to be included in collections and menageries. Animals at the Tower of London included lions, bears, tigers and hyenas; similar menageries on the continent featured caged animals but also live animal fights. Such collections might also contain skeletons and other inanimate objects kept to illustrate anatomy and what we would now call phylogeny. As in the case of the new science, information that was gathered about exotic animals was integrated with known ‘truths’, some of which were holdovers from myth. As Mason points out, what early modern explorers expected to find often shaped what they reported, regardless of accuracy or fact: thus, many artists and writers reported finding elephants, for instance, in South and Central America, despite their complete absence from those places (Mason 2009: 14–15). Magical creatures populated ancient texts like those by Pliny and Aristotle; who wouldn’t imagine it more likely that they actually existed in recently-discovered lands that seemed vast and strange, or in the remotest parts of Africa and Asia? The barnacle goose, believed to grow on trees or alternately from rotting timbers at sea, could not be found easily in England, yet The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (written in 1357 but in circulation through the Renaissance; 1983: 167) mentions them, so readers assumed they surely existed. The same was true of prodigies and monsters, among them the basilisk or cockatrice, dragons, unicorns and griffins. The French surgeon Ambroise Paré wrote Des monstres et prodiges (1575, translated into Latin in 1582) to explain monstrous births and debunk much mythologizing about them, but his inclusion of other accepted monsters and strange beasts in his work and some of his explanations for the marvels he included ultimately undermined his efforts. In a world where two-headed children were born because their mother took in too much male seed or reclined in an indecent posture, it is perhaps a short leap to a Caliban or the Anthropophagi that Othello claims to have met in Africa. Global trade also meant that many kinds of animals that had once been the prerogative of the elite became affordable to other classes, or at least more visible to the majority. From monkeys to parrots, imported species enjoyed their fads, displaying wealth or cosmopolitan sensibility or just the power to reach out and obtain unique specimens. The rise of global trade and English aspirations to global wealth and power were intertwined 4

Introduction

with reports of exotic animals, both fictional and real, as well as the collection of strange species in menageries – and the spread of such animals’ appearances on stage and in art. Consuming (by purchasing) artefacts or live animals and consuming the ideas or imaginative appearances on them in plays were related: if you could not go to Egypt or Africa, Shakespeare and his contemporaries could bring a taste of their fauna to you. If you could not hope to see a basilisk or a rhinoceros, you could pay to see a play that presented you with the spectacle of a fish-man or a weaver with the head of an ass.

III. Animals as companions The way most early moderns came to know animals was as daily companions – petkeeping was an increasingly common practice for those with money, but even those who were poor often kept animals to provide milk, meat or other subsistence materials. Pigs were ubiquitous: these endlessly useful creatures would eat anything, and so were universal garbage disposals; they were also quick and easy to breed, allowing for a steady supply of meat. Since pigs could be extremely destructive, growing regulation throughout the medieval and early modern periods was aimed at controlling their presence in urban spaces. Goats and sheep and poultry were also common sights, providing smallholders with food sources, but also the means to create wealth: wool, milk, goose quills and other items extracted from animals could bring in extra money or provide the basis for trade or a craft. Dogs and cats were unsurprisingly also widespread in both urban and rural environments, as were the many kinds of vermin they might hunt. Again, urban growth meant more crowding that brought early moderns into close contact with a variety of species, but it is also true that the cultural reaction against forming affective ties with animals was on the wane. In the Middle Ages, into the early Renaissance, the idea that humans would show deep affection for a pet, for instance, was held in great suspicion. Take as an example the treatment of the domestic cat, which could be paradoxical in the extreme. In times of scarcity, pets were a drain on resources; thus, keeping a cat could be associated with indulgence and the temptations of pleasure. The medieval Ancrene Wisse, which governed the female monastic orders, advised that nuns only be allowed to keep a cat rather than any other form of animal, most likely because cats were not clearly a form of property, being relatively independent and therefore less of a distraction to a nun than worldly things. However, the eleventh-century Liber confortatorius by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, written in England to a woman recluse, insists that ‘No cat, no chicken, no little animal, no irrational creature, should live with you: fleeting time should not be wasted’ (Bk III 80). The anonymous author of ‘Pangur Bán’, a medieval Irish poem, compares his cat’s hunt for mice to his own hunt for knowledge. The poem displays both close observation and a degree of true affection. Yet the thirteenth-century Pope Gregory IX denounced cats in a papal bull, and cats were regularly massacred by towns and cities roused to panic about their supposed association with the devil. It is fair to say that the Catholic Church was relatively antipathetic to cats (although much documentation of 5

Shakespeare and Animals

cats as pets is derived from Church records, perhaps because the relatively domestic life of monastic orders allowed more observation and commentary on the practice), affecting their status and treatment greatly. Most readers already know the long history that associated cats with witchcraft, which may have begun under the auspices of the Catholic Church, but certainly persisted under Protestantism in England. Yet many ‘working’ or feral cats may well have had affective relationships with humans that are otherwise lost to documented history. Legend has it, for instance, that Sir Henry Wyatt, imprisoned during the reign of Richard III, was helped to survive his incarceration in part by a cat who visited him bringing warmth and occasionally dead birds. In literature and art as in life, cats featured in contradictory roles, often portrayed at the feet of the Virgin Mary or in the company of saints, but equally often depicted as vicious, frightening or threatening creatures, associated with the night and with demons. Dogs were not necessarily any different. Some were loved and prized as great or noble beasts, while others were, like cats, assumed to be witches’ familiars or at the very least nuisances, if not outright threats to humans. Like cats, dogs were periodically massacred upon the outbreak of disease or other social disruption; like cats, many individual dogs were pampered, like the ladies’ lapdog which could serve a number of conflicting purposes. Lapdogs could function as metonyms for female sexuality, or as targets for male disgust or frustration. Thus, Sir Philip Sidney’s poetic alter-ego Astrophil demands of his beloved Stella ‘Dear, why make you more of a dog than me?’ (Ringler 1962: 194), complaining that her dog ‘clips’ her bosom and shares her breath while he, the poet, has no access. Both cats and some dogs were thus made part of the construction of gendered identity – note that it is women’s possession that turns these animals into objects of scorn. Where lapdogs are portrayed as indolent, dependent and inappropriately adored, hunting dogs are independent, signs of their owners’ vigour, knowledge about nature, masculine pursuits: in short, they are manly, not effeminate. Nor were the herd animals raised for food, hides and other by-products merely animate property to many. Fudge (2017) discusses the emotional connections that many owners felt for their animals, sometimes arising out of farmers’ belief that the nonhuman world was the site of providential instruction, but also as the by-product of what Fudge calls ‘the joint dance of being’ (2016: 155) that linked humans and animals in mutually beneficial processes of acknowledgement and care. Such creatures were companions too, if not exactly as pets are: their wellbeing was in many ways more important to their owners, who needed their milk or quills or wool to survive and thrive. Birds have been kept by humans in cages since the earliest records of human civilization: the Sumerians had a term for a birdcage, for instance (subura), and mariners have kept birds for company on long voyages since they started sailing the seas. Wild birds were captured for their beautiful plumage while others were seized for their pleasing songs. Pliny deplored the Roman practice of ‘imprisoning within bars living creatures to which Nature had assigned the open sky’, but few had such qualms (NH 10.72). The Alexandrine Parakeet is named for Alexander the Great, whose generals captured and transported the bird to Europe after conquering India, the bird’s native 6

Introduction

home. Boehrer describes the popularity of the parrot, a profitable import from India or Africa that generated a ‘mania’ (2010: 78) in the sixteenth century. These and other companion animals bring together material and immaterial desires – for wealth and preferment, for useful aid or subsistence survival, for love and friendship – in ways that are impossible to disentangle.

IV. Animals as metaphors By metaphors, we really mean all the immaterial ways that animals were used in Shakespeare’s world – as symbols, emblems, analogues, signs of wealth or character, all the representational functions one can imagine. Animals are, as Claude Levi-Strauss famously stated, ‘good to think with’ (1962: 89). Animals structure the ways that humans understand themselves, their environments, their actions, the social world, God and nearly every other aspect of life. Early moderns thought with animals as well as about animals. When Renaissance Italian polymath Giambattista della Porta wanted to express core human identities, he looked to animal comparisons, such that his 1586 De humana physiognomonia posed human faces opposite their animal counterparts to illustrate how facial features dictated character. His work is a logical outcome of classical opinions from Aristotle forward on how character traits are associated with animals – animals have dominant temperaments or dispositions like cowardice, calmness, viciousness, cunning, courage, mildness and so on, setting up a paradigm for analysing humans through analogies. Moreover, physical attributes are associated in many authors with certain qualities: uprightness is a sign of nobility, for instance (not least because it places the head closest to the heavens, something important in early modern thought about bodies), while a curved or hunched spine must mean a creature is sly or craven, always looking earthward. A broad forehead seems to necessarily indicate intelligence in both animals and humans, something that even now influences how people think. Aesop’s fables, emblem literature, paintings and of course literary texts mobilized a menagerie of animal signifiers. Niccolo Machiavelli argued in the sixteenth century that a successful Prince must combine aspects of the lion and the fox to succeed: the lion is assumed to be both noble and fearless, while the fox is crafty and discreet (2009: 69– 70). Dogs are loyal; humans who are loyal are thus like dogs, for better or worse. Moralizing art and literature established whole classes of animals that were immediately associated with virtues or vices: few creatures have such a deep association with Christian values as the sheep and the lamb, who embody innocence and serve as alter egos for Christ, the sacrificial Lamb of God. At the other end of the scale, the serpent, which had very different associations in ancient and classical sources (representing fertility, rebirth or wisdom, for instance), was instead linked in Christian Europe with its reputation as the seducer of Eve. Ants and bees stood for prudence and industry, owls and kites for death, doves for fidelity. But these kinds of symbolic or emblematic meanings were far from stable: the serpent still represented wisdom, enough so that Elizabeth I had herself painted in a 7

Shakespeare and Animals

gown with a serpent holding a ruby heart on her sleeve to signify that her passions were under the control of her reason. Dogs might be faithful, but they were also fawning sycophants, especially if they were small pets. A French version of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper (Perry Index 373) in which the former refused food to the latter during the lean winter months emphasized the ant’s lack of charity, not its forethought. Doves might be faithful, but they were also weak innocents, at the mercy of stronger birds, while the lion might be strong but it was also wrathful, a potential tyrant rather than a noble leader. This is only to say that there was and is no simple, stable structure for how animals signify. Their value rests in their function as endlessly adaptable tools for conveying truths about the world as humans perceive it – or want to perceive it. Shakespeare’s world had an especially rich cornucopia of creaturely tools to deploy, taken from Greek and Latin sources, the Bible, ancient texts, from folklore and from everyday life. While these animal metaphors involved fictions, actual animals also had a role in making meaning. Horses of certain breeds and training spoke about their owners’ wealth and social standing as loudly as if they had language. The world of the knight and his mount had passed with the Middle Ages, but its nuanced matrix of ideas about integrity, martial prowess, mutual care, birth and breeding persisted. Thus, to ride well and care for his horse signified a man’s attitude toward war; to ride too well and love his horse too much could signify his unfitness for the political world of the day (see Watson 1983) or his suspect sexuality (see Raber 2020). Having dogs of the hunting breeds, as we’ve noted, could demonstrate one’s pleasure in sport and nature – or, if the dog was a lurcher (a sight hound cross-bred with a terrier), it could be a dead giveaway that one was out poaching. Either way, dogs and horses were markers of class, occupation, wealth, breeding and one’s attitude toward many contemporary issues simply because they could be counted amongst one’s possessions or companions. Recent studies concerning the literary and cultural uses of animals have argued that animals’ primary function was and still is to constitute the category of ‘the human’ through difference. Whatever it meant to be human is always in distinction (whether positive, negative or otherwise) from what it meant to be an animal. While homo sapiens is merely one species among others, a mammal with certain attributes, to be human is to be something else, something complex and in many ways ephemeral, even wholly imaginary. Defining oneself or others as human thus requires constant vigilance and repeated adjustment, or what Giorgio Agamben calls the ongoing operations of the ‘anthropological machine’ (2004: 33–8). For early moderns, this could mean avoiding those activities or behaviours that seemed ‘bestial’ like drinking or eating to excess – or engaging too frequently or with too much abandon in sexual intercourse. In the Renaissance, the Great Chain of Being, derived from Aristotle, Plato and other ancient philosophers, and adapted to Christian views, charted a kind of ladder of creation, at the top of which was God, with descending rungs based on the degree of transcendent ‘spirit’ they embodied (like angels, which were subordinate only to God) vs. those beings made of matter (beasts, then plants and below 8

Introduction

them mere objects like stones). Humans were placed just below angels since they contained the greatest degree of spirit but in mixture with matter. Within each rung there were further gradations, so that animals like lions or elephants were superior to dogs and sheep. But each rung was slippery, allowing for ascent or descent depending on actions and character – a noble human being could slip into bestiality if not careful, and so needed to examine and control his or her thoughts and behaviour, aspiring always to become more angelic and less of a mere thing. Such a purifying process is, as recent animal studies theory points out, averse to hybridity, to what is depicted as contamination and to the actual indistinction that is at the root of ideas about being human. Pressure to refine and differentiate humans from all other forms of creation builds under such a system, erupting in zoophobia that could articulate with xenophobia or attitudes toward gender, religion or race. Shakespeare’s works tend to feature the human as just such an unstable, impossible thing, seeking but never finally establishing its fixed existence. At the same time, animals are obsessively identified with racialized or religious outsiders and class- or gender-based marginalized almost-humans. When Iago calls Othello a ram or a Barbary horse, he expresses racialized loathing for Othello’s different skin and origins; but he also expresses generalized insecurity about his own status as a Venetian who merits preferment and perhaps access to Venice’s elite women – in other words, insecurity about his humanity. When we meet Caliban, he serves as a foil for Prospero, but also for Ferdinand, whose promise of sexual restraint stands in direct opposition to Caliban’s attempted rape of Miranda. And when Titania is forced to dote on the transformed Bottom, her punishment is ultimately designed to restore her to the only ‘human’ behaviour acceptable in women, that of submission to her husband. Boehrer observes that Shakespeare was ‘haunted’ by animals, and suggests that rather than thinking of him as the inventor of the human (Harold Bloom’s famous description that is the title of his 1998 book Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human), ‘we should remember him instead as the poet of humanity in crisis’ (2012: 65). As much as the animals in Shakespeare’s plays owe their genesis to their sheer physical and literary ubiquity in early modern England, they also arise from this process of division, the process of creating the self by distinction from its others, and of the human from all other forms of life.

V. Animals and Shakespeare: new perspectives Shakespeare’s readers have noted for a century or more that his plays are full of animals and animal references. Books like Phipson’s The Animal Lore of Shakespeare’s Time (1883), the animal-related portions of Caroline Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery (1966), Dent’s World of Shakespeare: Animals and Monsters (1972), or Webb’s Shakespeare’s Animals: A Guide to the Literal and Figurative Usage (1996) are examples of the initial urge to collect and catalogue such references. Harting’s 1871 volume, The Birds of Shakespeare, may be the epitome of this desire, as well as an inspiration to later authors. But in the last decades a new urgency attends interest in 9

Shakespeare and Animals

Shakespeare’s animals, as well as a new toolkit for studying them. Writers responding to ecological crisis have excavated Shakespeare’s world in the hope that understanding pre-modern attitudes toward nature and its creatures could address the ideological grounds on which humans separate themselves from all other beings with such disastrous results for the planet and its inhabitants. Some have found in Shakespeare’s works a more open, entangled world in which humans and animals do not occupy radically different existential niches, and where culture is not yet wholly at odds with nature. Shakespeare promises to restore a sense of wonder, of abundance and of possibility to a broken system that treats the environment as dead matter. When Shannon (2013) observes that the word ‘animal’ appears only eight times in all of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, she reminds us that there was no human–animal binary available to early moderns, but rather a richly diverse continuum on which humans appeared but did not eclipse or stand abyssally apart from the presence of other created beings. Such perspectives have been aided by theory and philosophy, which has joined the ‘animal turn’ by rethinking the consequences of Enlightenment humanism, by asking new ethical questions about how literature represents non-humans and by developing new theoretical approaches that reject or qualify old hierarchies and assumptions. The result has been a huge surge in books and articles about animals. Many of the recent works on Shakespeare’s animals that we cite reflect these new orientations and methods, which also inform our own practice as scholars. But because the topic is the subject of so many new critical texts, we cannot guarantee that our review of secondary sources is complete – by the time this volume appears in print, a slew of new texts will have joined it.

VI. A further note on the entries Our entries attempt to be comprehensive within the constraints of our charge to include all of Shakespeare’s animals. In some cases, we have divided entries that might seem to belong together in order to emphasize subtle distinctions: for example, we have created separate entries for ‘horsemanship’ and ‘manage’, although the latter might be considered an expression of the former, and we treat ‘serpent’ and ‘snake’ separately, although again both terms might sometimes seem to be used interchangeably in the plays. In the former instance, we wish to register that ‘manage’ has a much more specific meaning related to the highest training of the horse for war, while horsemanship includes all expressions of riding skill. And a ‘serpent’ carries different baggage than ‘snake’ in Shakespeare’s world, with a distinct literary heritage that is often missing from references to snakes. The young of various animals might be included in an entry on the adult animal or treated separately depending on whether the animal’s young has a specific and different use or association. Thus, because ‘cat’ and ‘kitten’ do not operate substantially differently, they appear in a single entry together; however, ‘sheep’ and ‘lamb’ can have distinct implications and are handled as two entries. Many characters interact with animals in Shakespeare’s works, and we have tried to include the most significant among them. However, where a character is abundantly 10

Introduction

represented across multiple entries and is not uniquely associated with an animal or animals, we have not given that character her or his own entry. For this reason, where Caliban merits his own entry as a conundrum of human–animal hybridity, and Henry V’s Dauphin is given an entry because he is virtually defined by his love of his horse, we do not offer entries featuring Falstaff or Hotspur, who appear in many guises among other entries. This is, of course, a somewhat subjective judgement call. We have included a representative selection of secondary works in the (C) sections of entries where possible. While these range from classical to current sources, the emphasis in most entries is on a reasonably comprehensive overview of the most recent criticism. And finally, we have had to make decisions about inclusion and exclusion in entries for animals that are so ubiquitous that we could not possibly discuss every appearance. In these cases, we have tried to include both a representative range of uses and meanings, and the more significant uses or meanings of that animal.

11

12

A Actaeon. (A) A hero and hunter in Greek mythology. The version of the myth Shakespeare would have known appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: while out hunting, Actaeon accidentally comes upon Diana (or Artemis), the goddess of the hunt, of animals, of virginity and childbirth, while she is bathing in the woods. To punish him for seeing her naked, Diana turns him into a stag, whereupon he is pursued and killed by his own hounds. Actaeon became for the Renaissance an emblem of the dangers of curiosity and of probing secrets of state: Sandys’s 1626 commentary on Ovid treats the tale as an allegory of subjects’ fate should they ‘discover their [Prince’s] nakednesse’ (1970: 3.150). (B) Actaeon is directly or allusively invoked in several plays as a reference to sexual desire, to improper surveillance or voyeurism and to failures of distinction between human and animal. On the ludic end of the spectrum, the horns imaginatively sported by cuckolded husbands are a reference to Actaeon’s stag antlers. Thus, the voyeuristic Falstaff is made an Actaeon figure by Mistresses Ford and Page when he is crowned with horns at the conclusion of WIV and tormented by the very prey he thinks he pursues. Meanwhile, Ford is spurred to rage by the prospect that his wife might be vulnerable to Falstaff’s charms when Pistol informs him that Falstaff is out to seduce her. ‘Prevent or go thou like Sir Actaeon he, / With Ringwood at his heels’ (WIV 2.1.106–7), Pistol advises. Ringwood was, according to Ovid, one of Actaeon’s hounds, which resonates with Pistol’s description of hope as a ‘curtal dog’ (a tailless cur trained to run a turnspit, 2.1.99), likely to upend the wheel of Fortune. Pistol’s two references to dogs confer an animal framework on the inversion of authority that threatens Ford should Falstaff succeed – he fears that his subordinate (his wife) is about to betray him, upending the human–animal hierarchy which requires non-elite beings (like women – or dogs) to serve and submit to their betters. Ford cannot understand why Page is not similarly paranoid, calling him a ‘secure and wilful Actaeon’ (3.2.39). But Ford’s jealousy and forcible surveillance, which turn him into a ‘mad dog’ (4.2.118), are ultimately thwarted by the wives, and he joins them in making Falstaff the ‘deer’ (5.5.118) who literally wears a ‘buck’s head’ and thus acts the part of the ‘Windsor stag’ (5.5.12 s.d.) attacked by ‘fairies’ who pinch and torment him at the play’s end. The wives thus engineer the restoration of Ford to the role of household master, while planting Actaeon’s horns where they belong, on Falstaff’s head. Intrusion and surveillance are central to a reference to Actaeon in TIT. Tamora, Queen of the Goths and wife to Saturninus, meets her lover, the Moor Aaron, in the woods while the royal party is out hunting. Discovered by Lavinia and Bassianus, Tamora seizes on Bassianus’s sarcastic comparison of her to the chaste Diana: ‘Saucy controller of my 13

Actaeon

private steps, / Had I the power that some say Dian had, / Thy temples should be planted presently / With horns, as was Actaeon’s, and the hounds / Should drive upon thy newtransformed limbs / Unmannerly intruder as thou art’ (2.2.60–5). As in WIV , women in TIT are potentially the prey of hunters. After they kill Bassianus, Chiron and Demetrius rape Lavinia, leading to Titus’s anguished play on the homophone ‘deer/dear’ (3.1.90– 2). Unlike the merry wives, who merely deflate Falstaff’s self-importance, Tamora is deadly. In both plays, lust renders humans bestial: Lavinia appeals to Chiron and Demetrius as tiger cubs (2.2.142–6), and Falstaff ends WIV wearing antlers. Bassanio accuses Tamora and Aaron of ‘foul desire’ (2.2.79), while the queen is described as ‘spotted, detested, and abominable’ for lowering herself to dote on her ‘raven-coloured love’ (2.2.74, 2.2.83). In TN , Orsino imagines himself in Actaeon’s place because he claims to be tormented by Olivia’s rejection of his courtship. When Curio asks whether the languishing Orsino will go hunt, Orsino replies that he already hunts the ‘hart’ (with a pun on ‘heart’): Why so I do, the noblest that I have. O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first Methought she purged the air of pestilence; That instant was I turned into a hart, And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E’er since pursue me. (1.1.17–22) Olivia here is made into a version of the goddess Diana, while Orsino occupies the role of Actaeon. But in casting his own desires as Actaeon’s hounds, Orsino appoints himself both victim and agent of destruction. Elam notes that in so doing, Orsino suggests that he, like Malvolio, suffers from the ‘malady of “self-love” ’ (AR3: 164, n. 20). At a minimum, the violence mobilized by Orsino’s use of the Ovidian myth in these lines recurs throughout the play, not least in Orsino’s threats against Viola when he believes that ‘Cesario’ has won Olivia’s affections. Antony describes the assassinated Caesar in language that indirectly alludes to Actaeon’s death: ‘Here wast thou bayed, brave hart. / Here didst thou fall. And here thy hunters stand / Signed in thy spoil and crimsoned in thy lethe’ (JC 3.1.204–6). When Caesar’s wounds are numbered at ‘three and thirty’ (5.1.52), the reference to the myth continues, if obliquely, since Ovid’s Metamorphoses lists thirty-three of Actaeon’s hounds. (C) Steadman (1963) discusses Falstaff as Actaeon; Wood (1973a) details the allusions to the Actaeon myth in JC ; and S. Brown (2000) considers Bottom as an Actaeon figure turned into an ass instead of a stag. Berry (2001) treats the myth in TN and TIT (34–5, 83–4). KR adder. (A) The term in Shakespeare’s day may refer generically to a snake (from OE nædre, serpent), but it may refer specifically to the only poisonous snake indigenous 14

adder

to England, now classified as Viperus berus, the northern or European viper. Whether the adder is recognized as a viper is difficult to determine in many early modern texts, for adders and vipers are assigned different characteristics. Adders, unlike vipers, are said to dart and to sting, occasionally via the tail but usually via the mouth. Their tongues are often represented in popular art as having a kind of anchor-shaped dart at the tip. The adder thus becomes a symbol of lying, deceit, treachery and hypocrisy. The biblical and proverbial deaf adder is anyone who wilfully refuses to hear the truth. (B) In his performance as a madman, Petruchio violently rejects the beautiful gown ordered for Katherina, and then reinforces the performance with an irrelevant and faintly insulting natural analogy: ‘is the adder better than the eel / Because his painted skin contents the eye?’ (SHR 4.3.176–7). The comparison is indirect, but Petruchio implies that Katherina, well-dressed, would be venomous; better that she should be the homely and edible eel. In WT , Autolycus offers to sell Mopsa a ‘[v]ery true’ and ‘doleful’ ballad about the appetite of a usurer’s pregnant wife, who ‘longed to eat adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed’ (4.4.267, 262, 264–5). The taboo nature of the desires attributed to her is probably due less to her pregnancy than to her husband’s occupation. More typically in Shakespeare’s works, the adder with its forked tongue and venomous bite appears as a metaphor for treacherous speech, as in 3H6, when York addresses Queen Margaret as a she-wolf who is ‘worse than wolves of France, / Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth’ (1.4.111–12). Similarly, when Hamlet calls Rosencrantz and Guildenstern his ‘two schoolfellows – / Whom I will trust as I will adders fanged’ (HAM 3.4.200–1), he reveals to the audience that he knows his erstwhile friends have been lying to him. Hermia in MND accuses Demetrius of having cowardly murdered Lysander in his sleep, asking scornfully, ‘Could not a worm, an adder do so much?’ (3.2.71). Then she realizes that a metaphoric adder did do it, for Demetrius is a treacherous, lying snake: ‘An adder did it, for with doubler tongue / Than thine, thou serpent, never adder stung’ (3.2.72–3). She means that Demetrius’s duplicity outdoubles the adder’s double (i.e., forked) tongue. The ingredients of the witches’ cauldron in MAC include ‘Wool of bat and tongue of dog, / Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting’ (4.1.15–16), the adder’s forked tongue giving material expression to the play’s theme of equivocation and ambiguity. In TIT , Aaron teaches Tamora to read the bodily signs that he is governed not by Venus but by Saturn, which implies a drive for bloody vengeance. In addition to his glare, his silence and his melancholy, he cites his ‘fleece of woolly hair that now uncurls / Even as an adder when she doth unroll / To do some fatal execution’ (2.2.34–6). Bartels (1990) remarks that Aaron’s woolly hair and other physical attributes ‘evoke a stock image of the black man’ (442), but snake-like hair also conjures up the image of a Medusa head. The threat of the adder’s poison, its facility for ‘fatal execution’, works on the fearful imagination of several Shakespearean characters. In CYM , the heroic Guiderius refuses to tremble at hearing Cloten’s name. He announces, ‘Were it Toad or Adder, Spider, / ’Twould move me sooner’ (4.2.89–90). In LR , Edmund reflects on the emotional havoc 15

adder

he has wrought by swearing love to both Goneril and Regan, making ‘[e]ach jealous of the other as the stung / Are of the adder’ (5.1.57–8). The statement neatly turns on ‘jealous’, which means that Goneril and Regan are both distrustful of his faithfulness and fearful of danger (OED 4a, 5a). The sound of hounds baying is likened to the sight of an adder in VEN . Hearing the hounds, Venus ‘starts, like one that spies an adder / Wreathed up in fatal folds just in his way, / The fear whereof doth make him shake and shudder’ (878–80). The adder’s coils, mentioned also in TIT , reinforce the sense of a sudden unfolding of the hidden horror associated with the adder. In several Shakespearean works, adders are represented as the progeny of the earth. King Richard II beseeches the earth to guard his kingdom by bringing forth noxious creatures to harm traitors. When my enemies pluck a flower, ‘Guard it’, he admonishes the earth, ‘with a lurking adder / Whose double tongue may with a mortal touch / Throw death upon thy sovereign’s enemies’ (R2 3.2.20–2). Unlike the other noxious creatures he invokes – spiders, toads and stinging nettles – forked-tongue adders, hiding in flowers, imitate and symbolize the treachery of his enemies. In TIM , the bitter and misanthropic Timon acknowledges that the earth in which he digs is responsible for feeding humankind but that it also engenders ‘the black toad and adder blue, / The gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm’ (4.3.180–1). Here the adjective ‘blue’ seems to be figurative, signifying something harmful (OED 7a). Lucrece, having been raped, also laments the fact that both good and harmful creatures are brought forth by the earth, but believes in her despair that the latter triumph over the former: ‘Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers; / The adder hisses where the sweet birds sing; / What virtue breeds, iniquity devours’ (LUC 869–72). Brutus joins realistic natural history to symbolism when he muses in JC on how being crowned might release Caesar’s darker nature: ‘It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, / And that craves wary walking’ (2.1.14–15). The adder appears here in its familiar guise as an emblem of treachery (in this case, against the Republic), but it is true that as a cold-blooded animal, the adder does indeed bask in the sun. In TMP , the hissing and coiling rather than the venom of adders serve to punish Caliban, who complains that Prospero’s spirits torment him ‘[f]or every trifle’ (2.2.8): ‘Sometime am I / All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues / Do hiss me into madness’ (2.2.12–14). The deaf adder, inherited from Psalm 58.4–5, appears three times in Shakespeare’s works. Queen Margaret in 2H6 rails at King Henry, so plunged in grief for Gloucester’s death that he pays no attention to her anguished speech. ‘Art thou, like the adder, waxen deaf?’ she demands (3.2.76). Behind her question lies the unspoken accusation that he is choosing not to hear her. Hector reminds Troilus and Paris in TRO that being consumed by their passions imperils their ability to hear reason and to fulfil their proper masculine roles. He warns them that ‘pleasure and revenge / Have ears more deaf than adders to the voice / Of any true decision’ (2.2.171–3). In SON 112, the poet admits that his passion has made him deaf both to those who would and to those who would not condemn him: ‘In so profound abysm I throw all care / Of others’ voices that my adder’s sense / To critic and to flatterer stopped are’ (9–11). 16

Adonis

(C) In common with many northern European animals, the adder is not included in medieval bestiaries (which generally depict animals of southern Europe and Africa). Instead, one finds the asp (aspis), which Psalm 58.4–5 associates with wilful deafness and a refusal to hear the truth. These characteristics are transferred to the adder when the asp of the Latin Vulgate is translated as ‘adder’ in the early modern English Bible. Indeed, the biblical deaf adder was so well known that it became proverbial; Tilley records the proverb, ‘As deaf as an adder’ (1950: A32). In The Faerie Queene, Spenser turns the adder into a symbol of voyeurism: Cymochles is ‘like an Adder, lurking in the weedes, / His wandring thought in deepe desire does steepe, / And his frayle eye with spoyle of beauty feedes’ (Spenser 2001: 2.5.34). Topsell includes some experiential material in his chapter on vipers. It is not known, he states, whether there are vipers in England. ‘Yet’, he adds, ‘I verily think that we have in England a kinde of yellow Adder which is the Viper [. . .] for I myself have killed of them [. . . and] the proportion and voice of it did shew that it was a Viper’ (1658: 801). In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne implicitly criticizes popular pictures of ‘the tongues of Adders and Vipers, described like an Anchor’ (1981: 1.416). See Crump (2015: 95–6, 240) for folklore associated with the adder. For the physiological effects of being ‘stung’ by the adder’s ‘fork’, see Warrell (2007: 659–60). KE Adonis. (A) In Greek mythology, a beautiful youth whose story was available to Shakespeare in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 10. In most mythological accounts, Adonis is said to have been conceived when his mother, Myrrha, tricks Cinyras the king of Cyprus, her own father, into lying with her. When the incest is discovered, Myrrha flees and is transformed into a myrrh tree, from which Adonis is born: ‘The beawtyfullyst babe on whom man ever set his eye’ (Golding 1567: 211). In Ovid’s version, Venus is accidentally scratched by one of Cupid’s arrows and falls passionately in love with Adonis, who is killed by the boar he hunts despite her warnings. ‘But manhod by admonishment restreyned could not bee,’ Ovid remarks (Golding 1567: 217), summarizing the gendered context for the conflict. Mourning him, Venus creates from the drops of his blood a red or purple flower, the anemone. (B) Most Shakespearean references to Adonis embed him in a world of animals. VEN represents the goddess’s pursuit through imagery of the hunt and other images of aggressive desire and entrapment that cast Venus’s desire as bestial. Unlike Ovid’s short tale of the adult Adonis, who fully reciprocates the goddess’s affections, Shakespeare’s thousand-line poem is focused on Venus’ repeated advances and Adonis’s chaste rejection of those advances. Animal imagery in the poem is too extensive to cover in detail, but a few examples reflect its scope: Venus kisses Adonis ‘as an empty eagle, sharp by fast[ing]’ (55); he is depicted ‘fastened in her arms’ as ‘a bird lies tangled in a net’ (68, 67); he raises his chin for a kiss ‘[l]ike a dive-dapper peering through a wave’ (86). Venus proposes, ‘I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer’ (231). The hunted deer in Renaissance literature is usually assumed to be female, the hunter male, but by enclosing Adonis in 17

Adonis

this fashion, Venus constructs her body as a kind of snare or trap that seizes Adonis’s will. In one of its most famous episodes, the poem describes Adonis’s courser, enticed by a ‘breeding’ jennet, breaking from his master’s control and vigorously pursuing her (259–324). With its image of animal desire unleashed, the episode again represents a gendered point of comparison: Venus tells Adonis he should ‘learn to love; the lesson is but plain’, and should be more like his mount who ‘[w]elcomes the warm approach of sweet desire’ (407, 386). Like her Ovidian precursor, Venus tries to convince Adonis to be more careful of wild beasts, urging him to hunt ‘the timorous flying hare’ (674) or the fox or roe [deer] rather than more dangerous prey. In the end, Adonis is made the ‘conquest’ (1030) of the boar instead. Finding his mutilated body, the goddess laments that, ‘nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine / Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin’ (1115–16). By chasing the beautiful boy, Venus only intensifies the pangs of unrequited desire that torment her; in parallel fashion, the boy hunter becomes the prey of the boar he hunts, ‘nuzzled’ and penetrated by its tusks. (C) Berry (2001a) discusses Adonis in the context of the hunt as a masculine rite of initiation. Other critics focus on the rich natural, erotic and material world of VEN . Taormina (2012) argues that VEN can trace its origins not only to Ovid, but to Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which explains its very earthy version of Venus, who is identified with or as nature itself. Jacobson (2011) treats Adonis’s stallion as a kind of material object, an exotic commodity and an item of commercial desire, the representation of which demonstrates Shakespeare’s superiority to Ovid. R. Miller (1952) sees the episode of the courser and the jennet as a kind of ironic or inverse allegory of Adonis’s failure to react as the stallion does. In a psychological reading, Fletcher points out that the poem’s animals communicate with one another, while its two human principals do not, making the animal characters ‘surprisingly human, the speaking characters surprisingly animal’ (2005: 2). For Callaghan (2003), as for Berry, Venus’s love for Adonis (which uneasily blends elements of the maternal, the incestuous and the bestial) resembles nothing so much as the boar’s violent ‘love’, suggesting that sexuality blurs the distinction between human and animal. KR alligator. Crocodilian reptile of North America. Romeo recalls ‘a tortoise hung / And alligator stuff’d and other skins / of ill-shaped fishes’ (ROM 5.1.41–4) in the shop of the apothecary from whom he intends to procure poison. In travel accounts like that of Purchas (1625) the alligator gets a passing mention, and Ben Jonson refers to one in Bartholomew Fair (1614) when Justice Overdo criticizes smoking: ‘And who can tell, if, before the gathering and making up thereof, the alligator hath not pissed thereon?’ (1982b: 2.6.23–4). An alligator would have been an extremely rare sight in late sixteenthcentury England; its sole appearance in Shakespeare’s work emphasizes the exotic nature of the ‘hanging specimens’ collected by the poor apothecary (see Rhodes and Sawday 2000: figs 45 and 46). KR

18

angling, angler

anchovy. Small forage fish belonging to the genus Engraulis. It was salted and served in taverns as an accompaniment to drink. In his Klinikē, Hart calls them ‘the drunkards delight. They cut tough phlegme in a phlegmaticke stomacke, and provoke appetite’ (1633: 91). Whether it is their salty taste, provoking thirst, or their ability to settle a ‘phlegmatic stomach’ that has prompted their purchase is unclear when they appear in the list of items Peto finds in the pocket of the sleeping Falstaff: ‘Item: anchovies and sack after supper’ (1H4 2.4.525). KR angling, angler. (A) Angling refers to fishing with an ‘angle’ or hook, a pole and bait, usually but not exclusively in fresh water. Anglers are usually distinguished from fishermen, who may cull fish with nets or dig for shellfish, although there is some overlap between the terms. While not yet associated with a contemplative tradition as it would be in the seventeenth century, angling was held in the Renaissance to be a pleasant pastime that raised the spirits, as the author of The Booke of Haukynge, Huntyng and Fysshyng (Berners 1547) suggests. Angling was also aligned with cunning and strategy, since its methods required the angler to have some knowledge of the behaviour of different species and their preferred environments in order to tease fish onto the hook. (B) Angling in the plays often has a harsh side to it, perhaps because the sport ends violently in the fish’s struggles and death; plays link angling with the predatory nature (especially sexual) of men as fishers and the characterization of women as fish. Edgar in the guise of Poor Tom in LR babbles that ‘Frateretto calls me, and tells me Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness’ (3.6.6–7), probably echoing Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’, in which Nero fishes in the Tyber (AR3: 287, n. 6–7). Hamlet tells Horatio that King Claudius has ‘thrown out his angle for my proper life’ (HAM 5.2.65) when he set up the plot to have Hamlet killed on the way to England. Hotspur condemns King Henry IV for being a sly strategist who has won by false performance ‘[t]he hearts of all that he did angle for’ (1H4 4.3.84). A more lighthearted use of angling as a metaphor occurs in ADO when Ursula and Hero plot to make Beatrice and Benedick fall in love with one another. Ursula remarks, ‘The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish / Cut with her golden oars the silver stream / And greedily devour the treacherous bait, / So angle we for Beatrice’ (3.1.26–9). Both the reputation of angling as a ‘pleasant’ pastime and its connection to cunning and entrapment are encompassed by Ursula’s image. Leontes uses the language of angling to describe his attempt to snare his wife and Polixenes in a compromising position: ‘I am angling now,’ he says as he withdraws to watch the two together, ‘Though you perceive me not how I give line. / Go to, go to!’ (WT 1.2.179–81). Leontes’ language elsewhere is also replete with images of fish and angling, almost all of which involve his jealous suspicion of Hermione and all women, especially when he mutters about those whose ponds are ‘fished’ by their neighbours (1.2.194). His mistrust is not unique in

19

angling, angler

the play: Polixenes imagines Perdita as the ‘angle that plucks’ his son Florizel away from him (4.2.46). An indirect but clearly related use of angling imagery involves the Jailer’s Daughter in TNK . Her Wooer first hears her while he is ‘angling / In the great lake that lies behind the palace’ (4.1.52–3). Moved by her singing, he leaves his ‘angle / To his own skill’ (4.1.59–60) and creeps toward her, overhearing her mad chatter about Palamon and ultimately saving her from suicide by drowning. When the Wooer dresses himself in Palmon’s clothes and persuades the Daughter to have sex with him, he has, as it were, caught his fish. The angling imagery of TNK , WT and ADO links trickery and deceit to the ensnaring of women. But women can also be anglers: Bertram in AWW describes his liaison with Diana (with whom he believes he has had sexual relations, although in fact he slept with Helena in the bed trick that she arranged) in terms that are ambiguous, but possibly related to angling: he ‘boarded her’ he claims, ‘[s]he knew her distance, and did angle for me’ (5.3.211, 212). Indeed, Helena angled so successfully that she is able to fulfil the terms of his letter, proving herself pregnant by him though he did not intend to sleep with her, and so securing her marriage to him. In ANT , Cleopatra calls for her ‘angle’ in order to ‘betray / Tawny-finned fishes’ at the river. As she pulls each one up, she claims that she will ‘think them every one an Antony, / And say ‘Ah, ha! You’re caught!’ (2.5.10–15). The queen’s playful nature is on display here, but so too are her predatory and deceitful impulses. Not only does she make Antony a victim of her schemes (an ominous foreshadowing of the way in which she withdraws her ships at the Battle of Actium), she also alludes to her sexual control over him when she imagines him ‘caught’. Charmian reminds Cleopatra that she once played a trick on Antony when they fished the Nile together: they wagered on who would catch the first fish, but she ordered a diver to place a salt fish (a dried and pickled fish) on his line. Presumably Antony believed he had won the bet until he pulled up the line to see he was the butt of her joke (2.5.15–18). The fishing trick is clearly meant to mock Antony’s need to win even the silliest wager, but it also conveys his emasculation at her hands when he not only fails to catch a fish but ends up in her bed after she drinks him under the table. (C) In part because of the importance of Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653), angling is the topic of a good bit of scholarship on the early modern period, although not much of it focuses on Shakespeare. Brayton (2003) argues that the connection LR makes between angling and demonic darkness is one sign of the way the play uses mapping and misogyny to construct a dangerously close association between kingship and the demonic. Shea (2015) looks at the way angling in WT borrows from rogue literature and provides a self-reflexive commentary on theatre itself. Gurney (2016) revisits Cleopatra’s angling to explore the sport’s elements of deceit, cunning and seduction as they implicate the Egyptian Queen in political and moral hedonism. Wright (2018: 96–115) analyses angling imagery in ANT , focusing on how the sport provides an alluring but unstable framework for the two protagonists’ relationship. KR 20

animal

animal. (A) In early modern English, the term primarily denotes a living, that is an animate, organism, either human or non-human. The term only occasionally refers exclusively to non-humans, a significant departure from its chief modern usage. (B) In several of Shakespeare’s plays, ‘animal’ means a living creature possessing only the most basic attributes of life: movement and sensory perception. This meaning is epitomized in King Lear’s description of what he takes to be a madman, whom he comes upon sheltering in a hovel on a storm-ravaged heath. The ‘three on’s’ (Lear, Kent and the Fool) are ‘sophisticated’, Lear says, meaning that they have lost their primitive natural purity or simpleness. ‘[T]hou’, he exclaims to the madman, ‘art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (LR 3.4.103–6). Immediately afterwards, Lear tears off his clothes, his adulterating ‘accommodations’: ‘Off, off, you lendings: come, unbutton here’ (3.4.106–7). ‘Forked’ in Lear’s exclamation refers to the fact that the torso ends in two legs. It is a unique usage in Shakespeare’s works; all other forked animals are metaphors for cuckolded men (referring to their imaginary horns, the traditional sign of the cuckold) or indications of something sinister, as in the forked tongues of serpents. That the basic level of existence implied by ‘animal’ precludes refined or subtle intellectual activity is made clear in LLL , when Nathaniel describes the illiterate Dull as not having ‘eat[en] paper’ nor ‘drunk ink’. Nathaniel continues, ‘His intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts’ (4.2.25–7). Dull, in short, is capable only of subsistence thinking. He renews his body with food and sleep but has no means of developing his mind. In ADO , when Claudio denounces the chaste Hero at the marriage altar for her (imagined) sexual promiscuity, his language moves into a realm of fevered misogyny having nothing to do with the maiden standing before him. She is ‘more intemperate’ in her blood ‘[t]han Venus or those pampered animals / That rage in savage sensuality’ (4.1.58–60), he exclaims. Venus was understood in the Renaissance to be the goddess of love, but love mired in lust, sensuality and adultery. McEachern (AR3: 298, n. 59) suggests that ‘those pampered animals’ are pet monkeys, which are ‘notoriously randy’. But the term may well have a more general significance and include human as well as non-human creatures. The import of ‘animals’ is nonetheless clear: Claudio accuses Hero of embodying what he sees as the lowest common denominator of animate beings, unrestrained sexuality. In each of its three occurrences in AYL , the term ‘animal’ moves toward its primary modern meaning (a non-human creature), while retaining the sense of a creature in its elemental state. In the first speech of the play, Orlando complains of his treatment by his uncle Oliver: [H]e keeps me rustically at home or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping, for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox? His horses are bred better, for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are

21

animal

taught their manage and to that end riders dearly hired; but I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth, for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I. (1.1.6–15) Orlando is and is not like non-human animals; he is like an ox and the unnamed creatures that peck for food in the refuse heap; but he is not like a horse, in that he is not carefully bred and trained. Nathanial’s description of Dull in LLL perfectly fits Orlando’s condition: ‘His intellect is not replenished, he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts’. Later in the play, when the action moves to the forest, the first Lord describes a wounded deer being observed by the melancholy Jaques: ‘The wretched animal heaved forth such groans / That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat / Almost to bursting, and the big round tears / Coursed one another down his innocent nose / In piteous chase’ (AYL 2.1.36–40). Here, the Lord’s phrase evokes both the most fundamental quality of an animal – that it is (just) animate – and also the absurdity (in the Lord’s opinion) of a human observer devoting attention to a spectacle so insignificant. Even more absurd, in the first Lord’s opinion, is Jaques’s indignation that tyrannical, usurping human beings are ready ‘[t]o fright the animals and to kill them up / In their assigned and native dwelling-place’ (2.1.62–3). ‘Assigned’ refers to the biblical account of Genesis, when God lists categories of creatures with their specific habitats: ‘the fish of the sea [. . .] the fowle of the heaven, & [. . .] everie beast that moveth upon the earth’ (Gen. 1.28, GNV). The suggestion here that Jaques believes in what we would today call animal rights (or more narrowly, that he has an anti-hunting philosophy) is clearly seen by the other characters as wholly eccentric. In MV , the term ‘animals’ implies savagery, when Graziano calls Shylock a ‘damned, inexecrable dog’ (4.1.127) and then elaborates: Thou almost mak’st me waver in my faith, To hold opinion with Pythagoras That souls of animals infuse themselves Into the trunks of men. Thy currish spirit Governed a wolf, who, hanged for human slaughter, Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet, And whilst thou layest in thy unhallowed dam, Infused itself in thee; for thy desires Are wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous. (MV 4.1.129–37) The ancient philosopher Pythagoras held that, upon death, human souls could migrate into the bodies of animals. Gratiano here suggests that savage animals (both human and non-human) have entered the body of Shylock. While you were in the womb, he charges, the soul of a wolfish human being entered your body, making you bloodthirsty. Drakakis 22

ant, pismire

(AR3: 343, n. 133) notes that the wolfish human being to whom Gratiano refers has been read as an ‘oblique’ allusion to Queen Elizabeth’s Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez (evoking Latin lupus, ‘wolf’), who was executed in 1594 for attempting to poison her. Hamlet’s use of ‘animals’ simultaneously glorifies human beings as the peak of created perfection and denigrates them as mere dust: What piece of work is a man – how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties, in form and moving; how express and admirable in action; how like an angel in apprehension; how like a god; the beauty of the world; the paragon of animals. And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? (HAM 2.2.269–75) The ‘quintessence’, or fifth essence, was believed to be the material from which heavenly bodies were composed. But the phrase ‘quintessence of dust’ brings heavenly bodies back to earth and to God’s punishment for the Fall: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, til thou returne to the earth: for out of it wast thou taken, because thou art dust, and to dust shalt thou returne’ (Gen. 3.19, GNV). (C) Dauphine calls Captain Otter ‘animal amphibian’ (i.e., an amphibious animal) in Jonson’s Epicoene (1979: 1.4.24), the italics indicating that the phrase is seen as wittily foreign, not fully anglicized. The otter was classified as both fish and beast in the early modern period, and the captain ‘has had command both by sea and by land’, La Foole explains (1.4.22–3). Shannon (2009, 2013: 6–11) provides a detailed discussion of all eight occurrences of ‘animal’ in Shakespeare’s works and concludes that early modernity did not divide humans and animals in the binary way we do today. Most scholars address Shakespeare’s use of ‘animal’ within a single play. For R. Knowles (1999: 1049), the deep scepticism embodied in the movement from Hamlet’s ‘paragon of animals’ to ‘quintessence of dust’ is antithetical to the optimism of Renaissance humanism. Levy (2001) suggests that ‘the paragon of animals’, by straining after knowledge that is unobtainable, deceptive, anguishing or distressing, is essentially tragic. Gough (1999: 57) notes that Claudio’s denunciation of Hero represents her as, simultaneously, a bewitching Circe and a bestial creature like one of the animals into which Circe turns Odysseus’ men. Boehrer (1999: 163) observes that the swift transition from animal to cur to wolf in Graziano’s attack on Shylock is made possible by the three roles that dogs played in the early modern period: household companion, symbol of slavery or debasement, and embodiment of feared predator. Calderwood (1965: 320) points out that Dull may be but a barren animal, since his actions produce neither words nor wit, but the academicians of LLL may also be seen as barren, since their witty words produce no actions. KE ant, pismire. (A) This familiar insect had several names in England, including ant, pismire and emmet or emet (Moffet 1658: 1074). Although England has fewer distinct 23

ant, pismire

types of ants than most other land masses, it still supports around forty species. The ant’s generally positive reputation among early moderns stems in part from elaborations of its biblical appearance in Psalms 6.6–8: ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest’ (KJV). The social organization of the ant and its constant activity make it an ideal model for human behaviour. Aesop uses the ant to illustrate humility and a sense of place. Unlike the fly, the ant neither boasts nor presumes to exceed its place (see ‘The Ant and the Fly’, Perry Index 571). For gardeners and farmers the ant is an important practical contributor to the fertility of soil. But the ant does not have a uniformly positive reputation. Its tendency to swarm, its role as household pest and its practice of raiding the stores of other creatures for food all make it at times either a source of fear or irritation and thus a negative exemplar for human beings. (B) Lear’s fool admonishes Kent for asking a question with an obvious answer: ‘We’ll set thee to school to an ant, to teach thee there’s no labouring i’the winter’ (LR 2.4.257–68). He alludes to the ant’s prudence in remaining dormant in winter; Kent, by implication, is foolish for following Lear, thus wasting his labour. Shakespeare’s ants sometimes act as scourges: their bite, Moffet notes, causes redness and itching (1658: 1079). This explains Hotspur’s reference to being ‘whipped and scourged with rods, / Nettled and stung with pismires’ (1H4 1.3.237–8) when he is forced to listen to stories about the ‘vile politician’ Bolingbroke (1.3.239). The link Hotspur makes between ants and irritation may explain why he places the insect among the prophetic and emblematic creatures Glendower invokes later in 1H4. ‘Sometimes he angers me / With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, / Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies’ (3.1.144–6), Hotspur complains. The actual prophecy includes only four creatures, a mole, a dragon, a lion and a wolf (standing in for Henry, Glendower, Mortimer and Percy), but Hotspur adds pismires to emphasize his annoyance with Glendower’s boastful ramblings and possibly to trivialize his prophecies. In E3, the ant’s small size and capacity for swarming is a threatening image: Audley refers to ‘the snares of the French like emmets on a bank’, that are circling King Edward’s son in battle, leading everyone except the King to believe the prince will be overwhelmed and killed (8.28). (C) Moffet lists the ‘policies, prudence, sagacity, parsimony’ and other commendable attributes of ‘this divine little creature’ the ant, and claims it ‘fetcheth the fashion of its building from heaven’ (1658: 1074–5). Adding to their status in Shakespeare’s world is the belief that ants are also valorous in battle and practice division of labour with ‘officers of all sorts’ (see Moffet 1658: 1075). Blyth (1653: 4) and Braithwaite (1630) summarize the oft-repeated formula that the ant’s diligence is God’s model for good husbandry among humans. Kelley (2021) analyses the reputation of the ant in husbandry manuals. KR ape, monkey. (A) Apes (family Hominoidea) are a group of large, tailless primates; the scientific designation includes humans, although the traditional understanding of the 24

ape, monkey

Figure 1 A monkey, sixteenth century, by Albrecht Dürer. Photo credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

family does not and can even include monkeys and other simians who are not properly apes at all. A monkey is a small or medium-sized primate belonging to one of three families: Callitrichidae and Cebidae (New World animals mainly from Central or South America), and Cercophithecidae (Old World animals, comprising the largest primate family). Apes and monkeys are sister species, identified even now by a very few physical characteristics, such as the absence of tails and the range of shoulder movement. In the Renaissance, however, there was no clear distinction between apes and monkeys, so it is often impossible to determine whether apes, monkeys or even other primates are intended by the use of either term. Monkeys had been kept as pets since antiquity, while larger primates were familiar from travellers’ reports and menagerie captives. Descriptions and categorizations of apes tended not to be based on empirical observation of phenotypical characteristics but were rather informed by ideological beliefs about certain types of human beings who could be said to be ape-like. Topsell includes monkeys as apes; he mentions baboons; ‘calitrichs’, which may be marmosets; ‘Prasyan apes’, which he describes as having white faces like capuchins, but which are ‘five cubits high’ and therefore too large to be that species; ‘martines’ and ‘tartarines’, which cannot be identified with any certainty (1658: 6–10). Topsell also includes satyrs among 25

ape, monkey

the apes, humanoid creatures about which he reports a tale of abduction and sexual abuse. This story reflects early modern discomfort with the human-like qualities of apes and monkeys, especially the fear that they might be capable of breeding with humans. In Topsell’s story, satyrs rape a woman whom sailors had set ashore in order to lure the satyrs away to protect themselves. The satyrs assault the woman Topsell reports, ‘not only in that part that nature hath ordained but over the whole body most libidinously’ (1658: 11). Apes and monkeys were perceived to have no shame about their bodies or their sexual activity and were often employed to represent human lechery and debasement; yet their ability to exhibit or mimic human facial expressions and physical gestures allowed them to be positioned as uncanny, disturbing or ludicrous caricatures of human beings. Apes and monkeys are capable of performing complex tricks and roles: from this ability, a rhetoric of ‘aping’ arises in the plays, linking primates with theatre, a link already present in the relatively widespread use of performing monkeys by showmen and professional fools. Since apes’ skill at imitation is assumed to be purely mechanical and lacking true understanding, aping is an activity attributed to foolish followers of fashion and other shallow courtiers. Ben Jonson’s poem ‘On PoetApe’ may locate Shakespeare himself among these superficial imitators – Jonson calls Poet-Ape a thief of others’ accomplishments, ‘whose works are e’en the frippery of wit’ (1975: 2). (B) The Renaissance’s complex and often contradictory attitudes towards monkeys and apes reflect the anxieties that primates created about what it is to be human. These attitudes are evident in the range of ways that apes are used in Shakespeare’s plays. On the one hand, to be called an ape or a monkey is an insult. In WT , Autolycus refers to his supposed robber as an ‘ape-bearer’, someone who travels with a performing monkey (4.3.93) and whose ‘knavish’ profession makes him automatically suspect (4.3.97). On the other hand, Macduff’s son is a ‘poor monkey’ to his mother (MAC 4.2.60), indicating that the term could be a fond epithet even as it suggests the child’s laughable mimicry of adult ways. When Oberon punishes Titania for withholding the boy he covets and doses her eyes with love juice, he suggests the possibility that she will awake and fall in love with a ‘meddling monkey’ or ‘busy ape’ (MND 2.1.181). Both ‘meddling’ and ‘busy’ imply sexual activity. Oberon imagines, that is, that Titania will be infatuated with a lecherous beast that is close enough to a human being to raise the disturbing possibility of sexual congress between them. Of course, Bottom fills the bill just as well as would a monkey or ape, a reminder that humans – especially those of the lower classes – could be viewed as less than fully human. When Coriolanus scorns Rome’s soldiers for retreating from the Volsces, he rails at them ‘how have you run / From slaves that apes would beat!’ (COR 1.4.36–7). Apes and aping are also used in Shakeseare’s plays to convey skill: the artist who creates Hermione’s statue is said to ‘beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape’ (WT 5.2.97). Paulina arranges a show featuring the work of Giulio Romano, the sculptor who has supposedly memorialized Hermione. The Steward’s wording hints that, like a trained monkey, Romano merely imitates what Nature has already created. 26

ape, monkey

No denigration of Romano or art in general is intended, however. Renaissance audiences would have understood the sentiment that human artists are to God’s creating hand as apes are to humans. When ‘aping’ means aspiring to represent the heights of divine creation, it is praiseworthy. Isabella in MM uses apes to stand in for humans who resemble mere primates when perceived from a divine perspective: But man, proud man, Dressed in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence, like an angry ape Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven As makes the angels weep, who with our spleens Would all themselves laugh mortal. (2.2.120–6) Humans assume that their ‘glassy essence’, or the soul that is the mirror of God, distinguishes them from apes and other animals. But Isabella charges that in their ignorance of the soul’s true contents – here understood as the humility that Angelo lacks – human beings behave like ‘angry apes’, playing the kind of imitative tricks for which apes were famous. While Isabella’s apes are figures for human buffoons, they help constitute a hierarchy in which even angels, had they spleens (the organs of laughter), might slip down a rung or two on the ladder of creation so comical is the proud man’s hubris. Isabella’s angel reference, of course, links this observation with Angelo, implicitly making him the ‘angry ape’ who sinks into both pride and ignorance. Antony calls Caesar’s assassins grinning deceivers: ‘You showed your teeth like apes, and fawned like hounds [. . .] / Whilst damned Caska, like a cur’ struck from behind (JC 5.1.41–3). Apes are associated here with a mimicry of human behaviour that is empty of genuine feeling. Lear’s fool points out how humans can treat each other worse than animals when he chatters about Kent, who has been placed in the stocks by Regan: ‘Horses are tied by the heads, dogs and bears by the neck, monkeys by the loins and men by the legs. When a man’s overlusty at legs, then he wears wooden nether-stocks’ (LR 2.2.198–201). Indeed, human characters in the plays may experience identity confusion with apes and monkeys and on occasion even devolve into primates. Dromio of Syracuse insists that he has been transformed after being mistaken for his twin in Ephesus: ‘I am an ape,’ he announces, but is convinced by his master that instead he is surely an ass (ERR 2.2.204). Dromio’s self-identification makes him a fool and an ‘ass’, since the latter term implies rightly that he is a beast of burden. The combination of ass and ape marks his status as not-quite-human, a lowly servant whose membership in humanity is ambiguous. Given how the Dromios are repeatedly beaten in the play, Dromio’s selfasserted demotion to ape seems ontological rather than metaphorical. It further troubles the sense that the line dividing humans from their hominoid fellow species is fixed or insurmountable, a division already complicated by primates’ various physical 27

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resemblances to human beings. Like humans, primates are capable of short bursts of upright walking; they have opposable thumbs, and share aspects of facial structure. Caliban calls Ariel a ‘jesting monkey’ (TMP 3.2.43), as if to apply to the sprite a human hierarchy and make pleasing Prospero the equivalent of performing like a street musician’s monkey. When Caliban worries that Trinculo and Stephano are taking too long to make their move on Prospero, he warns, ‘We shall lose our time, / And all be turned to barnacles, or to apes / With foreheads villainous low’ (4.1.247–9). At first glance, the villainous low foreheads of apes would seem to distinguish the animals from humans, but having a forehead is in itself a point of connection, as is the impression of villainy from a lower brow. As Vaughan and Vaughan note in AR3, these lines seem to imply that the already confusingly hybrid Caliban is not apelike (282, n. 248). Does this mean that Caliban is less humanoid than an ape? Or does it simply mean that he does not see himself as ‘villainous’, but rather as a creature more elevated than an ape? If so, is his disparagement of human-like apes also a disparagement of the humans who resemble them? Whatever the case, his companions continue to treat him as a servile ‘monster’ (4.1.250), and he and they are hunted offstage by Ariel and other spirits. Although early moderns admitted that apes and monkeys showed a degree of cleverness, they were assumed to have limited creative intelligence, an assumption perhaps meant to provide reassurance that the distinction between species was clear-cut. Hamlet refers to an as-yet unidentified proverb in which ‘the famous ape’ falls to his death after opening a basket of birds on a rooftop and attempting to imitate them by climbing in the basket and then springing out (HAM 3.1.192). The point of the proverb seems to be that the ape is too stupid to work out the consequences of his actions, and Hamlet cites it to warn his mother not to reveal his accusations against Claudius. In R3, the two little princes insult the hunchbacked Richard. The young Duke of York quips that his brother, Prince Edward, refers to ‘bearing’ him ‘[b]ecause that I am little, like an ape, / He thinks that you should bear me on your shoulders’ (3.1.128–31). The child’s repetition of ‘bear’ and the idea of Richard carrying him around transforms Richard into a combination of lumbering beast and a fool or jester who carries a monkey on his back just like those street performers who kept monkeys to entice audiences. The boys pay a heavy price for their petty mockery when they are murdered by Richard’s henchmen. The term jackanapes belongs to the Renaissance tradition of dismissing or denigrating the followers of court fashions, whether sartorial or otherwise. A jackanapes is an empty-headed fop resembling the grinning apes Antony mentions in JC . Caius and Evans in WIV call each other jackanapes and apes a number of times (1.4.100, 2.3.76, 3.1.75, 4.4.66) without quite mobilizing the usual meanings of those terms or the court contexts where jackanapes are concerned. In 2H4, however, the jackanapes is a superficial follower of fashion. King Henry imagines his son’s reign as one in which invitations will go out to all parts of the world for ‘apes of idleness’ to attend the court (4.3.252), while Prince Hal observes that Falstaff seems to have made his page into an ‘ape’, most likely implying that the page is a fancy dresser and a lightweight annoyance to others (2.2.69). Palamon and Arcite complain in TNK of the consequences for soldiers 28

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when peace is declared in Thebes, because fashion then calls for the mockery of martial bearing. He and Arcite, however, see themselves as ‘masters of our manners’ who will not be tutored by ‘apes’ or fops, mindless imitators of fashion (1.2.43–4). For the raging Antonio in ADO , Claudio and Leonato (who have disgraced Antonio’s niece Hero) are ‘fashion-monging boys’ and ‘apes, braggarts, jacks, milksops’ (5.1.94, 91). Antonio’s insults accuse them of being mere empty mimics of adult men. Imitation is nothing, asserts Holofernes (the great aspiring imitator) when he reads the letter Don Armado has written Jaquenetta: ‘So doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse his rider’ (LLL 4.2.125–7). In AYL Rosalind promises to be ‘more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy [. . .] than a monkey’ (4.1.141–3). She means that as Ganymede, she will be changeable and obsessed with novelty, with an added sexual subtext involving monkeys’ lechery. In other words, she will act (ape) the part of a silly woman who is like a monkey or an ape in being silly, flirtatious and changeable, a layering of identities that once again undermines any simple ideas about human distinction. Apes and monkeys, Rosalind’s words demonstrate, were strongly associated with sexual license. Falstaff calls Justice Shallow ‘lecherous as a monkey’ (2H4 3.2.313). In SHR , Baptista has decided that his younger daughter Bianca cannot marry until Katherina is wed, a decision that enrages Katherina, who takes her anger out on Bianca. When Baptista rebukes Katherina, she complains: What, will you not suffer me? Nay, now I see She is your treasure, she must have a husband, I must dance barefoot on her wedding day And, for your love to her, lead apes in hell. (2.1.31–4) Katherina here merges two proverbs. One, ‘to dance barefoot’, refers to an old wives’ tale that may imply being naked and willing is the only way for a spinster to get a mate; the other proverb, ‘Those that die maids lead apes in hell’ (Tilley 1950: M37), links spinsterhood to unmet sexual desires that inevitably lead to fornication and damnation. The old maid is presumed to be served in hell by apes, sexually promiscuous animals. The same proverb is invoked when Beatrice in ADO defends herself against the pressure to marry: she claims she ‘could not endure a husband with a beard on his face’ (2.1.26– 7), but also claims she would not want one without a beard, since [h]e that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him. Therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bearward and lead his apes into hell. (2.1.30–5) The training of bears and the training of apes overlapped, which allows Beatrice to pun on the homophones beard/bearward (or berrord, pronounced in Shakespeare’s times 29

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very like ‘beard’) and to allude to the proverb involving apes. But she inverts the proverb, claiming that the devil will reject her anyway, allowing her to give up her apes and head to heaven (2.1.40–1). She thus wittily turns a commonplace unflattering to women into a moment of heavenly endorsement (despite the fact that she is rejecting marriage). In LLL , Moth and Armado toy with a verse about ‘The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee’, who (as Moth adds) are no longer ‘at odds’ when the goose joins them to become four, an even number (3.1.82–95). The characters’ verse displays their foolishness, but it may also comment on the sexual mores of the court that mocks them for their ambitions. When Iachimo indirectly muses (confusing Innogen) on men’s failure to recognize true virtue and beauty, he determines it can’t be that they fail to see the difference between a fair woman and a foul one, ‘for apes and monkeys / ’Twixt two such shes would chatter this way and / Contemn with mows the other’ (CYM 1.6.39– 41). While what he actually says is that even apes would know the difference, he perhaps unconsciously aligns even good or fair women with the ability to attract attention from apes. What this says about Iachimo’s own desire for Innogen is not flattering. References to apes and monkeys in OTH register the intersection of sexual, gender and racializing rhetoric. Iago warns Othello against wishing for ‘the ocular proof’ (3.3.363) that Desdemona has been unfaithful with Cassio. ‘Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on? / Behold her topped?’ (3.3.398–9), demands Iago, thus provoking Othello to imagine the scene.‘Topping’ or ‘tupping’ (1.1.88) is a term reserved for animals. Iago thus transforms Desdemona into a lascivious and promiscuous beast, encouraging Othello to dehumanize her as he visualizes her in the act of sexual congress. Iago denies the possibility of ocular proof in terms that force Othello to imagine disturbing scenes: ‘It is impossible you should see this / Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, / As salt as wolves in pride’ (3.3.405–7). Othello later repeats the phrase ‘goats and monkeys’ (4.1.263), after striking Desdemona – an action perhaps fitting if directed at a goat or monkey but not, as Lodovico exclaims, against his wife. The transfer of Desdemona from the category of wife to beast must be understood not only in the context of scepticism about women’s full humanity, but also in light of Othello’s status as racial Other in Venice where Iago can enrage Brabantio by casting Othello as a horse or a ram having sexual relations with Brabantio’s white daughter. Othello is vulnerable to manipulation and gradually adopts Iago’s versions of human–animal indistinctions, until he comes to view Desdemona as a mere lustful beast – an inadvertent and ironic mirror of the beastly nature Iago and Brabantio assumed a Moor would possess. Shylock is subject to racial bestializing in MV , but it is his daughter who has commerce with monkeys. When Jessica trades a ring for a monkey – the turquoise ring given to Shylock by his wife – Shylock laments that he ‘would not have sold it for a wilderness of monkeys’ (3.1.111). This is one of the rare moments in which Shylock reveals concern for something other than his ‘ducats’ (2.8.15): he wishes Jessica dead and buried along with his money and jewels (3.1.80–2). The value of the lost ring is at once material and immaterial; the monkey is a mere toy to Jessica, who values the ring 30

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not at all, but for Shylock it is both a memento of his past and a sign of his daughter’s betrayal of her father and of her religious identity. Drakakis (AR3: 288, n. 108) suggests a theological dimension to the monkey that Jessica purchases: Isaiah 13.19–21 refers to Babylon as a house full of wild animals that in the Geneva Bible are named ‘Zjim’ or ‘Zim’, names identified by Topsell as belonging to monkeys (1658: 5). One of the most extensive uses of an ape is in TIM , where Shakespeare includes the character Apemantus, a cynic who challenges Timon’s assumptions about humanity during both his idealist and his misanthropic stages. As a cynic, a follower of Diogenes, Apemantus is most thoroughly associated with dogs (the term ‘cynic’ derives from the Greek word for dog), affirming his dog-like demeanour by snapping and snarling about the self-delusions of other men. He also remains a loyal companion (of a sort) to Timon, attempting to turn Timon away from his destructive self-exile. Yet the name Apemantus is no accident. The ‘Ape Man’ early in the play rehearses a provocative argument about the relationship between humans and apes: ‘The strain of man’s bred out into baboon and monkey’ (1.1.256–7), he asserts, hinting at a kind of perverse Darwinism, with overly-courteous and flattering humans devolving into apes. Indeed, Apemantus sees human society as so empty, artificial and corrupt that to be a dog or an ape is preferable to being what is counted as ‘man’. The heart of the cynic’s philosophy is an emphasis on austerity. Shedding of what are usually considered civilized accoutrements or luxuries can lead to living what to some might look like an austere bestial life. Timon takes this position to extreme in the play’s second half when he finds that his lavish generosity has gained him nothing, and he leaves Athens to live in the forest, digging roots and living in a cave. But even the cynic Apemantus scolds him for suddenly leaping to the absolute opposite pole of philosophy from his prior unstinting generosity. Timon, he concludes, continues to fail to understand the human condition, instead ‘affect[ing] / A poor unmanly melancholy’ (4.3.201–2). Too much civilization makes one a monkey; but too little does the same. (C) Jansen (1952) is the most comprehensive source on early modern primates. Although she does not focus on Shakespeare, Hall’s 1997 essay on apes and race is important in charting early modern uses of the ape/African connection. Rundle (2007) considers the basis for the alignment or mirroring of Caliban and primates in terms of performance history. Maisano (2010) describes Shakespeare’s ‘primatology’, that is, his thorough exploration of the relationships between primates and humans, with special attention to TIM and Apemantus’s role in that play; elsewhere Maisano (2013) argues that Shakespeare, himself considered a mere ‘aper’ or imitator of his betters, challenged the idea of absolute distinctions between humans and primates. Breuer (2012) argues that the ape referred to in LLL signals lechery and, along with the other animals (fox, bumble-bee and goose), is part of a satire on court values. Dugan investigates the Renaissance fascination with tales of ape rape (2016), while Dugan and Maisano (2017) use Animal Planet’s Romeo & Juliet, a Monkey’s Tale to structure a discussion about aping as acting in Shakespeare’s plays and beyond. KR 31

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asp, aspic. (A) A venomous snake of Northern Africa and the Middle East (the Nile region), probably referring to the cobra, a general term for several species of elapid snakes – that is, hooded snakes with hollow fangs for injecting toxin into their prey. Asp could possibly refer to the horned viper (cerastes cerastes), although this identification is less likely since the viper’s venom is significantly less toxic than the neurotoxin in the cobra’s bite. (B) The asp appears mainly in ANT , where it used by Cleopatra to commit suicide. ‘Hast thou the pretty worm of Nilus there / That kills and pains not?’ Cleopatra asks the clown, who carries a basket of asps (5.2.242–3). She applies one snake to her breast, another to her arm, and dies. Dolabella and a guard identify the means of death for Octavius, who is taken aback by her peacefully sleeping form: ‘Here on her breast / There is a vent of blood, and something blown’, Dolabella observes, and the guard confirms, ‘This is an aspic’s trail, and these fig leaves / Have slime upon them, such as th’aspic leaves / Upon the caves of Nile’ (5.2.347–8; 350–2). Caesar’s added comment, ‘She hath pursued conclusions infinite / Of easy ways to die’ (5.2.354–5), echoes Plutarch’s description of Cleopatra’s experiments with snake venom and her deduction that the asp was the most immediate and painless in causing death (1579: 1004). According to Pliny, asps are uniquely dangerous: ‘when asps’ necks swell up there is no remedy for their sting except the immediate amputation of the parts stung’ (NH 8.35.1 [1940: 63]). Other classical sources offer different possibilities for the means of Cleopatra’s death: she might have taken a cocktail of poisons orally, or applied ointment to her skin, or pricked herself with a poisoned needle. Plutarch suggests this last, but notes that ‘few can tell the truth’ (1579: 1010). It is possible that traces of these options persist in the play and explain the fact that Cleopatra suggests that Iras die by kissing her and ingesting poison from her lips: ‘Have I the aspic in my lips? Dost fall?’ (5.2.292), she asks. Since this moment comes well before the snakes have been unearthed from the clown’s basket, perhaps Cleopatra has indeed taken poison by mouth. Snakes do not in fact leave slime behind, as the guard believes, nor does cobra venom, no matter how potent, kill instantly. But Shakespeare’s decision to stage Cleopatra’s death as if it resulted from the direct bite of asps emphasizes her connection to the seething, teeming, dangerous animal life of Egypt, with its array of creatures that exhibit obscure and alien habits and often collapse the boundary between life and death. As Lepidus says, ‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred, now, of your mud by the operation of your sun’ (2.7.26–7), glancing at the excessive fertility figured through such acts of spontaneous generation associated with Egypt’s fetid swampy environment. Its sexually aggressive queen is likewise almost excessively fertile, bearing multiple children to different fathers. When Cleopatra lifts the asp to her breast, the creature emblematizes both geographical and personal fecundity: the asp is her child – ‘Dost thou not see my baby at my breast?’ (5.2.308), she asks – while at the same time, the phallic snake is a reflection of her dead lover, invited to her breast with the exhalation ‘O Antony! – Nay, I will take thee too’ (5.2.311). Asps, Pliny reports, are known to take revenge for the killing of their ‘consorts (NH 8.35.1 [1940: 63]). That trait seems appropriate to the suicide of a queen whose own actions prompted Antony’s death. If the asp is meant to be 32

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a cobra, its hooded appearance in the queen’s death-scene is additionally a reminder of her royal status, since the uraeus, or rearing and hooded cobra, features in the iconography of the pharaohs, accompanying or guarding them in sculpture and hieroglyphs. Elsewhere, the asp’s bite conveys extreme psychic pain: for instance, moved to certainty about Desdemona’s infidelity, Othello uses the image of poisoned bloat to describe his agony: ‘Swell, bosom, with thy fraught, / For ’tis of aspics’ tongues!’ (OTH 3.3.452–3). His words are tragically ironic: the poisonous wound he has suffered comes not from Desdemona, but from Iago’s forked tongue. (C) Broussard (1974) argues that Cleopatra’s asp makes the Nile and its excessive fertility a source of evil in the play. Kinghorn (1994) identifies the asp in ANT as a horned viper. KR ass. (A) The ass (Equus africanus asinus) is a smaller member of the Equidae family domesticated as a draught or pack animal. Males are jacks, females are jennets or jenneys. An ass can cross-breed with a horse, producing infertile offspring called mules. Sturdy desert animals, asses emerged in Africa, as their scientific name indicates, but spread throughout Europe, Asia and other parts of the globe by the early modern period. They can survive on the least nourishing provender, often represented in their putative ability to eat thorns or thistles. Asses are more solitary than horses and less inclined to bond with humans, leading to their reputation for stubborn surliness. They serve as beasts of burden, and because they are affordable even for the very poor, they are associated with poverty as well as hard labour and suffering: Topsell includes among the descriptors for asses terms like ‘miserable’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘vile’ (1658: 17). Additionally, their loud braying call and long ears make them apt figures for blustering human fools and slow or stupid dolts. As Edwards notes, however, the ass ‘inhabits a paradoxical rhetorical space’; on the one hand it is the most base and servile of beasts, but on the other it is a paragon of humility (2005b: 200–1). Aesopian asses tend more toward the doltish end of the spectrum: ‘The Ass in the Lion’s Skin’ tells of an ass that finds a lion’s pelt and dons it, inspiring terror at first amongst those who see him. He is eventually betrayed by his long ears, which stick out of the costume, and is soundly beaten for the deception (Yoder 1947: 12). The fact that asses might carry burdens of great value but were themselves treated only to the most meager rations inspired a series of emblems about asses carrying heavy packs of gold but eating thistles. The meaning of these might vary: for Alciati, the ass was a rebuke to miserly humans (Emblemata, 1531, Sig.C6r), while for others the ass stood for human greed that denied itself luxuries to hoard resources, or for the folly of those who could not appreciate ‘gold’, i.e., either valuable objects or higher rewards. (B) Most of the asses in Shakespeare feature in insults directed at humans who behave as the worst kinds of fools. Pandarus’s comment about marching soldiers, as he and Cressida watch them pass by, epitomizes the full content of the slur: ‘Asses, fools, dolts; chaff and bran’ (TRO 1.2.233), he calls them. They are no more than the husks of threshed grains, of little value. Thersites similarly calls Ajax an ‘asinico’ (2.1.44), from 33

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the Spanish for ‘little ass’ (AR3: 185, n. 44), making him even less impressive than a full-sized ass. Another angry insulter, Apemantus in TIM , terms servants of Athenian nobles ‘asses’ because they are unaware of their own servile identities (2.2.63). Conrade in ADO calls Dogberry an ass, which Dogberry indignantly picks up and repeats: ‘But masters, remember that I am an ass; though it be not written down, yet forget not that I am an ass [. . .] O that I had been writ down an ass!’ (4.2.78–88). The verger cannot let go of the insult: in Act 5 after Borachio confesses his and Conrade’s role in the plot against Hero, Dogberry tells Leonato, ‘this plaintiff here, the offender, did call me an ass. I beseech you let it be remembered in his punishment’ (5.1.295–7). Dogberry’s humane incompetence and linguistic ineptitude reflect the paradox Edwards notes in the figure of the ass, since the Watch demonstrate a redeeming humility although they are less educated and powerful than the nobles in the play. Dogberry is, in fact, an ‘ass’ or fool – but that is a good thing for the outcome of events precipitated by the nobles. Fluellen in H5 calls the Scots Captain ‘an ass, as any in the world (3.2.70–1) and later implies that Gower, too, is an ass for talking too much and too loudly: ‘If the enemy is an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb, is it meet, think you, that we should also, look you, be an ass and a fool and a prating coxcomb’? (4.1.78–81). As often happens, the insult backfires on the insulter: Fluellen proves that he is a fool when he silences Gower for no reason apart from his own sense of importance. Toby greets Feste in TN , ‘Welcome ass’ (2.3.17), a description which Feste fully owns in Act 5, telling Orsino that his friends ‘praise me and make an ass of me’ but ‘my foes tell me plainly I am an ass, so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself’ (5.1.15–17). TN is full of human asses, not surprising in a comedy. Maria calls Malvolio ‘an affectioned [affected] ass’ (2.3.143) and proceeds to make an ass of him. Sir Andrew worries that the group will ‘make an ass’ of him, too (3.2.12), which they do, by setting him up to duel Cesario. In MM , the duke, disguised as a Friar, counsels the condemned Claudio, meditating on the brevity and suffering of all human life and the inevitability of death. He invokes the ass of the emblem tradition when he tells Claudio that even if you are rich you are still in a sense ‘poor, / For like an ass, whose back with ingots bows, / Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey, / And death unloads thee’ (3.1.25–8). Falstaff is made an ass in WIV for his philandering. Although he calls Master Page an ass for trusting his wife (2.2.284–5), Falstaff is forced to admit that he himself is one when the company makes a fool of him: Mistress Ford:

Falstaff: Ford:

34

Sir John, we have had ill luck, we could never meet. I will never take you for my love gain, but I will always count you my deer. I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass. Ay, and an ox too. (5.5.116–20)

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Both ox and ass are animal figures for slowness and stupidity, but only the ox has horns like the cuckold. Thus, Ford plays on Falstaff’s size, but with a glancing reference to his own obsession with being cheated on by his wife. Another character who, like Falstaff, threatens the cohesion of the community is Paroles in AWW . He too represents the potential for disunity, but unlike Falstaff (who is invited to dinner once he has been chastised), Paroles is expelled from the community, taking on the role of a scapegoat (or scape-ass) who bears the burden of the various aggressions at large among the play’s characters. He is exposed as a coward during a war, an appropriate allegory for the conflicts of the play. A group of Florentine soldiers reveals Paroles’s slanders to Bertram, who wants to subject him to physical punishment (4.3.229–30). Though caught in his lies, Paroles is nevertheless allowed to escape with his life, at which point he admits, ‘Who knows himself a braggart, / Let him fear this; for it will come to pass / That every braggart shall be found an ass’ (4.3.325–7). Lance, Proteus’s servant in TGV , is called an ass by both Pantino and Speed, both of whom are also servants (2.3.33, 2.5.22, 41). Their epithets reflect the fact that being an ass was often bound up with ideas about the folly of loyal service as well as more general doltishness. Servants were intimate members of a household, providing their labour in a relationship that involved bonds of loyalty and reciprocal obligation, yet which could also include abuse. Lance is indeed a clown, treated like a dog or worse (as he says at 4.4.1–38), but he is also an occasionally shrewd participant in the play and is clearly capable of witty and insightful repartee. He bests Speed, for instance, in a verbal exchange: after Lance thoroughly confuses Speed, the latter says, ‘At thy service’ (2.5.51), suggesting that Lance has ‘mastered’ his peer. The two Dromios of ERR are similar beasts of burden, often beaten by their masters, so the play’s frequent use of the word ‘ass’ is no surprise. Stunned at his reception in Ephesus, Dromio of Syracuse is convinced that he has been transformed into an ape. His master reassures him he is still himself, although Luciana interjects, ‘If thou art changed to aught, ’tis to an ass’ (2.2.205). Dromio responds: ’Tis true: she rides me, and I long for grass. ’Tis so, I am an ass, else it could never be But I should know her as well as she knows me. (2.2.206–8) What Dromio does in these lines is complicated: his speech sutures together metaphor, literal meaning, social awareness, acknowledgement of his powerlessness and a sly assertion of individual authority. First, he affirms that Luciana is correct, something he must do since she is of higher status than he, and his master has denied that any transformation has taken place in his appearance. At the same time, Dromio insists he is indeed an ass – so he has been transformed, despite what Luciana and Antipholus claim. The animal he has become is a representation of his status as servant, and so in a sense his double; but his ass-ness also conjures images of witchcraft, of the Circean influence he implies that Luciana exerts over him when she rides him and makes him ‘long for 35

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grass’ (AR3: 195, n. 206). He may also be alluding to another image common in the Renaissance of Aristotle ridden by Phyllis, who has seduced him and exposes him to public humiliation. In this case, Dromio hints that Luciana is a dominatrix who might turn both him and Antipholus into asses. His twin, Dromio of Ephesus, has a rather different encounter with his master, whom he insists has beaten him in the market: Antipholus of Ephesus: Dromio of Ephesus:

I think thou art an ass. Marry, so it doth appear By the wrongs I suffer and the blows I bear. I should kick, being kicked; and, being at that pass, You would keep from my heels and beware of an ass. (3.1.14–18)

The tyranny of service that Dromio of Syracuse only glances at is here directly named. To be a servant is to be an ass; that is, to be treated like something less than human. Being an ass is in many ways not figurative for either of the Dromios: it is a physical and immediate lived experience. In answer to his master, Dromio of Ephesus threatens to use the defences that even an animal is allowed, retaliatory blows from his hooves. As an ass he would have more latitude for self-defence than he enjoys as a human. The play returns in Act 4 to the issue of Dromio’s ass-hood when Antipholus of Ephesus again beats his servant: Antipholus of Ephesus: Dromio of Ephesus:

Thou art sensible in nothing but blows, and so is an ass. I am an ass, indeed: you may prove it by my long ears. – I have served him from the hour of my nativity to this instant and have nothing at his hands for my service but blows. (4.4.28–33)

AR3 notes that the reference to Dromio’s long ears is probably to a proverb (258, n. 30–1; see Tilley 1950: A355) that says one knows an ass by his ears. However, the whole passage, while comical, emphasizes Antipholus’s assumption that Dromio is like an animal because he fails to obey until his body is forced to do so through abuse. ‘Sensible’ in the passage refers to physical feeling, in this case pain, and stands in contrast to reason, according to early modern thinking the defining quality of humans. Yet it is Antipholus, not Dromio, who is deluded about what is happening in Ephesus, not to mention prey to more irrational outbursts of violence, while both Dromios see clearly and early on that something strange is afoot. 36

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A much more sinister instance of the ass–servant connection occurs in OTH , when Iago names himself an animal for his loyal service to the Moor: I follow him to serve my turn upon him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters Cannot be truly followed. You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, Wears out his time much like his master’s ass For naught but provender, and, when he’s old, cashiered. Whip me such honest knaves! (1.1. 41–8) Rather than serving Othello as his ass, Iago gets his revenge by turning Othello into an ass instead: ‘The Moor is of a free and open nature / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, / And will be as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are’ (1.3.398–401), he says. He later returns to the same image, saying he will ‘Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me / For making him egregiously an ass’ (2.1.306–7). These moments support critical suggestions that what Iago really wants is either to have what Othello has gained – namely Desdemona – or (what amounts to the same thing) to be Othello, or at least to have Othello’s undivided love and loyalty. In this last instance, Iago’s resentment is based in the lack of reciprocity in his relationship with Othello, the lack of adequate reward substituting for the violation of emotional bonds he has suffered by being passed over for promotion. Having been an ass as a servant, Iago takes revenge (serves himself) by exchanging places with his master. Iago’s transformation of Othello into an ass also echoes the bestializing descriptions in his inflammatory shouts at Brabantio’s window, in which he calls the Moor a horse, a ram, a devil and a beast (1.1.87, 90, 110, 114). To assert that he is himself human, despite his dependency on and subordination to the general, Iago must transform Othello into an animal. In the tradition of asses who recognize their own abasement, King Richard laments his usurpation in R2 first by blaming his horse for allowing Bolingbroke to ride it, then berating himself for being so unreasonable: Forgiveness horse! why do I rail on thee, Since thou, created to be aw’d by man, Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse, And yet I bear a burthen like an ass, Spurred, galled and tired by jauncing Bolingbroke. (5.5.90–4) Richard’s image of himself as a burdened ass aligns with his sense that the monarchy is itself a burden, something he uses against Bolingbroke’s theatrical staging of the abdication in 4.1 (see 195–9). At the same time, Richard’s empathy for his erstwhile horse speaks to his enlightenment about the vicissitudes of fortune and the responsibilities of kingship, things he was unable to see clearly while he ruled. 37

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The ass of emblems and fables turns up in JC , crossed with the foolish ass who is used and abused as a servant. Antony encourages Octavius to treat Lepidus as a mere beast of burden rather than a full partner in governing: Octavius, I have seen more days than you; And though we lay these honours on this man To ease ourselves of diverse slanderous loads, He shall but bear them as the ass bears gold, To groan and sweat under the business, Either led or driven, as we point the way: And having brought our treasure where we will, Then take we down his load and turn him off, Like to the empty ass, to shake his ears And graze in common. (4.1.18–27) The speech is reminiscent of Iago’s image of the ass who is turned out at the end of its labouring life to fend for itself. Antony’s version of the emblematic ass that carries panniers full of gold but sups on thistles and thorns (see Tilley 1950: A360) removes Lepidus from the status of full humanity, insisting that like the ass that cannot appreciate greater things, the triumvir should not be trained but rather treated as mere ‘property’ (4.1.40). Philip the Bastard in JN references the Aesopian fable of the ass that wears the lion’s hide in order to insult Austria, whom Philip resents for killing Richard the Lionheart, supposedly the Bastard’s father. The Bastard and Blanche both imagine that Austria would have removed the Lionheart’s lion skin to mark his triumph: Austria: Bastard:

Blanche: Bastard:

What the devil art thou? One that will play the devil, sir, with you, An ’a may catch your hide and you alone. You are the hare of whom the proverb goes, Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard. I’ll smoke your skin-coat an I catch you right. Sirrah, look to’t, i’faith I will, i’faith. O, well did he become that lion’s robe That did disrobe the lion of that robe. It lies as slightly on the back of him As great Alcides’ shoes upon an ass. But, ass, I’ll take that burden from your back, Or lay on that shall make your shoulders crack. (2.134–46)

Philip alludes to the proverb of the hare who plucks the dead lion by the beard in order to impugn Austria’s courage (Wilson 1970: 354; Tilley 1950: H165). He goes on, with 38

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the added support from Blanche of Castile, to insinuate that Austria is like the ass who cannot hide his essential character when he dons the lion’s ‘robe’. Alcides, another name for Hercules, slew the Nemean lion and wore its skin as an outward show of his valour (see Ovid, Metamorphoses 9: 208, 268). The Viscount of Limoges, whose rebellion Richard Lionheart died suppressing, used the Palatine lion as part of the family’s heraldic charge, thus adding another allusive dimension to the Bastard’s remarks (AR3: 138, n. 30). Richard the Lionheart did not actually wear a lion’s skin – indeed, what is important about his nickname is that it refers to inner qualities that made him a great military leader. When the Bastard says that the stolen skin of a lion will fit Austria no better than the proverbial Herculean shoe that a child might try on (Tilley 1950: A351; AR3: 176, n. 144), he intends to demean Austria by making him seem a foolish, morally corrupt creature in comparison with the Lionheart. He also impugns Austria’s martial prowess through the conjunction of the hare (a small animal) and the ass (a draught animal), neither of which is particularly martial or threatening. King Philip, however, testily scolds the whole company as ‘Women and fools’ (2.1.150), putting them in their place and suggesting that the Bastard is making an ass of himself. The most consummate ass in Shakespeare’s plays is Bottom in MND , whose transformation merely makes evident his fundamentally asinine nature. Shakespeare would have been familiar with Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, a collection of uncertain origin and date but probably written in the third century CE . The work is a series of episodic narratives about a curious man who wants to learn magic and is accidentally transformed into an ass. He has several comical adventures before being restored to human form by the goddess Isis. Although there is no direct proof that the novel influenced Shakespeare, it inspired a number of his contemporaries and seems most likely to have been a contributing source for Bottom’s fate in MND . Throughout MND ’s early scenes, the various craftsmen who gather to rehearse the play for Theseus’s wedding celebration seem simple-minded, but Bottom is most determinedly silly, wishing to perform all the parts, uttering malapropisms and discovering late in the day that the play Pyramus and Thisbe is actually a tragedy. When Puck gives Bottom an ass’s head and transforms him into a loudly braying foolish animal, Bottom in fact becomes more like himself. He inadvertently provides the best description of his condition when he reacts to his companions’ terror at his new appearance: ‘What do you see? You see an ass-head of your own, do you?’ (3.1.112–13), he demands, and then adds, ‘I see their knavery. This is to make an ass of me’ (3.1.116– 17). Later, when the enchantment is over and Bottom decides he has merely had a terrible dream, he remarks, ‘Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream’ (4.1.205–6) – and then goes about to expound it. An ass indeed. When she awakes, Titania is greeted with the sound of Bottom’s singing, which would certainly be performed by an actor as a loud and unharmonious braying, although to her enchanted ears it is sweet music. Later Bottom requests that she provide him ‘a peck of provender; [. . .] good dry oats, [. . .] a bottle of hay’ (4.1.31–3). He is at the bottom of the food chain in any number of ways: eating oats and hay registers his 39

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essential lowliness. His high-handed treatment of the fairy servants provided by Titania in 4.1 emphasizes how absurd his temporary elevation is, while his mangling of I Corinthians at 4.1.209–12 (‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen’) shows him to have a tenuous grip on both reason and scripture. In fact, Bottom has been used as a convenient instrument by his supposed betters, a means for punishing the Fairy Queen. He is treated as a servile clown, which provides a rich source of jokes in the play. And yet Bottom can be both self-aware and humble, as when he denies that he merits Titania’s love (3.1.140). He also offers a true – and rational, even insightful – observation when he comments that ‘reason and love keep little company together nowadays’ (3.1.139–40). In this, Bottom is yet again an example of the paradox Edwards locates in the ass’s symbolic function: he is indeed a fool and a dolt, yet unlike the play’s noble characters, he is also kindhearted, gentle and ‘sweet’, as Quince calls him (4.2.31). In some cases, asses may also be arses, that is, they provide subtle allusions to human anuses and contiguous genitalia. This clearly applies to Bottom (an inversion of the centaur figure, which has the head of a human and the body of a horse), who along with being given an ass’s head is made the object of Titania’s sexual desire: ‘Methought I was enamoured of an ass’ (4.1.76), she exclaims when awakened and disenchanted. Critics have pointed out the implications for queer sexuality in the play’s use of animal imagery, including but not limited to Bottom’s transformation, arguing that MND hints at bestiality, bondage, anal erotics, sexual infantilization and paedophilia (see Rambuss 2011; Boehrer 1994, 2002). Asses in other plays are occasions for arse jokes as well. In LLL , Holofernes plays the role of Judas in the Pageant of the Nine Worthies, allowing the noble audience to play with the name: Boyet:

Dumaine: Berowne:

Therefore, as he is an ass, let him go. And so adieu, sweet Jude. Nay, why dost thou stay? For the latter end of his name. For the ass to the Jude? Give it him. Jud-as, away! (5.2.619–21)

Vienne-Guerrin notes that there is a series of linguistic games in the play that make ‘jude-ass’ into a scatological pun on ‘arse’ as well as a reference to the animal (2016: 19). A more direct sexualization of the ass occurs in SHR when Petruccio, whom Katharine has called a joint-stool, tells her, ‘Come, sit on me’; she replies, ‘Asses are made to bear, and so are you,’ which earns the rejoinder, ‘Women are made to bear, and so are you’ (2.1.199–201). Like horses, then, asses can be associated with intercourse and pregnancy. It is this subtext that colours Mistress Quickly’s remark in 2H4 that Falstaff has drained her of money and goods: ‘A hundred mark is a long one for a poor lone woman to bear; and I have borne, and borne, and borne, and have been fubbed off [. . .] There is no honesty in such a dealing, unless a woman should be made an ass and a beast, to bear every knave’s wrong’ (2.1.30–7). Quickly’s lines associate her dubious 40

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role as tavern hostess (satisfying one kind of appetite was assumed to be connected to procurement for other, less respectable ones) with bestial ‘bearing’ – i.e., bearing children, or showing the fruits of illicit sex. (C) De Vries argues that the end of Saturnalia in the ritual killing of the ‘ass eared god (later the Christmas Fool) [. . .] explains the otherwise inexplicable relation between asses and fools, since it is a well-known fact that the ass is more intelligent than e.g. a horse’ (1974: 28). Sixteenth-century proverbs repeat the idea of being ‘dull as an ass’ in various forms (Wilson 1970: 21–2). Kott (1964, 1998), Rambuss (2011) and Boehrer (1994, 2002) discuss MND in terms of Bottom’s ass head, and its sexual and erotic subtexts and contexts. Stockton (2007) makes the case that, despite the fact that the OED does not authorize a link between ass and arse, the connection is clearly one the plays make; he discusses WIV as well as briefly touching on ADO , MND and AWW . Watts (2006) similarly argues that Bottom’s name and his ass head could have been perceived as a reference to the buttocks. Allen, however, argues that because he is fully an ass, Bottom’s relationship to Titania is entirely devoid of ‘lasciviousness’ (1967: 108). Schreyer (2012) links Bottom’s ass-head to medieval dramas featuring the tale of Balaam’s ass and Reformation images of the ‘Popish Ass’ used to demonize Catholicism. Starnes (1945) finds abundant evidence of Shakespeare’s use of Apuleius in a series of plays and poems, including ERR , TGV , VEN and MND . Lemercier-Goddard (2003) elaborates further on Apuleius as a source. Wyrick (1982) expands on the ass-as-fool tradition with special attention to ERR and MND . For more on the connection between asses and servants, see Neill (2004), Burnett (1992, 1997) and Schalkwyk (2008). Vienne-Geurrin (2016) covers the general use of ‘ass’ as an insult (36–45). KR

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B baboon. (A) A primate native to Africa and Asia with a dog-like muzzle and a short, non-prehensile tail (unlike other species of apes or monkeys, which use tails for hanging and climbing). Topsell calls baboons ‘Cynocephales’ for their resemblance to dogs, and notes that some are capable of writing, understanding speech, wearing clothes and engaging in other human-like actions, but they are ‘evil mannered and natured’ and so are used symbolically to signify wrath (1658: 8–9). Florio (1598) refers to the ‘babbione’ as ‘a great babuine, monkie or ape’, adding examples of its application to humans, a ‘gull, a sot, a ninnie, a foole’. The term is an insult (Vienne-Guerrin 2016: 46). Like apes, baboons are also associated with lechery. (B) TNK includes an actor, Bavian (a version of ‘babuine’ or ‘babion’, variants of ‘baboon’), who appears in Act 3 along with the schoolmaster Gerald and several countrymen and women to rehearse a Morris dance. Along with the Jailor’s mad Daughter, they plan to perform the morris dance before Duke Theseus. Bavian has one line, responding ‘Yes, sir’ to the schoolmaster’s instruction to ‘tumble with audacity and manhood / And, when you bark, do it with judgement’ (3.5.37–8). Potter (AR3: 125, n. 22) remarks that there was an apparent fad in Elizabethan England for actors to perform dressed as baboons; she cites as an example the Red Bull’s comic Thomas Greene, who ‘specialized in dancing in a baboon costume’. Like apes, baboons are associated with the degeneration of humans into beastliness. In TIM , Apemantus rails against the parasitic ‘knaves’ who show up to feast as Timon’s guests and are overly courteous to one another despite their mutual loathing: ‘The strain of man’s bred out into baboon and monkey (1.1.256–7). Likewise, when Roderigo threatens to drown himself for love of Desdemona, Iago mocks him: ‘Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon’ (OTH 1.3.315–17). Marina scolds Pandar’s servant Boult in PER , ‘For what thou professest a baboon, could he speak, / Would own a name too dear’ (4.5.181–2) – in other words, a baboon would have more pride. Also, as in the case of apes, baboons are deployed in the literature of the day to construct sexual and racial distinction: Topsell reports that baboons are ‘lustfull and venerous’ and ‘will attempt to defile all sorts of women’ (1658: 9), while Crooke warns that baboons would ‘offer violence even to a woman’ and so should not be kept as pets (1615: sig. T3). When Bavian is introduced to Theseus as part of the Morris dance in TNK , the Schoolmaster notes that he has a ‘long tail and eke long tool’ (3.5.131), that is, a long penis. (C) Baboons are an important part of the racial ape-rape fantasy described by Dugan (2016). Knowles (2004) describes the way in which, just as apes and aping are connected 42

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to playacting and therefore the stage in general, so (actors dressed as) baboons were present on the Renaissance stage and lent their name to acts of grotesque ornamentation via terms like ‘baboonery’ (146). Vienne-Guerrin addresses the baboon’s use as an insult (2016: 46–7). KR bacon. (A) Smoked meat made from pork. (B) In WIV , William pronounces the Latin word ‘hoc’ as ‘hog’. His mother thus hears his recitation of Latin ‘Accusativo, hung, hang, hog’ as ‘Hang-hog’, or ‘Latin for bacon’, since smoking requires hanging the animal. Bacon, a fatty dish, is associated with corpulence and wealth, but also with indulgence and excess: Falstaff attacks the pilgrims at Gads Hill calling them ‘bacon-fed knaves’ and later (ironically, given his own girth) simply ‘bacons’ or fat men (1H4 2.2.82, 88). The Second Carrier in 1H4 transports gammons, or pork shanks, which along with the ginger root he mentions suggest a stark contrast between the items he brings to supply paying customers and the rank and foul conditions of the inn where he and his horse are stabled. The jailer’s daughter in TNK , who ‘lards’ her mad ramblings with references to Palamon (4.3.7), imagines a hell in which sinners are ‘put in a cauldron of lead and usurers’ grease’ and ‘there boil[ed] like a gammon of bacon that will never be enough’ (4.3.35– 8). The image conveys an infernal fusion of moral and physical corruption with the dearth of nourishment, reflecting the hopelessness of her proximity to the noble with whom she is infatuated. The glancing social commentary in her reference to ‘usurers’ grease’ (Bruster 1995: 287–8) aligns her with other lower-class characters like the carriers, for whom gammons of bacon are signs of their exclusion from the plenty enjoyed by others. KR bait, baiting. (A) The food used by hunters or trappers to lure fish, birds or mammals, often itself made up of small fish, insects or animal parts. Baiting applies to many kinds of snares and traps, but the term baiting is also used to describe an attack on a bull, bear or other large animal by dogs (OED 2a). Thus, bait can refer to temptation, especially one that is self-destructive, or to an assault or harassment by external foes. (B) Claudio encourages his companions in ADO to ‘bait the hook well’ in their plot to convince Benedick that Beatrice loves him, for ‘this fish will bite’ (2.3.110), says Claudio. Ursula and Hero use the same language of angling or fishing when referring to Beatrice: ‘The pleasant’st angling is to see the fish [. . .] greedily devour the treacherous bait’ (3.1.26–8). In a play that revolves around Don John’s plot to ensnare Don Pedro and Claudio with a false accusation against Hero, these descriptions are ominous: the same theatre of deception that provides ‘false sweet bait’ to Beatrice (3.1.33) also indicts Hero as a temptress. The sexual connotations of bait inform its use in PP , when Venus tempts Adonis with ‘touches so soft’ (4.8), but he resists her: like a wary fish: ‘[t]he tender nibbler would not touch the bait’ (4.11). SON 129 observes that the object of 43

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sexual lust is ‘Past reason hated as a swallowed bait, / On purpose laid to make the taker mad (7–8). ROM also deploys baiting to describe Juliet’s love for Romeo. The family feud means that she must ‘steal love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks’ (2.0.8). Because baits were sometimes used not to catch but to kill, bait in this context hints at the poisons in which both the Friar and apothecary deal – the sweeter the bait, the better it tempts the unwary animal into eating it and dying. MM gathers sexual temptation and sexual purity into a single package when Angelo is seduced by Isabella’s chastity: ‘O cunning enemy that, to catch a saint, / With saints dost bait thy hook!’ (2.2.182–3). While Angelo wants to elevate himself and his desire to biblical status, the image of hook-baiting implies the animal context for his fall, as it does in ADO and PP . Claudio is closer to the mark when he describes human beings as like ‘rats that ravin down their proper bane’ when they persist in acting on lust despite the law’s constraint (MM 1.2.125). Tamora assuages Saturninus’ fear of Lucius, who has allied with the Goths to attack Rome in TIT, with the promise that she will ‘enchant’ Titus to intercede with his son ‘With words more sweet and yet more dangerous / Than baits to fish or honey-stalks to sheep’ (4.4.88–90). Tamora’s faith in her persuasive powers is, of course, misplaced: in fact, Titus will trick her into a cannibal feast at which she will consume her sons’ flesh and blood baked into a pie. Her reference to ‘honey-stalks’ or sweet clover that cause bloating and death raises the spectre of appetitive greed, very like the images of bait in MM and ROM . Rome expanded the reach of its empire by assimilating other tribes and cultures; the play suggests that its ambition, which requires it to incorporate outsiders like the Goth queen, carries great risk to its identity. Perhaps the most famous bait in Shakespeare’s plays is referenced in MV when Shylock dismisses the value of a pound of Antonio’s flesh for being fit only ‘to bait fish withal’ (3.1.48). While Shylock seems to confirm Salarino’s opinion that human flesh is not valuable in itself, he goes on to insist that ‘if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge’ (3.1.48–9). Like TIT , MV deals in the language and imagery of cannibalism, but does so not to indict Roman values, but to remind audiences of the Jewish blood libel, the myth that Jews abducted, murdered and consumed Christian children in their secret rites. Shylock’s use of fishing imagery also echoes Gratiano’s earlier warning to Antonio not to be tempted to affect sadness just to seek a reputation for seriousness: ‘fish not with this melancholy bait / For this fool gudgeon, this opinion’ (1.1.101–2). Antonio is free of the error Gratiano describes – but are his performances of Christian disgust for Jews on the Rialto, recounted by Shylock, not also signs of Antonio’s susceptibility to the siren song of public acclaim? Dogs used in the bloodsport of bear-baiting harry the bear with repeated assaults, wearing it down until it is exhausted. This violence lies behind images of harassment in COR when Sicinius leaves rather than allow himself to be baited by Volumnia (4.2.43), and in MAC , when Macbeth refuses to submit to Macduff and ‘be baited with the rabble’s curse’ (5.8.29) while kowtowing to Malcolm. In both plays, networks of animal imagery are extensive enough to link these moments to other scenes with 44

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fascinating results. If Sicinius resists being baited by Volumnia, the scent hints, Coriolanus has no such ability; he is quickly overcome by her appeals, just as he was easily manipulated by her strategies. Macbeth identifies himself as a baited bear immediately before he fights Macduff, saying, ‘They have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, / But bear-like I must fight the course’ (5.7.1–2). Thus, by the time he tells Macduff he will not be baited by the crowd he has already cast himself in exactly that position. In other plays, the idea of snares or baiting is not always directly announced but implicit in the work’s structure or in its references to animals. Primary among these is SHR , which deploys the language of training, taming and mastery over such animals as falcons and horses to compare Katherina’s condition to that of a baited animal: she is so thoroughly baited – both chastised and enstrapped – by Petrucchio that by the play’s conclusion she is able to articulate the most passionate defence of her husband’s supremacy, the very thing she resisted throughout. HAM touches on the idea of using bait to catch fish in Polonius’s speech to Reynaldo when the servant is advised to lie about Laertes to find out whether he is behaving himself or not: ‘Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth’ (2.1.60), Polonius says. Hamlet later calls Polonius a ‘fishmonger’ (2.2.171), implying that he and his daughter are both corrupt – Ophelia may ‘conceive’ the way maggots breed in a dead dog (2.2.182). Given that a fishmonger is a possible euphemism for a pimp or fleshmonger, Hamlet may be hinting that Polonius is effectively selling his daughter’s flesh by encouraging her to flirt with the young prince. At the very least, in all instances Polonius is being rightly characterized as a maker of snares and traps. Falstaff repeats the commonplace idea that big fish eat little fish (Tilley 1950: F311) when he soliloquizes in 2H4 about making Justice Shallow the target of his plotting: ‘If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him’ (3.2.329–30). A dace is a type of small fish; a pike has large teeth with which to snap at its food. (C) Klein (1977) links Hamlet’s reference to Polonius as a fishmonger to a Ciceronian proverb about pleasure as the bait that lures all humans. Ramsey-Kurz (2007) describes Katherina’s transition to compliance in SHR as an act of baiting and taming. KR Barbary. (A) A breed of horse from North Africa, also known as the Barb or Berber horse. Barbs were expensive and regal mounts, fine-boned but with a fiery disposition and great stamina. (B) Richard II and his groom discuss Bolingbroke’s progress into London on ‘roan Barbary’, who seems to betray both the groom’s training and Richard’s ownership by accepting his new rider (R2 5.5.78). Roan is a reddish colour, so this reference might be to the horse as a red-coated Barb, or Barbary might be the animal’s name. If the latter, the moment is especially poignant, since using the proper name indicates the intimacy the king shared with his prized mount. The groom’s references to ‘dress[ing]’ Barbary in the manage or manege style of riding, and to his haughty carriage, as if he 45

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‘disdained the ground’ under Bolingbroke, reflect the breed’s elegance and athletic capabilities (5.5.80, 83). Good horsemanship and good rule are connected throughout Shakespeare’s plays, especially the histories. Richard is at first dismayed to hear that his horse has displayed pride under his new rider and calls him a jade, but he quickly realizes that it is an error to blame the animal, just as it is to blame the English populace, for accepting a new master. It is Richard who was responsible for maintaining order and good rule, not the horse, and so it is the king who failed: ‘Why do I rail on thee,’ he asks, ‘Since thou, created to be awed by man, / Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse, / And yet I bear a burden like an ass, / Spurred, galled and tired by jauncing Bolingbroke’ (5.5.90–4). Barbary horses were prized in England both for their rarity and for their intelligence and trainability – thus when Osric tells Hamlet that the king has wagered ‘six Barbary horses’ against Laertes in the upcoming duel, he is expressing the magnitude of the king’s confidence in Hamlet’s skill (HAM 5.2.130–1). The breed is invoked by Iago to horrify Brabantio with the news that his daughter has married Othello, the Moor: ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans!’ (OTH 1.1.109–12). Iago’s inclusion of this reference to the breed participates in discourses about racial difference as bestializing, but adds the element of exoticism associated with Othello’s origins and travels in Africa: not only does he invoke the actual African horse breed, but he sets up an echo effect with the idea of Othello as ‘barbarous’ (from the Greek or Latin for ‘foreign’). (C) Boehrer (2010) links Barbary to both the tradition of animal loyalty, in R2 under erasure by the new mechanistic universe of science, and African exoticism (29–54). Swarbrick (2016) argues that animal imagery is deployed in OTH to dehumanize the Moor yet also undermines the distinctions that justify racism, while Bovilsky (2008: 40–9) points out that animal breeding offers a narrative adaptable to fears of miscegenation in the period. Neill (1989) notes a possible allusion to Jeremiah’s connection between black skin, animal sexuality and the Jews (‘Can the blacke More change his skin? or the leopard his spottes. I have sene thine adulteries, & thy neyings, y filthines of thy whoredome’ [Jer. 13.23–7, GNV]). KR bark, barking. (A) The vocalization of a dog. Barking can stand in for various kinds of speech, especially from characters who are associated with animals or from marginalized groups that are bestialized as a result of their class, gender, racial or other status. (B) Basset insults Vernon in 1H6 on multiple levels when he refers to the ‘envious barking of your saucy tongue’ (3.4.33). Not only is Vernon contaminated by his service to Somerset and resentful of York and his men, Basset implies, but he is also an insignificant adversary, a mere yapping dog. Assuring Wolsey of his continued favour in H8, King Henry dismisses the voices raised against him: ‘[Y]ou have many enemies 46

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that know not / Why they are so but like to village curs, / Bark when their fellows do’ (2.4.155–7). In ADO , in the midst of their first merry bout of words, Beatrice declares to Benedick and others ‘I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me’ (ADO 1.1.125–6), suggesting not just that words of courtship are annoying to her, but that any man’s – i.e., Benedick’s – voice and speech is mere grating noise. In the early modern period, dogs were employed providing warning alarms for households and estates. It is this role that informs Brutus’s claim that elevating Coriolanus to the status of tribune will silence the Citizens and ‘make of them no more voice / Than dogs that are as often beat for barking / As therefore kept to do so’ (COR 2.3.212–14). In MND , Puck chases the mechanicals, terrifying them by imitating animal noises including the hound’s bark (3.1.106). King Richard III claims his deformity prompts ‘dogs [to] bark at me as I halt by them’ (R3 1.1.23): in other words, he is such a horrifying figure, an unnatural being, that animals loathe him on sight. Mad Lear imagines ‘the little dogs’ barking at him at the mock trial he conducts in the hovel on the heath (LR 3.6.60). When Lear asks Gloucester if ‘[t]hou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar’ (4.6.150–1), his question is part of a social critique: he describes the unseating of human authority in the person of a justice judging a thief as well as the dog barking at the beggar – but then observes ‘there thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office’ (4.6.153–5). In other words, as he tells Gloucester, you do not need eyes to recognize the world’s injustices; you need only listen and recognize that traditional hierarchies have no purchase in the world both old men now inhabit. KR basilisk, cockatrice. (A) A legendary reptile described as the king of serpents (Greek: basilikos; Latin: rex). Its name may be linked to a marking on it in the shape of a crown, or to a crest that resembles a crown on its head. Since it is a fictional creature, accounts and pictorial representations differ. It is usually described as a relatively small snake or lizard, either with or without legs. According to Pliny and others, the basilisk has the power to kill with its gaze or with its breath; because it is so venomous, it can also infect through mere touch, and its passage can burn grass and bushes (NH 8.33 [1940: 57]). In some sources, the basilisk shoots venom from its eyes, while in others, a glance from its eye is enough to kill. Pliny also names basilisk venom as the antidote to sorcery. The creature’s only enemies are the weasel (NH 8.33 [1940: 59]), or a cock’s crow (according to Aelian 1958–9: 1.193–5 [3.31]), either of which can destroy it. Basilisks and cockatrices feature in the Bible: Isaiah 14.29 gives a warning to Philistia that ‘out of the serpent’s root shall come forth a cockatrice, and the fruit thereof shall be a fiery flying serpent’ (GNV), promising a return of Israelite power. While Gesner includes the basilisk or cockatrice in his Historia animalium, Topsell disputes the possibility that such a hybrid creature could exist (1658: 677). Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) does not doubt that the basilisk exists, given its presence in the Bible and classical literature, but he suggests that the old basilisk is not the same as that described by new sources (1981: 3, 97–8). 47

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(B) The term basilisk was applied to an early type of cannon, whose spitting of fire, smoke and iron shards was held to resemble the creature’s poisonous breath. In the first and second tetralogies, numerous instances of the word thus relate to artillery, and only indirectly to the mythical beast. In WT , however, Polixenes invokes the animal when he defends himself against Camillo’s hints that Leontes has contracted a ‘disease’ (jealousy) from him: ‘How caught of me? / Make me not sighted like the basilisk. / I have looked on thousands who have sped the better / By my regard’ (1.2.383–6). Posthumus, convinced that Innogen has surrendered her virtue to Iachomo, gives him his ring to keep alongside the bangle Iachimo claims he received from her as a token, calling the ring a ‘basilisk unto mine eye, / [that] Kills me to look on’t’ (CYM 2.4.107–8). Posthumus thus transfers the killing power of the basilisk’s gaze to the symbol of Innogen’s affections, making his own eyes the victim in a reversal that echoes the play’s layers of errors and substitutions. Lady Anne also references the basilisk in R3 to repudiate Richard’s assertion that it is her beauty that caused him to murder her father-in-law Henry (and, she believes, her husband Edward). When she spits at him, wishing her spit were poison, Richard casts himself as her abject lover: Richard: Anne: Richard: Anne:

Never came poison from so sweet a place. Never hung poison on a fouler toad. Out of my sight! Thou dost infect mine eyes. Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine. Would they were basilisks, to strike thee dead. (1.2.149–53)

Richard has in fact manipulated Anne away from her initial position, when she called him names (toad, and earlier devil, hedgehog, homicide), into wishing that she herself was a monstrous creature. This shift, like Posthumus’s allusion to the serpent, reflects the misogynistic but widespread portrayal of women as basilisks or Medusas, whose gaze turns men to stone or poisons them with temptation. (C) Lobanov-Rostovsky (1997) uses the basilisk to launch an examination of eye anatomies in literary and other texts, arguing that the creature undid itself: if it is not visible because it is deadly to look on, how can it be known? And if not known, can it exist? He connects the basilisk’s self-undoing to Phoebe’s rejection of Petrarchan tropes in AYL (209). Chalk (2014b) argues that the first scene of WT stages Leontes’s experience of visual contagion as a material process when he is physically shaken by the sight of Hermione with Polixenes. Vienne-Guerrin (2016) considers references to the basilisk as an insult (64–5). KR bat. (A) A winged nocturnal mammal of the order Chiroptera. Whether Shakespeare’s contemporaries knew that a bat was a mammal and not a bird is a matter of some dispute. Puttenham recounts a tale of a ‘rattlemouse’ (a bat, sometimes also called a flittermouse), which escapes a war between the beasts and the birds by 48

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demonstrating that it belonged to neither category (1589: 113). Other fables reflect the creature’s mouse-like characteristics (Allen 1939: 2–3). The bat’s equivocal nature as a flying mammal is reflected in Swan’s description in Speculum Mundi of ‘a creature between a bird and a beast’ and his conclusion that it is ‘no bird but a winged mouse’ (1635: 404). (B) When Hamlet says to his mother, ‘who that’s but a queen – fair, sober, wise – / Would from a paddock, from a bat, a gib, / Such dear concernings hide’ (HAM 3.4.187– 9), he alludes to the bat’s association with witchcraft: paddocks or toads, gib-cats or tomcats, and bats were often cited as witches’ familiars. The three weird sisters use ‘wool of bat’ (the down of a bat’s chest and belly) in their brew in MAC (4.1.15). Bats’ connection to the supernatural is linked to their nocturnal habits, especially their silent flight and preference for roosting in ruins (Allen 1939: 16). When Macbeth assures his wife that ‘ere the bat hath flown / His cloistered flight, ere to black Hecate’s summons [. . .] there shall be done / A deed of dreadful note’ (3.2.41–5), he refers both to bats’ roosting choices and to their relationship with Hecate, goddess of the moon and sorcery. Night’s capacity to cloak evil deeds, hinted at in a description in The Faerie Queene, ‘The lether-winged Batt, dayes enimy’ (Spenser 2001: 276 [2.12.36]), is not, however, the bat’s only association: it features in a number of recipes for medical treatments. Johnson’s Cornucopiæ, for instance, recommends that readers place on their bodies a bat’s heart or a powder made from parts of the animal to banish sleep and gain ‘profit in vigilancy’ (1595: sig. A5r). KR beagle. (A) A small scent-hound used for hunting smaller game; the term ‘beagle’ could refer to any of a number of types of dog that hunted by scent rather than sight, including harriers and foxhounds. Topsell describes these dogs as ‘endued with the virtue of smelling’ (1658: 130), and Markham remarks on the miniature beagle ‘which may be carried in a man’s glove’, and which might have been used for hunting prey through woodland undergrowth. (B) In keeping with the association of dogs and other animals with identities defined by gender, class or race, Sir Toby calls Maria ‘a beagle true bred, and one that adores me’ (TN 2.3.174–5): what seems a compliment enforces Maria’s secondary, dependent status as servant of Toby’s whims. Like a good dog, she plots against Malvolio to entertain her ‘master’ and like a good dog she is rewarded for her success – with marriage to Sir Toby, confirming that women are chattel and that marriage involves an unequal master–servant relationship. Women and dogs are likewise aligned in TIM , albeit to slightly different ends. After his retreat into the forest and his embrace of misanthropy, Timon tells Alcibiades to leave him alone and ‘take / [his] beagles’ with him (4.3.173–4). Timon refers to Alcibiades’s two companions, the prostitutes Phrynia and Timandra, who have come looking for the gold Timon is reputed to have. Timon makes no distinction between Alcibiades and the two whores; indeed, he greets Alcibiades by saying, ‘I do wish thou wert a dog / That I might love thee something’ 49

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(4.3.55–6), which suggests that for Timon, being a prostitute (a beagle) does not differ much from being a captain (a dog), and perhaps that being a human is worse than being an animal. (C) Stewart (2004) notes the prevalence of beagle references at the court of James I (who called Robert Cecil his ‘little beagle’), and argues that the animal symbolizes James’s style of government by proxy. KR bear, bear-baiting, bearward. (A) Ursos arctos, or the Eurasian brown bear, was extinct in England by the early Middle Ages but present throughout Europe. The word ‘bear’ derives from the Old English ‘bera’ meaning ‘brown’; however, polar bears (Ursus maritimus) were also known among Europeans and might be the source for references to white bears in heraldry or in the plays. Bears feature in medieval English place names, probably linked to the surnames of associated families, and are a common feature in heraldic crests and coats of arms, usually signifying strength and ruthlessness. The white bear and the muzzled bear, for instance, featured in the badges and banners of Richard Neville (1428–71) and John Dudley (1504–53) respectively, both Earls of Warwick. Bears were imported to England for bear-baiting, a blood sport similar to bull-baiting, in which dogs were set on a chained bear to ‘bait’ or worry in a ‘bear garden’, a pit or arena. From the fifteenth century, the monarchy appointed an official bearward to oversee the sport. Geographically, the theatre and the bear garden shared space in the liberties in Southwark. Bears were carefully trained and tended even for baiting, and because of their scarcity and the costs of importation, they were valuable; some especially ferocious or entertaining individuals were known by name. Many bears were also used in a less violent manner and trained, for instance, to dance, tumble and perform tricks. Training and restraint for both baiting and dancing usually involved a muzzle, a nose-ring and a staff. Bears were thought to be born without shape and licked into form by their mothers. Topsell confirms that bears are believed to be ‘perfected after littering’ (1607: 28, emphasis added). He notes that they are known to be vile and lustful creatures, difficult to tame and prone to violence even when raised from cubs by humans, a reputation he supports by citing a biblical verse: God’s anger is like that of ‘a bear robbed of her whelps’ (Hos. 13.8, GNV). He also remarks on their upright posture in fighting and on the toughness of their hides (32), but also on their fondness for honey, which derives in part, he claims, from their poor vision, remedied by bee stings. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne joins a host of natural historians (including Topsell) in rejecting the idea that licking forms cubs, considering the myth an assault on God’s sole claim to creative power (1981: 179). Bear-baiting drew a good bit of commentary, both for and against. Patten (1575) describes the inclusion of a baited bear for the entertainment of Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth Castle as ‘a matter of goodly relief’ and a ‘very pleasant’ sport’ (23). German traveller Paul Hentzner observed the whipping of a blind bear (1797: 30); Dekker (1609) 50

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describes the whipping of blind Harry Hunks, a named bear likely past his prime. Hunks was attacked, says Dekker, by ‘creatures that had the shapes of men and the faces of Christians’ and whipped until he was bloody (sig. B2r). Dekker’s language reveals both popular engagement with baiting and occasional horror at its capacity to turn humans into beasts. (B) The plays contain copious references to both the material and the metaphorical aspects of the bear. A sense of the international trade in animals emerges from references in MAC (3.4.98) and H5 (3.7.143) to Russian bears, which were probably larger and fiercer than the common sort of European bear. The astrological constellation of the Great Bear is invoked in a description of a storm in OTH : ‘The wind-shaked surge, with high and monstrous mane, / Seems to cast water on the burning bear’ (2.1.13–14). But it is the bear’s wildness and aggression that usually inform its presence in the plays. When Menenius and Sicinius argue over the relationship between bears and lambs in Act 2 of COR , for instance, they both position Coriolanus as a violent beast. Menenius wants to defend Rome’s champion by celebrating his martial prowess, criticizing the ‘hungry plebeians’ who would ‘devour’ the ‘noble Martius’ and arguing that a bear cannot be expected to ‘live like a lamb’ (2.1.9–12). Sicinius registers instead the threat in a ‘lamb that baas like a bear’, suggesting that Coriolanus is simply a bear in sheep’s clothing, who will inevitably cannibalize his fellow Romans. Alexander describes Ajax as a man who ‘hath robbed many beasts of their particular additions’ – but this means Ajax is ‘churlish as the bear’ (TRO 1.2.19–21) as well as strong and aggressive. The power of Desdemona’s soothing influence in OTH is encapsulated in her ability to ‘sing the savageness out of a bear’ (4.1.186), a power that fails only when Othello, baited by Iago, hardens his heart and blocks his ears. In MND , Oberon fantasizes repeatedly that once dosed with love juice, Titania will fall for whatever terrible creature she sees first, ‘Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull’ (2.1.180), or ‘ounce or cat or bear’ (2.2.34). Helena calls herself ‘ugly as a bear’ who frightens even other animals away (2.2.98). In these instances, the bear’s inclusion among other dangerous animals signals not only the physical threat of the forest, but its intangible perils: it is a space removed from the punitive laws of Athens that block the lovers’ desires, but is therefore also free from the protections and constraints of civilization. Indeed, bears stand along with other wild animals for the hazards of love itself, a disruptive, bestializing emotion that provokes nearly every character in the play to potentially destructive action. Puck, the principle of chaos through whose interventions the plot confusions arise, chases the poor mechanicals in the guise of ‘[a] hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire’ (3.1.105), as if he were the embodiment of unruly nature. Perhaps the most famous example of the bear as a principle of random, consuming and destructive nature is the animal who devours Antigonus in WT . Leaving Perdita to die on the desert coast of Bohemia, Antigonus finds himself the prey of a bear, which is itself fleeing the hounds’ ‘savage clamor’ (3.3.55). And so Antigonus ‘exit[s], pursued by a bear’ (3.3.57 sd). The clown who tells the tale of Antigonus’s death says that the bear 51

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‘tore out his shoulder-bone’ (3.3.93) and ‘mocked him’ with its roars, even as the ship that bore him was wrecked by a terrible storm (3.3.95). The bear’s roars, the storm’s clamour and Antigonus’s cries of pain merge with the clown’s comical recounting of the scene to capture the chaotic nature of both nature and human affairs. The fact that the bear that pursues Antigonus is being hunted creates a chain of roles in which the bear enacts on a human character the very same violence that human beings intend to enact on it. The hunt is one of the most potent exercises of human dominion over nature in early modern England, but in Antigonus’s case the mirroring of hunter, bear and hunted human might suggest to audiences that what goes around comes around. In fact, since bears can adopt a human-like posture by rising on their back legs – something baited bears would have done to free their forepaws for defence – the resemblance between bears and humans would have been particularly disturbing. Elsewhere, in a scene that resonates with the rough music of WT ’s bear episode, Hippolyta in MND recalls the Spartan hounds she hunted with in Crete, who generated so ‘musical a discord’ with their ‘sweet thunder’ as they ‘bayed the bear’ (4.1.112–17). MND shifts the role played by the hunted bear from the terrifying avatar of an unruly natural and supernatural world to the proper target of human predation. The play does so at the very moment when order is about to be reestablished, the lovers sorted and everyone neatly married off at an entertainment provided by ludicrously inept artisan players – in short, just as civilization, including class divisions and gender hierarchy, is about to be reasserted. Bear-hunts were a distant memory to early modern audiences, while bear-baiting was a familiar sport, one conducted within hearing – and probably within smelling – distance of the Globe theatre. Although he is a ‘wolf’ to Rome’s citizens (COR 2.1.7), Coriolanus also functions as a bear (2.1.11–12), a violent, barely-restrained warrior in the midst of tame creatures. In scenes in which he stands before the citizens to show his wounds, he is like nothing so much as the baited bear, something reflected in his repeated characterization of the ‘hungry plebeians’ (2.1.9) as ‘beasts’ who, though so much less powerful than he, retain the ability to vex him nearly to death (2.1.6). As Höfele points out, standing before the citizens is intolerable to Coriolanus, leading to his nearhysterical pleas to be released from the chains of custom (2011: 109). In 2H6, the Yorkist Earl of Warwick is identified with the ‘rampant bear chained to the ragged staff’ on his coat of arms (5.1.203). Clifford, incensed by the treachery of Richard’s pawns, Warwick and Salisbury, scoffs, ‘Are these thy bears? We’ll bait thy bears to death / And manacle the bearherd in their chains, / If thou dar’st bring them to the baiting place’ (5.1.148–50). In return, Richard calls him a ‘cur’ who turns tail when raked by the bear’s paw (5.1.151–4). In 3H6, York’s son, later King Richard III, describes his father fighting on the battlefield ‘as a bear encompassed round with dogs’ (2.1.15). These images operate in different ways: in the first instance, bear-baiting imagery suggests that Warwick and company are not their own masters, but beasts that are easily manipulated by York, the bearward who earns Clifford’s ire and who will be chained as if he were merely another animal; in the second instance, York’s attacking foes are portrayed as lesser beings intent on destroying a natural monarch. Yet both images liken the bestializing violence 52

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of war and politics to the bloody pits of the bear arenas, and register the rapid, fickle inversions that bring one or another kind of leader to power, only to see him toppled by yet another pack of schemers. Characters positioned as baited bears include, in addition to Coriolanus, Malvolio in TN , Macbeth, and Gloucester in LR . In TN , Fabian, Toby and Andrew take revenge on Malvolio for the many slights they have received at his hands, including his report to Olivia of Fabian’s attendance at a bear-baiting (apparently the puritanical Malvolio assumes this will be a mark against the servant). Appropriately, then, they conspire to imprison and torment Malvolio: ‘To anger him we’ll have the bear again, and we’ll fool him black and blue’ (2.5.8–9),’ says Toby. Indeed, Malvolio promises at the play’s conclusion to be revenged ‘on the whole pack of you’ (5.1.371), implicitly calling his tormenters hounds, and seeing himself as a bear who, as was the practice at baiting events, has been released from the stake in order to more easily attack the dogs. Olivia also feels like a staked bear because of her obsessive desire for Cesario: she asks the cross-dressed Viola, ‘Have you not set mine honor at the stake / And baited it with all th’ unmuzzled thoughts / That tyrannous heart can think?’ (3.1.116–18). MAC ends with its protagonist claiming ‘They have tied me to the stake; I cannot fly, / But bear-like I must fight the course’ (5.7.1–2). With his wife dead and his castle under siege by 10,000 English soldiers carrying tree limbs from Birnam Wood, Macbeth is locked in place, paralyzed both by his unwarranted confidence in his own indestructibility and by his sense of persecution. He dismisses all who bring him evil news: the servant who reports the number of the enemy is a ‘cream-faced loon’ and a ‘goose’ (5.3.11–12), and the messenger who relays the movement of the wood is a ‘[l]iar and slave’ (5.5.34). Indeed, Macbeth defies all comers including Macduff, fighting his foretold executioner even after learning he fulfils the witches’ prophecy that Macbeth can only be killed by one who is not ‘of woman born’ (4.1.79). He refuses, he proclaims, ‘To kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet, / And to be baited with the rabble’s curse’ (5.8.28–9), likening the crowd’s taunts to the barking and snapping of mastiffs in the bear arena. LR ’s Gloucester casts himself as a baited bear when Regan and Cornwall bind and interrogate him: ‘I am tied to the stake and I must stand the course’ (3.7.54), he says, just before he is blinded and turned out of his own home. Like Macbeth, Gloucester is still confident in his position, based on his sense of rank and age, demonstrating courage and endurance comparable to that of a bear. Like Macbeth, he is proven terribly wrong by events, making him more like a baited bear even than he could have imagined. In both plays, the mastiffs triumph, just as they usually did in the bear garden. Lear, too, summons the image of the wild bear, as if the play is full of the violence associated with the animal: in a moment that resonates with Antigonus’ experience (given the concatenation of storm and vicious animal), Lear remarks that the viciousness of the storm on the heath pales in comparison to his daughters’ viciously unnatural behaviour. They are more dangerous to life than the teeth of a bear, he implies: ‘Thou’dst shun a bear, / But if thy flight lay toward the roaring sea, / Thou’dst meet the bear i’the mouth’ (3.4.9–11). 53

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Beatrice in ADO offers an extended play on the idea of the bearward or berrord (pronounced ‘beard’ at the time): chided for being ‘curst’ or sharp-tongued, she responds that she ‘could not endure a husband with a beard on his face’ (2.1.26–7), but also claims she would not want one without a beard since [h]e that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him. Therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bearward and lead his apes into hell. (2.1.30–5) Bear training and training apes overlapped; this allows Beatrice to pun on the homophones beard/bearward and invoke the proverb, ‘Those that die maids lead apes in hell’ (Tilley 1950: M37). The proverb’s exact meaning is unclear: it may simply mean that old maids are punished, or it may be a condemnation of women who remain celibate (since they will be likely to fornicate, thereby becoming ape-like, or lesser beings). Regardless, the exchange revolves around the idea of marriage as a kind of taming or even imprisonment. Beatrice prefers to have no bearward governing her life and says that she would rather take payment for leading apes into hell, although, she claims, the devil will reject her and so she will still end up in heaven (2.1.37–43). Making an effort to woo Anne Page in WIV , Slender boasts he has ‘seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain’ (1.1.275–7). Sackerson was a famous bear featured in fights at the Bear Garden (the existence of named bears like Sackerson, Harry Hunks or George Stone indicate that some bears were tough and successful enough to have repeated appearances and become crowd favourites). Slender’s attendance at the baiting of this famous bear marks him as a lout; not only does he ‘love the sport well’, wasting money and time on it, but he ends his comment by mocking women and inadvertently comparing them to ugly bears through his tenuous grasp of grammar. Slender’s reference to bear-baiting and Sackerson seems at first a minor nod to topicality, but as the play progresses and Falstaff is repeatedly shamed, tricked and beaten, the reference begins to take on greater significance. Falstaff’s punishment may be seen as a kind of sporting retribution for his poaching of animals and wives: he starts the play poaching deer, and goes on to try to seduce Mistresses Page and Ford. Bears were thought to be especially lecherous – Edmund, for instance, mockingly blames his ‘rough and lecherous’ nature on his birth under the sign of the bear, Ursa Major (LR 1.2.130–1). In 1H4, Falstaff tells Prince Hal that he is ‘melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged bear’ (1.2.71). There are several possible meanings of ‘lugged’ at work here. It can signify a chained and so a baited bear, one pulled by the ring in its nose, but it can also by extension refer to a castrated animal (a gib cat is also castrated), and certainly the image as a whole emphasizes Falstaff’s sense of his constraints in love and finance. That the fat knight is repeatedly made the butt of tricks and jokes in WIV as well as 1H4 and 2H4 makes him a target of baiting, and of course his size makes him 54

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resemble a bear. The result is equivocal: it is possible to read him either as a beast who is a danger to civilized men and women, or as an abused and emasculated creature who cannot control the uses to which others put him, or both. References to bears’ care for their young occur several times in the plays. The ferocity with which mother bears defend their cubs is touched on by King John in E3 when he cheers the French forces battling Edward: ‘Fight, Frenchmen, Fight; be like the field of bears / When they defend their younglings in their caves’ (4.118–19). In LR , Kent is told that the night on which Lear wanders outdoors is so vile that the ‘cub-drawn bear would couch’ (3.1.12), meaning that even a bear starved with suckling her cubs would shelter rather than hunt for food. In 3H6, Richard Duke of Gloucester fully likens his deformed shape to ‘a chaos or an unlicked bear whelp, / That carries no impression like the dam’ (3.2.161–2). He alludes here to the myth that bear cubs are liked into literal shape by their mother’s tongue. The importance of Richard’s birth preoccupies him and others throughout 3H6 and R3, as characters look to his unnatural birth for an explanation of his evil deeds. The tradition that holds he was born by cesarean section, feet first, already having teeth, persists from More through Holinshed. (C) Quiller-Couch and Wilson (1931) speculate in their edition that the bear in WT is real. Coghill (1958) rejects that theory, arguing that a real bear would have been too dangerous, while an actor in a bear’s suit would have been comedic. Gurr (1983) links the bear to the statue in WT , viewing both as theatrical devices. Grant (2001) and Ravelhofer (2002) return to the question of whether the bear in WT is real or performed, providing evidence that the Globe owned white (polar) bears. Scott-Warren (2003) links blood and the comedy of humouralism through baiting imagery. Ramsey-Kurz (2007) reads Katherina’s transformation in SHR as one from baited bear to falcon. Paster (2004) uses Falstaff’s reference to lugged bears as the starting point for her analysis of the shared embodiment and humouralism of animals and humans in early modernity. Fudge (2000b), Hawkes (2002) and Höfele (2011) offer readings that account for the complexity of the unstable human and animal subject positions occupied by spectators and displayed creatures in the bear garden: for Fudge, anxieties like Dekker’s about the reduction of humans to beastly behaviour attest to the instability of human–animal distinction; Hawkes makes the story of Harry Hunks the centrepiece of his analysis of the many overlaps between baiting and theatre; Höfele elaborates the connections between the theatre and other forms of punitive spectacles in his treatment of COR as a baiting play, to uncover the range of perspectives provided by the presence of animals in Shakespeare’s plays. Quilligan (2016) links the bear in WT to early modern attitudes toward motherhood; Boehrer revisits the theatrical uses of bears, both real and metaphoric. KR beast, beastly. (A) In its earliest sense and still applicable in Shakespeare’s day, beast meant simply a living creature. Bees and hornets, as well as sheep and deer, could be called beasts. This inclusive sense of the word has now been replaced by ‘animal’, 55

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which in the early modern period meant, more narrowly, an animate being. Gradually during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘beast’ came to be used more commonly to refer to a quadruped mammal, reflecting the influence of Latin bestia and Old French beste, both of which applied to large, dangerous animals or monsters, as well as to domesticated livestock. Thus, beasts are distinct from fish or fowl in the KJV translation of Genesis 1, for instance. The term ‘beast’ is also used to refer to humans who demonstrate beast-like qualities or behaviour, or to reflect the bodily appetites and behaviour that threaten humans’ spiritual life. This usage draws on the connotation of lowness or degeneration that constitutes one strand of the term’s meaning. Topsell defends his decision to write on beasts by declaring ‘the knowledge of beasts, like as the knowledge of the other creatures and works of God, is divine, and beasts are all useful to human beings, even those that are dangerous since they act as warnings’ (1658: Epistle). Stubbes (1583) condemned the abuse of even ‘bloody beasts’ through baiting and other sports, since ‘they are good creatures in their own nature and kind, and made to set forth the glory and magnificence of the great God’ (sig. Q5v). (B) Shakespeare draws on the many and complex meanings of beast in his works. The fearsomeness and strangeness of beasts is evident in Caliban’s treatment in TMP , albeit in a comic mode (2.2.30; 4.1.140). Actual dangerous beasts are rare, except for the boar in VEN and the bear in WT . When Snug impersonates a lion in the play-withinthe-play at the conclusion of MND , he is introduced by Quince as ‘[t]his grisly beast, which Lion hight by name’ (5.1.138). Snug-as-Lion then apologizes for frightening the ladies, leading Theseus to call him a ‘gentle beast, and of a good conscience’ (5.1.225). The paradox of the gentle beast is frequently deployed to remind audiences that animals are capable of displaying gentler or more merciful behaviour than humans. When Lady Anne tells Richard that there is ‘[n]o beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity’, she means to rebuke him for violating law, custom and religion by killing her husband (R3 1.2.71). But Richard turns the paradox to his advantage, claiming, ‘I know none [i.e. pity], and therefore am no beast’ (1.2.72). Katherine in LLL quips and puns along with Boyet, likewise employing the paradox by calling him a ‘gentle beast’ when he tries to kiss her (2.1.222). In this instance, beastliness aligns with sexual desire, the human capacity for which is traditionally thought to reduce men and women to the level of rutting animals. Hamlet’s cry, ‘O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer’ (HAM 1.2.150–1), assumes that Gertrude’s sexual incontinence precipitated her marriage to Claudius. Indeed, whether women were humans or beasts seems in some cases not a settled question: Falstaff calls Mistress Quickly a ‘beast’ because she is ‘an otter [. . .] neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her’ (1H4 3.3.121–7). Since Quickly is defending herself on the basis of her marriage to an honest man, Falstaff’s remark means that because he can’t imagine her as sexually available (and she’s insulted him and tattled on him to the Prince), she is therefore not fully human. The implication that humans’ sexual desire makes them animal-like is notoriously invoked by Iago, who describes Othello’s liaison with Desdemona as ‘making the beast with two backs’ (OTH 1.1.114–15). ‘A horned man’s a monster, and 56

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a beast,’ Othello says later, and Iago affirms, ‘There’s many a beast then in a populous city’ (4.1.62–3). He thus invites Othello to imagine himself betrayed and made a commonplace cuckold who wears the figurative horns that signify emasculation through a wife’s loose conduct. Falstaff learns a thing or two about horns from Mistresses Page and Ford in WIV : tricked into wearing actual stag’s horns, he imagines he will enjoy the fruits of ‘powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some others a man a beast!’ (5.5.4–5). But instead of being transformed into a god-like Zeus (who wore his horns when he raped Europa in the form of a bull) as he anticipates, Falstaff is turned into the target of the hunt by his ‘doe’, Mistress Ford, and he is tormented, punished, but ultimately forgiven for his presumption (5.5.18). The ladder of creation is a slippery one. Like Falstaff, Timon of Athens aspires to scale its heights, but finds himself destroyed by his profligacy, at which point he withdraws into misanthropy, lamenting that ‘Th’unkindest beast [is] more kinder than mankind’ (TIM 4.1.36). Timon’s error, manifest in the play’s depiction of his fate, is not in thinking that beasts can be kind (which, as noted, is a commonplace of Renaissance thought) but rather in denigrating all ‘mankind’ and elevating animals above them. Timon can neither become fully a beast nor tolerate himself as human: he debates the question with Apemantus but concludes that to ‘remain a beast with the beasts’ would leave him vulnerable to attack by those beasts below him on the ladder of creation (4.3.322). ‘What beast couldst thou be that were not subject to a beast?’ Timon asks (4.3.341–2). It seems fitting, then, that his epitaph reads: ‘Timon is dead, who hath outstretched his span, / Some beast read this, there does not live a man’ (5.4.3–4). Hamlet reproaches himself for failing to avenge his father’s death by meditating on what makes a human being different from a beast, ‘If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed?’ (HAM 4.4.33–4). The fact that humans and animals share the bodily experiences of life (including sex, as is clear from his words about Gertrude) constantly perplexes Hamlet, leaving him at times sounding very like Timon. About Osric he murmurs to Horatio, ‘Let a beast be lord of beasts and his crib shall stand at the king’s mess’ (5.2.72–4), meaning that rich men will be welcome to feed at the royal table despite their lack of actual human accomplishments. Other comparisons of humans to beasts are designed to remove characters from human status altogether. Tamora’s life, Lucius announces in TIT , ‘was beastly and devoid of pity’ (5.3.198), for which reason her corpse will be food for wild animals. Coriolanus compares Rome’s citizens to the mythical Hydra, ‘[t]he beast / With many heads’, as they butt him away from the city for his perceived tyranny (COR 4.1.1–2). Yet humans and beasts can be aligned in their reliance on the material support of the earth and its fruits, as is the case in ANT , when Antony praises Egypt over Rome: ‘Our dungy earth alike / Feeds beast as man’ (1.1.36–7). Of course, although this moment alludes to the richness of Egypt’s soil (and its queen), it also invokes the atmosphere of eroticized decay associated with the Nile. It is also a gesture toward Antony and Cleopatra’s fantasy of escape from the political burdens of their lives – unlike Rome, Egypt seems to promise a more simple, natural life. 57

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(C) Women and beasts, Höfele argues (2003), are posited as the Other to ‘man’, but in TIM they collude as internal aspects of the protagonist, leading to his self-annihilation. Pfister (2009) uses COR to illustrate the continued difficulty of distinguishing human from beast even in an era that both emphasized the religious reason for that distinction and developed increasingly rational sciences for detecting it. Shannon (2013) notes the importance of understanding the variety encompassed by a term like ‘beast’, in contrast to the way the word ‘animal’ or the phrase ‘the animal’ is used in early modern discourse (18–19). Vienne-Gruerrin (2016) discusses beast as an insult (79–82), while Steel (2020) discusses the beast–animal distinction. KR bee, beehive, hive. (A) The term ‘bee’ refers to one of over 30,000 species in the Superfamily Apoidea, all of which feed on pollen and nectar. In Shakespeare’s works, however, ‘bee’ invariably signifies the familiar honeybee (Apis mellifera), also called the hive bee. Because wax and honey were valuable commodities, beekeeping was widely practised in the early modern period, as it had been for centuries. Indeed, Virgil’s fourth Georgic served as a bee-keeping manual in Shakespeare’s day and provided the basic elements for which bees were praised, including their ability to work for the common good. Early modern writers echo Virgil’s admiration for bees, especially worker bees, which were lauded as models of tireless industry, chastity and productivity. The term ‘hive’ or ‘beehive’ technically refers to a human-made nest for bees, to make the extraction of honey easier. (Bees in the wild typically build their nests in hollow trees.) A traditional hive was shaped like a dome or an upended basket; hence it was sometimes called a ‘skep’ (from OE sceppe, meaning basket or bushel). However, the term ‘hive’ in Shakespeare’s works often implies the totality of interactions and activities occurring within the hive. Honeybees are social insects with three distinct castes (monarch, workers and drones), which cooperate to raise their young. Thus, the hive has for centuries been a useful metaphor for complex organizations, as it is in some passages of Shakespeare’s works. (B) The fullest exposition of the beehive as a metaphor for a productive and ordered state occurs in H5. The Archbishop of Canterbury develops the analogy at great length, his point being that the cooperative behaviour of bees in the hive instructs human beings how best to organize their own society. Therefore doth heaven divide The state of man in diverse functions, Setting endeavour in continual motion, To which is fixed, as an aim or butt, Obedience. For so work the honey-bees, Creatures that by a rule in nature teach The act of order to a peopled kingdom. They have a king and officers of sorts,

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Where some like magistrates correct at home, Others like merchants venture trade abroad, Others like soldiers, armed in their stings, Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds, Which pillage they with merry march bring home To the tent-royal of their emperor, Who busied in his majesty surveys The singing masons building roofs of gold, The civil citizens kneading up the honey, The poor mechanic porters crowding in Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate, The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum, Delivering o’er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone. I this infer, That many things having full reference To one consent may work contrariously, As many arrows loosed several ways Come to one mark [. . .] (H5 1.2.183–208) The Archbishop’s depiction has utopian elements: the workers are happy in their labour, they march merrily, they sing and they knead honey. But this is not a disinterested natural analogy. Specifically, the Archbishop aims to persuade Henry V to go to war to make good England’s ancient claim to territory in France. More generally, the Archbishop uses the hive metaphor to support an essentially conservative vision: society will function harmoniously if the members of each segment of the population, from merchants to labourers, accept their allotted station and obey the ruler – and thus uphold existing power structures, in which the Archbishop has a prominent stake. Bees are said to ‘have a king’ or ‘emperor’ because it was not known until the eighteenth century that the monarch of the hive was female. Versions of the hive metaphor occur in other Shakespearean works. Warwick, reporting to Henry VI that Duke Humphrey has been murdered, uses the metaphor to convey the disorder that has erupted in Parliament during Henry’s absence: ‘The commons, like an angry hive of bees / That want their leader, scatter up and down / And care not who they sting in his revenge’ (2H6 3.2.125–7). Warwick’s analogy is an ancient one, drawn from Pliny’s observation that when the hive lacks a leader, the bees scatter and seek another (1940: 467 [11.55–8]). The normal, well-ordered functioning of the hive, however, accommodates the loss of worker bees, in particular the passing of the older generation. Lucrece’s father, Lucretius, evokes the hive in arguing that it is natural for parents to outlive their children. Confronting the body of his daughter, he exclaims in anguish, ‘The old bees die, the young possess their hive. / Then live, sweet Lucrece, live again and see / Thy father die, and not thy father thee!’ (LUC 1769–71).

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So, too, the King of France in AWW remembers that his old friend, Bertram’s father, had said that he wished not to keep living when his ‘ “flame lacks oil” ’ (1.2.59). The King agrees: ‘I, after him, do after him wish too, / Since I nor wax nor honey can bring home, / I quickly were dissolved from my hive / To give some labourers room’ (1.2.64–7). The Archbishop’s characterization of bees as ‘like soldiers, armed in their stings’ (H5 1.2.193) is echoed in several plays. The combination of the hive’s highly ordered, hierarchical organization, the worker bees’ uniformity and adherence to duty, and the fact that they have weapons (stings) makes the hive a useful metaphor for the army. Ulysses blames the Greek army’s failure to respect those in authority over them for their inability to conquer Troy: ‘When that the general is not like the hive / To whom the foragers shall all repair, / What honey is expected?’ (TRO 1.3.81–3). As Bevington observes (AR3: 186, n. 81), citing Samuel Johnson, this complex rhetorical question seems to be based on a negative syllogism: ‘when the general is not to the army as the hive is to the bees, the repository of the stock of every individual’, then nothing can be accomplished. In TIT , the First Goth professes the army’s loyalty to Lucius by drawing an analogy with the swarm: ‘We’ll follow where thou lead’st, / Like stinging bees in hottest summer’s day / Led by their master to the flowered fields, / And be avenged on cursed Tamora’ (5.1.13– 16). In a less flattering comparison, Talbot likens the English army to bees that Joan of Arc and the French troops have forced out of their hive: she ‘[d]rives back our troops and conquers as she lists: / So bees with smoke and doves with noisome stench / Are from their hives and houses driven away’ (1H6 1.5.22–4). Smoking a hive is the traditional mode of subduing bees in order to remove the honey from the hive. Taking the hive’s honey is frequently alluded to in Shakespeare’s works as theft, for which drones and wasps are often blamed. Overheard by Pericles, the Third Fisherman claims that if he and his fellow fishermen were supported by King Simonides, they would stop those who unscrupulously exploit the nation’s resources for selfish gain: ‘We would purge the land of these drones that rob the bee of her honey’ (PER 2.1.45–6), he declares. The drone, whose function was not understood in the early modern period, is assumed to be too lazy to produce honey and so instead steals it from the worker bees. In 2H6, the Marquess of Suffolk expresses his contempt for those base individuals who are fearful of great enemies and confine their attacks to the lowly and vulnerable: ‘Drones suck not eagles’ blood, but rob beehives’ (4.1.109), he declares. Wasps, too, were seen as the rapacious enemies of the hive. Lucrece compares herself to a useless drone after she has been raped and refers to Tarquin (whom she does not name) as the wasp that has stolen her carefully guarded honey, her chastity. Addressing her absent husband, she mourns: My honey lost, and I, a drone-like bee, Have no perfection of my summer left, But robbed and ransacked by injurious theft. In thy weak hive a wand’ring wasp hath crept And sucked the honey which thy chaste bee kept. (LUC 836–40)

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She depicts herself as a once-chaste worker bee who has failed in her duty to protect her honey and is now as useless as a drone. Her analogy prefigures her death, for it was known that worker bees kill drones before the onset of winter. As for the wasp Tarquin, entomologists observe that a genus of wasp-like bees, Nomada, grow up in the hives of honeybees as social parasites and take the honey intended for the larvae (Chinery 1993: 285). Ariel’s self-confessed behaviour in TMP – ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I, / In a cowslip’s bell I lie’ (5.1.88–9) – makes him a pleasing amalgamation of thieving wasp, industrious worker bee and lazy drone. Shylock complains that his servant, Lancelot, is guilty of a sort of theft, for although he does little work, he is ‘a huge feeder’. Shylock determines to get rid of him, therefore, ‘for [d]rones hive not with me’ (MV 2.5.44, 46). In JC , stealing from bees is a metaphor for hypocrisy. Antony calls attention to the shocking distance between Brutus’ words – ‘ “Long live! Hail, Caesar!” ’ – and the ‘hole [he] made in Caesar’s heart’ (5.1.32, 31). Cassius retorts that it is Antony who hides his hostility behind sweet words. We do not know how you will strike, Cassius remarks. ‘But, for your words, they rob the Hybla bees, / And leave them honeyless’ (5.1.34–5). ‘Not stingless too?’ (5.1.35), Antony fires back, implying that his funeral oration has indeed been effective, its apparently supportive words delivering a rhetorical sting to Caesar’s assassins. At this, Brutus jumps into the insult exchange and in effect calls Antony’s funeral oration just so many empty words: ‘O yes, and soundless too. / For you have stol’n their buzzing, Antony, / And very wisely threat before you sting’ (5.1.35–8). Occasionally in Shakespeare’s plays, the wasps that steal honey are also said to slaughter the bees that guard it. In TGV , Julia, having torn up the longed-for letter sent by Proteus, compares her fingers, in Petrarchan-like terms, to wasps: ‘O hateful hands, to tear such loving words! / Injurious wasps, to feed on such sweet honey / And kill the bees that yield it with your stings!’ (1.2.105–7). Sons are implicitly compared to wasps in 2H4, when the king bemoans the fate of fathers, who, like worker bees, toil incessantly to support their sons: For this they have been thoughtful to invest Their sons with arts and martial exercise, When, like the bee tolling from every flower, Our thighs packed with wax, our mouths with honey, We bring it to the hive and, like the bees, Are murdered for our pains. [. . .] (4.3.203–8) The king’s phrase, ‘Our thighs packed with wax’, is inaccurate in naturalistic terms. Bees’ thighs (or, rather, the filaments on their thighs) pick up pollen as bees suck nectar from flowers. The king’s phrase, however, is accurate in emotional terms, for it conveys the heavy weight of responsibility felt by fathers who labour to bring out the best in their heirs. Bees’ wax is most commonly associated in Shakespeare’s works with seals for letters and documents. Beeswax candles were too expensive for all but the very wealthy. 61

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Innogen thanks both the seal and the bees from whose hive the seal was made as she opens a letter from Posthumus: ‘Good wax, thy leave. Blest be / You bees that make these locks of counsel!’ (CYM 3.2.35–6). Her play on ‘be’ and ‘bees’ indicates her joy, although what she regards as the precious ‘counsel’ locked or kept confidential by the sealing wax is, in fact, composed of lies. The rebel Jack Cade comments on the binding power of the law when one seals, or agrees, a contract, quipping that a bee’s wax is its most potent weapon: ‘Some say the bee stings, but I say ’tis the bee’s wax [that stings]; for I did but seal once to a thing and I was never mine own man since’ (2H6 4.2.75–7). Three references to the beehive in Shakespeare’s works turn the metaphor to darker uses. After Caliban curses him and his daughter, Prospero promises to punish him: ‘For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps / [. . .] / thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging / Than bees that made ’em’ (TMP 1.2.326, 329– 31). Prospero evidently envisions a pattern of bruises left by pinching and stinging as intricate as a beehive’s structure of hexagonal cells. In a gloomy exchange with the Earl of Warwick in 2H4, the King alludes to the famous biblical riddle posed by Samson: ‘out of the eater came meat, and out of the strong came swetenes’ (Judg. 14.14, GNV). Samson had earlier come upon a beehive (‘swetenes’) in the carcass of a lion (‘the eater’), the answer to the riddle. Warwick has just attempted to assure King Henry that Prince Hal will reform, ‘[t]urning past evils to advantages’ (2H4 4.3.78). The King sceptically replies, ‘ ’Tis seldom when the bee doth leave her comb / In the dead carrion’ (4.3.79–80). That is, the chances of Hal reforming are as slim as coming upon the sight that led to Samson’s riddle. The hive and the carcass (albeit metaphors) are juxtaposed once again in LC , when the narrator introduces the complaining maiden: ‘Upon her head a plaited hive of straw, / Which fortified her visage from the sun, / Whereon the thought might think sometime it saw / The carcass of a beauty spent and done’ (8–11). Duncan-Jones notes that high-domed straw hats were worn not only by those in the country: ‘a straw hat survives at Hatfield House allegedly worn by Elizabeth [I] when a prisoner there’ (AR3: 432, n. 8). (C) Analogies between bee and human society may be found throughout classical literature (see Feeny 2014); Virgil’s fourth Georgic (1999: 229–39) is the fullest development of the analogy. Biblical appreciation of honey is well known, as in the description of Canaan as ‘a land that floweth with milke and hony’ (Exod. 3.17, GNV). But in contrast to classical praise of bees, the Bible represents bees as symbolic of enemies who surround and threaten God’s people, as at Psalm 118.12: ‘Thei came about me like bees, but they were quenched as a fyre of thornes: for in the Name of the Lord I shal destroie them’ (GNV). Samson’s riddle (at Judg. 14.14) may reflect the long-standing belief that bees are generated from dead flesh, usually that of oxen (see H. Harris 2002: 16). The representation of bees in medieval bestiaries is highly laudatory, reflecting Virgilian praise (see T. White [1950: 153–9]). The bee is the first entry in Moffet’s volume on insects, a position that indicates its importance in his estimation. His praise of the bee is unqualified: ‘Of all Insects, Bees are the principal and are chiefly to be admired, being the only creature of that kinde [i.e., insects], framed 62

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for the nourishment of Man; but the rest are procreated either to be useful in physick, or for delight of the eyes, the pleasure of the ears, or the compleating and ornament of the body; the Bee doth exceed them all in every one of these’ (Topsell 1658: 889). Neri (2011: 115) notes that an engraving of a bee and its parts in 1630 is in the first image of a microscopical observation to be published. For the mid-seventeenth-century interest in innovatory methods of beekeeping and of constructing beehives, and for the politicization of bee analogies in the prelude to civil war in England, see Raylor (1992). This politicization, in which the beehive analogy was adopted by Royalists, the ant bed, by Parliamentarians, explains Milton’s representation of the fallen angels as bees at Paradise Lost 1.768–76 (1998: 107). Olbricht (2006) compares the different conceptions of (human) labour embodied in early modern silkworm and beekeeping manuals. Grinnell (2016) argues that references to bees in Shakespeare’s works demonstrate a thorough knowledge of beekeeping. Campana (2013) considers the paradox of the hive analogy in H5, in which the comparison between a tiny insect and the nation’s sovereign is seen as appropriate. Gurr (1977) observes that the Archbishop’s application of the hive analogy in H5 is opposed to its well-known application in Erasmus. Corballis (1981) argues that Henry IV’s remark about bees in a carcass is not pessimistic about Hal’s chance of reformation because it refers to Virgil’s fourth Georgic rather than to Judges 14. Plant (1996) traces the history of the chaste bee in relation to Lucrece’s self-description. Jacobs (2020) discusses the ‘redemptive bee’ in Ariel’s song in TMP . KE beef. (A) The culinary term for the flesh of cattle, from the Old French boeuf. The English language features several such terms (e.g., pork, veal, mutton, venison, poultry), terms taken from Romance languages that distinguish the edible product of an animal from the animal itself. Beef and other words that designate meats in culinary contexts were assimilated into English following the Norman occupation, possibly reflecting the higher social rank or status – and therefore the use of the French language – among those regularly consuming animal flesh as part of their diet. Eating beef was thought to define the English in a number of ways. Geohumouralism, the association of certain humours (phlegm, blood, black and yellow bile) with geographical locations, dictated that the cold, wet climate of England allowed for ‘hotter’ stomachs and appetites, theoretically allowing the English to consume more meat than their peers in warmer countries. Beef was understood to generate courage; however, it was also a potentially damaging food for the wrong people. Beef was also linked to stupidity, slowness of both mind and body, possibly because it is hard to digest, and thus requires a robust body – assumed to be less quickwitted – to process it. Equally possible is simply the association of beef-eaters with the slow, ponderous cattle beef comes from. Yet eating beef was celebrated as defining the English character, so these negatives were outweighed by national pride. (B) The French Constable and Orleans comment that the English forces serving King Henry V are like ‘mastiffs in robustious and rough coming on, leaving their wits with their 63

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wives’ (H5 3.7.147–8). On top of this rude animal health, the English are given ‘great meals of beef and iron and steel’ (3.7.149), which makes them fight fiercely. The hope among the French is that the English troops are ‘shrewdly out of beef’ and so will have no stomach for battle (3.7.151). The two features of beef, its association with courage and sturdiness, and its tendency to make men stupid, define the English from the French perspective. Sir Andrew Aguecheeck in TN agrees: ‘I am a great eater of beef, and I believe that does harm to my wit’ (1.3.83–4). Thersites calls Ajax a ‘mongrel beef-witted lord’ in TRO (2.1.13): not only does he associate beef with slow wits, he also links both beef and witlessness to ‘mongrel’ status, making Ajax an ill-bred dog – ironic, since Thersites is a cynic, and thus himself a kind of dog (the term ‘cynic’ is derived from the Greek for dog-like). Katherina, starved by Petruccio as part of his plot to tame her, asks Grumio for meat. He teases her by mentioning and then rejecting dishes he could give her, such as ‘a piece of beef and mustard’ (SHR 4.3.23). Since beef is very choleric (i.e., it encourages anger), he urges her to have the mustard without the beef, or in other words to eat salad on its own. In MM , Lucio and Pompey discuss Mistress Overdo’s situation: the bawd Overdo has suffered from the closing of brothels in Vienna, so Pompey tells Lucio ‘she hath eaten up all her beef and she is herself in the tub’ (3.1.324–5). Pompey implies that in addition to running through her resources she is now also suffering from disease (a tub could refer to a sweating tub for fevers). Lucio’s response affirms that this is the way of things: ‘Ever your fresh whore and your powdered bawd’ (powdered meaning salted or preserved as well as cosmetically disguised, 3.1.327). If Overdo is salted meat, Falstaff is ‘sweet beef’ to the Prince in 1H4 (3.3.176), meaning fresh and unsalted. (C) Bullein warns in his Government of Health (1595) that beef can be dangerous because ‘it bringeth melancholy, and melancholious diseases, it is cold and dry of nature, and hard to digest, except it be of cholerick [hot-blooded] persons’ (60). Appelbaum (2000) offers a reading of TN ’s references to beef that challenges the usual editorial explanation for the connection between beef and stupidity, describing the complex early modern context from which the connection arose, but arguing that it hardly had the status of proverb. Appelbaum’s later work (2006) analyses beef amongst a wide range of food references in the plays from a materialist perspective, charting food’s role in constituting physical bodies as well as determining aspects of English Renaissance culture and the nuances of social interactions. KR beetle. (A) Insects of the order Coleoptera (from the Greek, ‘shield-wing’) with a hard exoskeleton, varying enormously in size, colouration and diet. The scarab or dung beetle had symbolic significance in the funeral rites of ancient Egypt because the dung orb it rolled resembled the sun and was therefore associated with the god of creation and renewal, Khepri. It was represented widely in jewellery and art. The stag beetle with its large size and horn-like mandibles (from which it gets its name) is described by Pliny (NH 11.34 [1940: 493]) and inspired Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1505 watercolour. Moffet, however, relegates all ‘greater’ beetles like the stag beetle to the category of 64

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Figure 2 Five salamanders and a stag beetle at left, sixteenth century, by Albrecht Dürer, watercolour. Photo: Dietmar Katz. Kupferstichkabinett, Staätliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Art Resource, NY.

dung-eaters (although in reality they eat decaying wood), a status that allows them to provide a moral lesson to human beings (1658: 1005–19) – their grandiose horns are no evidence of an exceptional nature. (B) The beetle that Macbeth invokes in his promise that night will cover his deeds seems to be a dung beetle since it is ‘shard-born’ or born from manure: ‘[E]re the bat hath flown / His cloistered flight, ere to black Hecate’s summons / The shard-born beetle, with his drowsy hums, / Hath rung night’s yawning peal, there shall be done / A deed of dreadful note’ (MAC 3.2.41–4). ‘Shards’ are pats of cow dung; Macbeth’s reference, like those in ANT (3.2.20) and CYM (3.3.20), alludes to the proverb, ‘The beetle flies over many sweet flowers and lights in a cowshard’ (Tilley 1950: B221; AR3 [ANT ]: 175, n. 20). Whether for moral instruction in humility, or as comparison to human perversity, the dung beetle’s association with ordure ensures its lowly status as a repulsive creature, as attested by its presence in Caliban’s curse in TMP (1.2.341) and the fairies’ preventive charm in MND . Isabella in MM , on the other hand, summons the beetle’s capacity for suffering – albeit in the interests of dismissing her brother’s fear of death – in her speech to Claudio: ‘The sense of death is most in apprehension, / And the poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies’ (3.1.78–81). KR 65

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bird. (A) Any warm-blooded vertebrate member of the class Aves. All birds have beaks and feathers, and most are capable of flight, with the exception of that group that includes the ostrich and the emu. Many species form large flocks; a number of species (including chickens, geese and turkeys) have been domesticated for food and other byproducts, or for companionship (as is true of the parrot and many songbirds). Individual birds have rich symbolic histories: the Holy Spirit is described in Mt. 3.16 and Lk. 3.22 as a descending dove, while a dove brings Noah an olive branch as evidence that the water has receded after the flood (Gen. 8.11, GNV), an image that is widely disseminated as an emblem of peace. Owls and ravens can serve as omens of evil; eagles are associated with courage and strength; the mythic phoenix symbolizes rebirth. Magpies are chatterers, while crowing cocks banish demons and ghosts. ‘Bird’ could also be a term of endearment, or a general epithet meant to indicate foolishness or triviality. Flocking behaviour lets birds serve as references to conformity, while their song is associated with dawn, with joy and pleasure, but also with a lack of awareness of looming threats. The care of birds for their young is a frequent analogy for human nurturing; their susceptibility to traps and snares, a representation of vulnerability. (B) Queen Margaret calls the fickle Warwick and King Lewis ‘birds of selfsame feather’ (3H6 3.3.161), echoing the proverb concerning birds of a feather that flock together (Tilley 1950: B393). Marina reflects on the caging of songbirds when she tells Lysimachus that she would be happy to be changed to ‘the meanest bird’ if only the gods would liberate her from the brothel in which she is trapped (PER 4.5.105). Lear reverses Marina’s imagined transformation when he wishes that he and Cordelia ‘alone will sing like birds i’the cage’ in prison (LR 5.3.9). The imprisoned King Henry VI greets his murderer, Richard of Gloucester, with the imagery of birds that are both easily entrapped and nurturers of their young: The bird that hath been limed in a bush With trembling wings misdoubteth every bush. And I, the hapless male to one sweet bird, Have now the fatal object in my eye Where my poor young was limed, was caught and killed. (3H6 5.6.13–17) Bird lime, often made from holly bark, is a sticky substance pasted onto tree branches to capture birds by making it impossible for them to fly. Henry’s lack of masculine aggression, his waffling and disinterest in ruling, are all present here: like the trembling bird made fearful by its experience of the trap, Henry has in fact been twice arrested, and while he may claim to be more innocent than a thief (which is what Richard’s description of his wariness involves), he reminds audiences of his prior unwariness. His son, Prince Edward, has died in part because of Henry’s weakness in surrendering the power of the throne to Warwick and Clarence. Like Lear, Henry wrongly imagined he could keep the title of king while divesting himself of its burdens. He is indeed a ‘hapless male’ in more ways than he might recognize in this scene. 66

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Other methods for trapping birds include using pits or snares. All three methods are mentioned in MAC when Lady Macduff and her son learn that Macduff has fled to England; to Ross she cites the counter-example to his abandonment, the wren, ‘the most diminutive of birds’ (4.2.10) that will nonetheless protect its nest against predators. After Ross leaves, Lady Macduff asks her son how he will live without a father: ‘As birds do, mother,’ he replies, but she remarks that he has never had to fear ‘the net nor lime, the pitfall nor the gin’ but he believes he is too ‘poor’ a bird to be ‘set for’ or ensnared (4.2.33–9). He is wrong: Lady Macduff cannot think where to ‘fly’, and the murderers arrive and kill the son, the ‘egg’ (4.2.75, 85). Adonis is ‘fastened’ in Venus’s arms like ‘a bird [that] lies tangled in a net’ (VEN 68, 67), while Venus herself is birdlike in her failure to enjoy the youth: ‘Even so poor birds deceived with painted grapes, / Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw’ (601–2). Shakespeare’s works resound with birdsong, but references to singing birds can be directed instead at less musical human voices, not to mention human concerns like the sexual pleasure that usually motivates birdsong. Thus, we find the melancholy Evans warbling, ‘To shallow rivers, to whose falls / Melodious birds sings madrigals – / There will we make our peds of roses (WIV 3.1.16–18). As a Welshman who partakes in his people’s long bardic history, Evans might be expected to sing almost as well as those ‘melodious birds’, but his poor grammar and mispronunciations jar despite whatever musical talent he may display. Evans’s song echoes PP : ‘There will we sit upon the rocks, / And see the shepherds feed their flocks, / By shallow rivers, by whose falls / Melodious birds sing madrigals’ (19.5–8). In both cases birds are associated with love, especially with the natural desires of youth and springtime. The refrain of the country tune sung by the two pages in AYL also links birdsong, spring and young love: ‘When birds do sing, hey ding a ding a ding, / Sweet lovers love the spring’ (5.3.20–1, 26–7, 32–3, 38–9). Tamora compares the ‘hounds and horns and sweet melodious birds’ who ‘chant melody on every bush’ to a ‘lullaby’ when she meets Aaron for a tryst during the court hunt in TIT (2.2.27, 12, 29). Since what is about to occur is the murder of Bassianus and the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, these apparently serene and harmonious images are deeply ironic – soon, events will deprive both Romans of their own voices and plunge Titus into madness. Birds mark time through their song, both because different birds give voice depending on whether it is day or night, and because birds create the dawn chorus. Birds are also heralds of seasons, whose appearance and disappearance can warn of an early spring or early winter. Perhaps the most famous instance of birds’ timekeeping is the debate between Romeo and Juliet the morning after they have consummated their marriage. Romeo hears the lark warning him to leave lest he be found in Verona and punished; Juliet hears the nightingale, hoping to keep him beside her longer (ROM 3.5.1–11). But she changes her opinion when he seems willing to stay and be arrested, saying instead, ‘It is the lark that sings so out of tune’ (3.5.27). Adonis begs to leave Venus, saying ‘the sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest’ (VEN 532), while Lucrece’s sobbing is drowned out by ‘[t]he little birds that tune their morning’s joy’ (LUC 1107). 67

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Looming disorder is signalled in JC when Caska reports that ‘the bird of night did sit / Even at noonday upon the market-place / Hooting and shrieking’ (1.3.26–8). The owl’s role as a bad omen is here compounded by its appearance in broad daylight. Westmoreland, who brings the good news of peace after rebellion in 2H4, is greeted by King Henry as ‘a summer bird / Which ever in the haunch of winter sings / The lifting up of day’ (4.3.91–3), as out of place as Caska’s owl perhaps, but more happily so. Birds can also convey aspiration either through their ability to soar above the earth or through the difficulty humans and other predators have reaching their nests to steal their eggs. Juliet’s Nurse grumbles over the job of bringing Romeo to her young charge: ‘I must another way, / To fetch a ladder by the which your love / Must climb a bird’s nest soon when it is dark’ (ROM 2.5.72–4). Her image makes Juliet’s bedroom the nest in which their union will take place, repeating the placement of Juliet on high that the balcony scene already established. In this case, however, the Nurse expects the creation of progeny that a nest implies. Benedick chides Don Pedro for appearing to woo Hero himself and not for Claudio. Claudio should be whipped for ‘[t]he flat transgression of a schoolboy, who, being overjoyed with finding a bird’s nest, shows it his companion, and he steals it’ (2.1.203–5). Don Pedro, however, assures Benedick he only steals the nest to ‘teach them [the birds] to sing, and restore them to their owner’ (2.1.212–13). Again, given that Hero’s supposed betrayal happens during a balcony scene, the image of a woman as a hard-to-get avian prize applies just as it does in Juliet’s case. (C) Early works offering summaries of birds and bird lore in Shakespeare’s works include Harting (1871), Phipson (1883), Geikie (1916), Stockelback (1940) and Harrison (1958). The association of birds with the measure of time is addressed by Pearce (1945). Birdsong and musicality are discussed by McDonnell (1964), Ingram (1972) and Wilson (2011). Bird symbolism and metaphors are treated in Bradbrook (1955), Babcock (1953), Halio (1963), Drew (1960), Daly (1978) and Showerman (2015). Issues of entrapment, snaring and escape feature in work by Breuer (2002), McLeod (2011) and Szatek-Tudor (2016). Bach (2016) considers the material uses of birds’ bodily components like quills and feathers and elsewhere (2020) surveys the metaphoric uses of Shakespeare’s birds. Mitchell (2013) considers the fate of a Shakespearean bird turned into an invasive species in the United States. KR birdlime, lime. (A) A sticky substance derived from plants, often from holly, boiled down and treated to create a gummy material used to trap birds. Birdlime was painted on bushes and twigs on which birds might alight; once their feet or plumage were coated, birds were trapped and unable to fly. Birdliming was a standard fowling (birdhunting) practice for both nobles and commoners. The spectacle of birds, especially songbirds, struggling to fly and crying in distress could provoke moral disgust in viewers, however, allowing liming to serve as an allegory for social and political abuse 68

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or as an analogy for evil plotting and trickery. Most references in the plays to birdlime involve the snaring of humans, or the fear of such entrapment. (B) In ADO , Ursula says of Beatrice, who has been tricked into falling for Benedick, ‘She’s limed, I warrant you!’ (3.1.104), and Proteus chastises Turio for failing to make Silvia his, saying Turio must ‘lay lime to tangle her desires’ (TGV 3.2.68). In 2H6, a play with multiple plots and counterplots, Suffolk tells Queen Margaret that he has ‘limed a bush’ (1.3.89) for Eleanor, the Duchess of Gloucester, while the Duchess later warns her husband that ‘York and impious Beaufort, that false priest, / Have all limed bushes to betray thy wings’ (2.4.53–4). The darkest example of birdlime imagery comes in Iago’s remark to Desdemona, ‘my invention / Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze’ (OTH 2.1.125–6). The reference to ‘frieze’, or woolen cloth, allows Iago to say that he is not adept at creative plotting, a piece of misdirection from this most devious character. McLeod (2011) discusses Desdemona as a limed bird in OTH , an innocent further ensnared by her own struggles, and ultimately crushed by the trap Iago lays for her. KR blind-worm. Also called slow-worm, Anguis fragilis was assumed in Shakespeare’s day to be a venomous serpent. Topsell, who declares that it is both blind and deaf, says it is dangerous when provoked, for its poison ‘is very strong’ (1658: 764). In fact, the blindworm is neither a worm nor a serpent, nor is it blind (or deaf). It is a reptile, a legless lizard having a smooth body and a metallic-looking sheen of grey-blue, brown or copperyred with almost iridescent flecks. Some blind-worms have dark zig-zag markings down their back resembling those of the adder. But despite this appearance and its reputation for being venomous, the blind-worm is completely harmless. It remains, according to naturalists, the ‘most poorly understood reptile’ in Britain (Beebee and Griffiths 2000: 117). It is among the ingredients of the witches’ brew in MAC , lumped together with a genuinely venomous serpent and, somewhat ironically, the leg of a lizard: ‘Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, / Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing, / For a charm of powerful trouble, / Like a hell-broth boil and bubble’ (4.1.16–19). When her fairies sing Titania to sleep in MND, they forbid all harmful creatures to come near her, including ‘Newts and blindworms’ (2.2.11). The blind-worm’s tiny eyes are easily missed; hence the assumption that it is blind. The melancholic Timon, digging in the ground, observes that mother earth produces food but also breeds ‘the black toad and adder blue, / The gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm’ along with other ‘abhorred births’ (TIM 4.3.180–2). KE bloodhound. This large scent-hound makes only one appearance in the plays. In 2H4, the animal’s use in hunting both large game and human beings lies behind Mistress Quickly’s description of the Beadle who, like a ‘starved bloodhound’, arraigns her and Doll Tearsheet (5.4.27). KR 69

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boar. (A) A wild species of swine (Sus scrofa), having tusks and a coat of coarse bristles, although the term may also refer to the uncastrated male of the species, wild or domesticated. Wild boars were once widespread and numerous in the British Isles (and continue to be so in Europe) but were hunted to extinction in England during the Middle Ages and somewhat later in Scotland. Records of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury appearances probably refer to boars imported from Europe for purposes of hunting and status. As game animals, or ‘beasts of venerie’, boars had a reputation in Shakespeare’s day for being fearsomely strong and wily. There have been many attempts over the centuries to reintroduce the boar to Britain. Recent attempts have been more successful, and wild boars may now be seen throughout southern England and in Wales and Scotland. But the reintroductions, both planned and unofficial, have not been without controversy. The rooting behaviour of the wild boar, which may increase biodiversity but may also damage crops, is the subject of ongoing study and debate. (B) In both ancient and early modern literature, the boar epitomizes savage strength. It was held to be equipped with weapons of offence (its tusks and powerful snout) and of defence (its coarse and bristly hide). Guillim (1638: 187) thus proposes it as a heraldic symbol for a warrior clad in complete armour. The boar’s ‘weapons’ are repeatedly evoked in Shakespeare’s works. Courageously defying Regan and her husband, Gloucester declares that he has helped King Lear escape to Dover ‘[b]ecause I would not see thy cruel nails / Pluck out his poor old eyes; nor thy fierce sister / In his anointed flesh stick boarish fangs’ (LR 3.7.55–7). The phrase ‘boarish fangs’ combines the savage with the venomous in Goneril’s behaviour; and the terrible juxtaposition of tender, quasi-divine flesh and razor-like teeth captures the extremes of human confrontation with the animal Other. In TIM , Alcibiades is called ‘a boar too savage [who] doth root up / His country’s peace’ (5.2.50–1). The description evokes Psalm 80.13, in which Israel is imagined as a carefully tended, ordered vineyard being savagely uprooted: ‘The wilde boare out of the wood hathe destroied it, and the wilde beastes of the field have eaten it up’ (GNV). Twice in Shakespeare’s works the boar appears equal in savagery to the most feared and fierce creatures of the Elizabethan imagination, lions and bears. Aaron claims in TIT that he is a lamb, unless opposed. Then, he warns, ‘[t]he chafed boar, the mountain lioness, / The ocean, swells not so as Aaron storms’ (4.2.140–1). What the lioness has in common with the boar is rage; the boar is ‘chafed’ or angered by being hunted; the lioness is ferociously determined to defend her cubs (Topsell 1658: 363). When Venus hears the ‘timorous yelping’ of the hounds in VEN , she realizes that the hunt has cornered a particularly fierce beast, either ‘the blunt boar, rough bear, or lion proud’ (884), she guesses. It is of course the blunt – that is, the harsh and unfeeling – boar. Indeed, as she warns Adonis, the boar is even a danger to other dangerous beasts, for ‘ “[b]eing ireful, on the lion he [the boar] will venture” ’ (628). The boar is apotheosized in the classical legend of the Calydonian Boar, retold in detail by Topsell (1658: 538). The monstrous boar, sent by the goddess Artemis to ravage the countryside of Calydon, is eventually slain by Meleager with the help of 70

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the Amazon warrior, Atalanta. Shakespeare refers to this legend in TNK , when the Second Queen praises Hippolyta (instead of Atalanta) for slaying ‘[t]he scythe-tusked boar’ (1.1.79), ‘scythe’ implying that the boar mows down all it encounters. A further, comically inappropriate, reference to the Calydonian Boar occurs later in the play, when the Schoolmaster instructs his troupe of morris dancers what to do when he throws his hat in the air: ‘Then do you [step forward], / As once did Meleager and the boar’, that is, as Meleager once stepped forward and presented the bloody head of the monstrous boar to Atalanta (3.5.18–19). In ANT , Cleopatra, comically and brilliantly self-dramatizing even at a moment of high tragedy, compares herself to the Calydonian boar when she flees from Antony, who is furious at her betrayal at the Battle of Actium: ‘the boar of Thessaly / Was never so embossed’ (4.13.2–3), she cries. Even the monstrous boar, in other words, was not as implacably hunted and driven to extremities as she. The boar figures centrally in two of Shakespeare’s works, R3 and VEN . Richard’s heraldic emblem is the white boar, and other characters in the play refer to him as a boar, invariably with hatred and fear. In Act 3, a messenger from Lord Stanley tells Lord Hastings that Stanley ‘dreamt the boar had razed off his helm’ (R3 3.2.10). ‘Razed’ resembles the heraldic term ‘erased’, meaning something depicted with a jagged edge, as if ripped off. As Siemon notes (AR3: 262, n. 10), Stanley’s dream suggests that the family crest and hence the family itself will be obliterated, a fear in keeping with the play’s dominant concern with succession. Stanley urges Hastings to flee with him to the north, but Hastings, reproving Stanley for his childish fears, claims that to flee from Richard will put them in more danger: ‘To fly the boar before the boar pursues / Were to incense the boar to follow us / And make pursuit where he did mean no chase’ (3.2.27– 9). Let us both go to the Tower of London, Hastings advises, and Stanley ‘shall see the boar will use us kindly’ (3.2.32). The very language in which Hastings offers his advice reveals his error: he means by ‘kindly’ that Richard will be gentle and considerate. But ‘kindly’ can also mean that the boar will act according to its nature or species (its kind) and therefore be violent and bloody. Furthermore, the boar is categorized in medieval and early modern hunting terms as a beast of chase, whereas Hastings’s warning against incensing the boar depicts (accurately, it turns out) the chased as the chaser, the hunted as the hunter. Hastings confirms his foolish optimism when, upon Stanley’s entrance, he jests, ‘Come on, come on. Where is your boar-spear, man? / Fear you the boar and go so unprovided?’ (3.2.71–2). The boar-spear with which Richard’s enemies need to provide themselves is of course wariness, and Hastings lives just long enough to acknowledge his error. Facing execution, he painfully reflects, ‘Stanley did dream the boar did raze his helm, / And I did scorn it and disdain to fly’ (3.4.81–2). But even the wary Stanley suffers. His son is taken prisoner by Richard, as Stanley reports: ‘in the sty of the most deadly boar / My son George Stanley is franked up in hold’ (4.5.2–3). ‘Frank’ is an obsolete term for a pen in which domesticated male swine are fattened. Stanley implies, in short, that because Richard is a boar, his sphere of activity is necessarily a sty, and all who place or find themselves within that sphere become lesser boars, swine to be 71

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slaughtered. On the eve of the king’s defeat, exhorting his followers to remember why they are taking up arms, Richmond provides the play’s most fully imagined picture of Richard as a savage boar: The wretched, bloody and usurping boar, That spoiled your summer fields and fruitful vines, Swills your warm blood like wash, and makes his trough In your embowelled bosoms, this foul swine Is now even in the centre of this isle [. . .] (5.2.7–11) The passage gestures toward the boar in the vineyard of Psalm 80.13. But Richmond’s figurative fields and vines quickly metamorphose into the bodies of Richard’s subjects. Domestic hogs and pigs were fed with swill or wash, watery kitchen waste slopped into the animals’ troughs. In Richmond’s imagination, Richard treats his subjects as so much refuse, greedily feeding on their blood and entrails. He is the monstrous minotaur in the centre of the labyrinth, disembowelling his subjects as sacrifices to his savage ambition. Before his final battle, Richard is visited in a dream by the murdered princes in the Tower. They curse him and pray that ‘[g]ood angels’ will guard Richmond ‘from the boar’s annoy’ (5.3.151). ‘Annoy’ has a much more powerful sense of vexation or trouble than it has today. In VEN , the boar functions as the third member of a love triangle, a relationship itself embedded in the metaphor of love as a hunt: Venus loves Adonis, and Adonis loves (hunting) the boar. As Adonis says, in response to the goddess’s plea that he learn to love, ‘ “I know not love”, quoth he, “nor will not know it, / Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it” ’ (VEN 409–10). When he tells Venus that on the morrow he ‘intends / To hunt the boar with certain of his friends’ (587–8), she exclaims in horror, ‘ “The boar!” ’ (589), clinging to him and seeking in vain to redirect his passion toward her. She increasingly resembles a jealous lover. When Adonis struggles to get away, she admits she would have released him by now, ‘ “But that thou told’st me thou wouldst hunt the boar” ’ (614). In the long description of the boar that follows, Venus rails against her rival. You do not know, she chastises Adonis, how dangerous it is to try to kill a boar with a javelin. It is ‘ “a churlish swine” ’; its ‘ “tushes” ’ are ‘ “never sheathed” ’, and it whets them continually, ‘ “[l]ike to a mortal butcher bent to kill” ’ (616–18). On his ‘ “bow-back” ’ he carries a row of pike-like bristles (619), which so protect his neck that a spear is useless. Even the tangled, thorny undergrowth is afraid of him and parts when he rushes through. Then, in a startling merger of the invertebrate and the carnivore, she declares that ‘ “[h]is eyes like glow-worms shine when he doth fret” ’ (621). He digs graves in the earth with his snout, and his tusks strike and kill anything that gets in his way. He cares nothing for your face or hands, lips or eyes, she warns Adonis; he ‘ “[w]ould root [up] these beauties as he roots [up] the mead” ’ (636), perhaps a foreshadowing of Adonis’s fate as a meadow flower. My jealousy, she tells Adonis, ‘ “presenteth to mine eye / The picture of an angry chafing boar” ’ and of you, gored by 72

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his ‘ “sharp fangs” ’ (662–3), the flowers stained with your blood. Here, fangs are tusks and have nothing of the serpentine about them as they do in LR . Venus concludes her jealous speech with a prophecy of Adonis’ death if he ‘ “encounter with the boar tomorrow” ’ (672). Behind her diatribe lies the ubiquitous early modern wordplay on death as orgasm. Hence her final attempt to make Adonis ‘ “hate the hunting of the boar” ’ (711) by redirecting his interest toward hunting the hare – notorious for its lechery and fertility – is appropriate, though doomed, and the boar hunt proceeds. Knowing by their fearful yelps that the hounds have a fierce animal at bay, Venus spies ‘the hunted boar’ and sees its ‘frothy mouth, bepainted all with red, / Like milk and blood being mingled both together’ (900–2). Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen argue that both frothy milk and blood imply ‘sexual emissions’ (AR3: 208, n. 902). What is perhaps more startling is that red and white are more usually found in the context of love poetry (as in the red lips and white complexion of the beloved) or of a politicized natural world (as in the Wars of the Roses). Venus frantically vacillates in her efforts to attach blame for Adonis’ death, first berating ‘the boar for murther’ (906), then chiding Death itself (931–54), until she hears a hunter’s hallow and is restored to hope. Apologizing to ‘sweet Death’ (987) for her harsh words, she excuses herself and blames the boar, ‘ “who provoked my tongue” ’ (1003), ‘ “that bloody beast, / Which knows no pity but is still [i.e., always] severe” ’ (999–1000). Hope ends when she discovers ‘[t]he foul boar’s conquest on her fair delight’ (1030) and sees ‘the wide wound that the boar had trenched / In his soft flank’ (1052–3). The verb ‘trenched’, a rare and now obsolete usage, dramatically emphasizes the catastrophic damage inflicted on Adonis’ flank by the boar. But it also points to the phallic nature of the encounter between them, a theme given greater prominence in Venus’ representation of what must have happened when Adonis met the boar. At first, she is certain, the ‘foul, grim and urchin-snouted boar’ did not notice Adonis’ beauty (1105). ‘Urchin-snouted’ plays on the belief that the hedgehog, or urchin, and the boar are both pigs. And indeed, both use their snouts to root up worms and insects. But Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen note that the urchin is associated in other Shakespearean works with malign supernatural forces, an association that colours Venus’ epithet (AR3: 222, n. 1105). She quickly amends her theory: the boar did see his face and wanted only to kiss him, and in kissing, killed him. She embroiders this new story: Adonis ran upon the boar with his sharp spear, Who did not whet his teeth at him again, But by a kiss thought to persuade him there; And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin. (1112–16) In Venus’ elaborate fiction, violence and love, the boar and the goddess, coalesce, as they do in her postscript to the story: she admits that, had she been ‘ “toothed” ’ like the boar, ‘ “With kissing [Adonis] I should have killed him first” ’ (1117–18). 73

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As if to exorcize the fear that it invokes, the boar is subjected to comic treatment in several of Shakespeare’s works. In ANT , Enobarbus readily feeds Maecenas’s desire to hear about the excesses of Egypt: ‘Eight wild boars roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there. Is this true?’ (2.2.189–90), Maecenas asks. Enobarbus assures him that such a feast is as nothing compared to other feasts they had. The version of Venus and Adonis in PP unfolds further and different sexual implications of the story. Venus, who sees him coming ‘with horn and hounds’, tries to dissuade Adonis from hunting the boar. ‘ “Once”, quoth she, “did I see a fair sweet youth / Here in these brakes deep wounded with a boar, / Deep in the thigh” ’ (9.5, 8–10). When she shows him the place on her own thigh, Adonis ‘saw more wounds than one’ (9.12) and flees, blushing. In a witty version of the adage that love is in the eye of the beholder, Oberon in MND drops juice on Titania’s eyelids knowing that she will fall in love with whatever ‘vile thing’ she sees first when she awakens, ‘[b]e it ounce, or cat, or bear, / Pard, or boar with bristled hair’ (2.2.38, 34–5). ‘Vile thing’ suggests that Oberon names beasts that are physically repulsive, at least as objects of human sexual desire. But all of them also have a reputation for ferocity, which adds an undercurrent of violence to Oberon’s planned humiliation of Titania. In SHR Petruchio declares that he is not afraid of the din that the scolding Katherina might create: ‘Have I not in my time heard lions roar? / Have I not heard the sea, puffed up with winds, / Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?’ (1.2.199–201). How an angry boar might sound is not the issue; rather, the humour lies in the reversal of the terms of comparison. One would expect Petruchio to have compared the lesser (angry boar) to the greater (raging sea). In AYL , as she and Celia prepare to flee to the forest, Rosalind announces that she will disguise herself in men’s clothes and carry as weapons ‘[a] gallant curtal-axe upon my thigh, / A boar-spear in my hand’ (1.3.114–15). It is a surprisingly complex moment, drawing self-conscious attention to drama’s use of props to signify, in this case, super-masculinity on the part of a male actor playing a female role who is disguising herself as a male. In what Bulman sees as a possible reference to the Boar’s Head Tavern in Cheapside (AR3: 241, n. 142–3), Prince Hal in 2H4 asks where Falstaff dines: ‘Doth the old boar feed in the old frank?’ (2.2.142–3), he asks. ‘[T]he old frank’, with ‘old’ signifying something that belongs to the past and is now superseded, suggests a way of life that Hal has left behind. This is turn colours ‘old’ in ‘the old boar’, for Falstaff’s age, the source of jests in 1H4, hints here at approaching mortality. Franking a pig is, after all, a prelude to its being slaughtered. Doll Tearsheet subsequently picks up the tenor of Hal’s epithet, when she fondly asks Falstaff, ‘Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig, when wilt thou leave fighting a’days, and foining a’nights and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?’ (2H4 2.4.232–5). Falstaff, Doll implies, is no longer fit for swordsmanship, either military or sexual. He is now but a fatted pig fit only for roasting at Bartholomew Fair, the fair held in London on 24 August, St Bartholomew’s Day. In CYM , Posthumus’s corrupted imagination suggests that Iachimo has ‘mounted’ Innogen ‘[l]ike a fullacorned boar, a German one’ (2.5.16–17). As Wayne notes (AR3: 228, n. 16), ‘a German 74

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one’ unleashes complex layers of meaning. The phrase evokes a German boor or peasant; a fattened male pig such as those for which Germany was noted (Topsell 1658: 665); a close relative, or german; and semen, that is, seed or germen. (C) Pliny reports on the origins of serving a whole boar at banquets (1940: 147 [8.78]). He also reports that boars harden their hide by rubbing their flanks against trees and by applying layers of mud to themselves (147–9). In classical mythography, which influences early modern interpretations, the boar is a symbol of winter and so slays Adonis, the feeble sun (Macrobius 1969: 141–2). The negative representation of boars in the Bible is both an accurate picture of their destructive behaviour – they uproot crops (Bodenheimer 1935: 113) – and a reflection of the prohibition against eating pork (Lev. 11.27). In the medieval bestiaries, the boar’s primary quality is savagery (White 1954: 76). For discussion of the wild boar’s extinction in England and Scotland, see Goulding (2003: 25). Gascoigne calls boars ‘subtle’, observing that they take cover in a dense thicket so that they can kill attacking hounds ‘at leysure one after another’ (1575: 140). Topsell devotes a chapter to the wild boar (1658: 537–46), stating that its disposition ‘is brutish, stubborn and yet couragious; wrathfull, and furious’ (540). Fabre-Vassas observes that the pig is the only domesticated animal that has ‘its woodland double’ (1997: 4). Sheidley (1974) discusses the boar in VEN as embodying the phallic energy aligned to mature masculinity, which Adonis rejects. Dent (1975: 784–5) observes that medieval and early modern boar-hunts were akin to engaging in warfare. Moulton (1996: 265–6) argues that Richard’s characterization as a boar in R3 signals a hypermasculinity that disrupts the social order because it is unattached to patriarchy’s dependence upon producing heirs. Berry (2001b: 45–9) provides a detailed account of the dangerous art of boar-hunting and its various cultural roles (such as preparation for the military and initiation into manhood), with particular application to the representation of Adonis in VEN . Olson (2003) connects Shakespeare’s representation of Richard III to the early modern conception of criminality as essentially bestial; the boar, she argues, is associated particularly with usurpation, both political and sexual. Prescott (2008) argues that the cosmological mythography that dominates the representation of the boar in VEN is also apparent, though more subtly, in the representation of the boar in R3. Shannon (2013) analyses the attractive 1558 watercolour of a wild boar piglet by Hans Hoffmann (100) and observes that the boar, because the law attributed intent to its violence, was subject to legal punishment (269). Raber (2014) argues that in his portrait of Richard III, Shakespeare not only makes symbolic use of the boar’s savagery but also invokes its many other complex cultural associations, such as its rooting, virility, connection with the hunt, role in classical myths and connection with heresy. KE Bottom. (A) One of the ‘rude mechanicals’ (3.2.9) in MND , Bottom is transformed by Puck into a monster with the head of an ass and the body of a human as part of Oberon’s plot to humiliate Titania. Puck doses Titania with the love juice he has used on the young lovers in the forest so that she will be infatuated with the first creature she 75

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sees, but he seizes on the accident of the mechanicals’ nearby rehearsal to ensure that she falls in love with something yet more absurd than the ‘ounce or cat or bear, / Pard, or boar’ (2.2.34–5) that Oberon has imagined. (B) Nick Bottom is a weaver, one of the six lower-class characters (or mechanicals, i.e., craftsmen) practising the play Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus’s wedding. ‘Bottom’ is a weaving term, referring to the core on which yarn or thread was wound (OED 24a); however, the name also carries the connotation of material baseness, especially in terms of social hierarchy. In the course of the rehearsals, Bottom shows himself to be already an aspirational shape-shifter who wants to play all the parts, including that of the lion (1.2.66), as well as author and director: he objects to the play’s violence and proposes ‘a device’ (a prologue) to palliate it, gives the group language for the prologue, and advises on how to bring moonlight into the playing chamber (3.1.16–20; 33–42; 51–3). He is clearly the most eager of the mechanicals and the least self-aware, convinced of his own talents despite his lack of command over the language. In his speech as Pyramus, he confuses ‘odious’ for ‘odorous’ and ‘Ninny’s tomb’ for ‘Ninus’s tomb’ (3.1.78–9, 92–3), and speaks out of turn, leading Quince to exclaim, ‘You speak all your part at once, cues and all’ (3.1.94–5). And when Quince, the apparent director of the play, agrees with the idea of a prologue written in eight (syllables) and six (lines), Bottom contradicts him, insisting it should be ‘eight and eight’ (3.1.23–4), thus exhibiting a tendency to be contrary and overbearing. Puck’s magical transformation thus in many ways results only in the external manifestation of Bottom’s character. With his ass’s head, he is lowered in status from human to part-animal and is turned into an inverted centaur, whose bestial half is dominant over his rational half. With his ass’s head, however, he is more himself than ever, refusing to be frightened when the mechanicals flee his new appearance because he assumes they are playing a trick on him, singing loudly while holding his ground and even criticizing the song he sings just as he did the play the group was planning. Once Titania wakes to dote on him, Bottom ‘gleek[s]’, or jests with her (3.1.142), believing himself to be quite witty. As he settles into his new form, Bottom becomes increasingly ass-like, requesting a ‘peck of provender’ to eat, along with ‘a bottle of hay’ and ‘dried peas’ (4.1.31, 32–3, 36–7). Bottom’s transformation belongs to a long tradition of tales about the transformation of humans and other creatures, exemplified by Ovid’s popular work Metamorphoses. Many of Ovid’s stories account for the origins of particular creatures in the passions of gods and humans. Transformation because of sex or rape, in particular, is a recurrent theme, as in the tale of the minotaur (the product of Pasiphaë’s copulation with a bull), or Philomela (changed to a nightingale after being raped by Tereus). Indeed, the basis for the mechanicals’ play, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, may be found in Ovid’s text. But Bottom’s ‘transl[ation]’ (3.1.115) is distinct in several ways: he is only partially changed, which suggests that he is resistant to metamorphosis because he is already a bit of an ass. His change does not happen as the work of a god, but is the decision of the trickster sprite Robin Goodfellow, reducing the cosmic significance of his experience, as is indicated by Bottom’s attempt to summarize his experience once restored to human 76

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form: ‘Methought I was – there is no man can tell what [. . .] The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was’ (4.1.206–12). His distorted paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 2.9 (which expresses the ineffable mystery of God’s work in the world) seems appropriate for a character who is himself a distorted version of the classical centaur. The literary sources for Bottom’s ass’s head are diverse: in addition to a number of Ovid’s tales, Shakespeare may have been thinking specifically of classical and early modern representations of Circe, who transformed Odysseus’s men into swine in Homer’s Odyssey. Plutarch’s Moralia includes an episode in which one of the crew, Gryllus, rejects restoration to human form and argues with Ulysses that he is happier as a pig, a perspective that Bottom might well share. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass features a protagonist who accidentally turns himself into an ass while tinkering with magic and is restored by a goddess. The relative influences of Puck and Oberon seem to track with Apuleius. The biblical story of Balaam’s ass may also have influenced Shakespeare: the story involves an ass which is given the faculty of speech in order to humiliate his master, who has failed to see an angel in the road and has beaten the donkey who stopped because he did perceive it (Num. 22). Medieval pageants often included Balaam’s ass as a piece of comical instruction. (C) Allen (1967) takes an indulgent view of Bottom’s transformation, noting that asses could be considered practical, grounded animals, and that Bottom is more ‘modest and sensible’ (108) as an ass than as a human being, a rebuke to the general foolishness demonstrated by the play’s other human characters. Rosenblum (1981) suggests another possible source for the ass-head motif, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), where obstinacy is represented by a woman with an ass’s head. Schreyer (2012) charts the appearances of the ass in medieval drama cycles, in Reginald Scott’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) and in other Reformation texts, all of which transfer religious meanings to the secular stage via the ass-head prop that Shakespeare’s theatre might have used. The gender and sexual elements of Bottom’s transformed appearance are also of interest to critics. Montrose argues that Titania’s smothering treatment of Bottom reflects Elizabeth I’s maternal relationship to her male subjects, a relationship that was deeply uncomfortable in a nominally patriarchal society (1983, 2006), while Boehrer finds in Bottom an example of the way marriage involved a kind of species confusion, given the dehumanization of women in early modern culture (1994, 2002). Rambuss argues that as a ‘border-crossing figure’ (2011: 238), subject to maternal and anal erotics as well as a form of vegetable bondage, Bottom is an index of the play’s queer erotic trajectories. KR brach, bitch. (A) A scent hound used for hunting, by the sixteenth century, most often used to refer to a female rather than a male hound. (B) The term ‘bitch’ is itself only used twice in the plays, once when Kent calls Oswald the ‘son and heir of a mongrel bitch’ (LR 2.2.21–2) and in WIV when Falstaff 77

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refers to drowning ‘a blind bitch’s puppies’ (3.5.10). The Lord who tricks Sly in the Induction to SHR shows his care for and knowledge of his hounds by ordering his huntsman to ‘couple Clowder with the deep-mouthed brach’ (Ind. 1.17). Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, exorcises the demonic ‘little dogs’ that Lear imagines are barking at him:’avaunt, you curs! [. . .] Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim, / Hound or spaniel, brach or him’ (LR 3.6.60, 62, 65–6). When Thersites calls Patroclus ‘Achilles’ brach’ (TRO 2.1.111), he implies that Patroclus is both effeminate and fawning. Lear’s Fool quips, ‘Truth’s a dog that must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when the Lady Brach may stand by the fire and stink’ (LR 1.4.109–11), probably by ‘Lady’ meaning Goneril and Regan. Hotspur tells his co-conspirators in Wales who are being entertained with singing that he would ‘rather hear Lady, my brach, howl in Irish’ than listen to Welsh music (1H4 3.1.232). Since the singer in question is Mortimer’s Welsh wife, who speaks no English, Hotspur’s remark conveys his general scorn for Glendower’s people, implying their language is incomprehensible (and therefore bestial). At the same time, his comment is actually part of his banter with his own wife and as such is full of sexual innuendo. Vienne-Guerrin (2016) discusses the use of bitch and brach as insults in the plays (92, 114). KR breese, breeze. (A) A gadfly or any bloodsucking fly belonging to the family Tabanidae. Its bite inflicts pain on large mammals (especially horses and cows) as well as human beings. (B) Nestor plays on the homophones ‘breese’ / ‘breeze’ as he attempts to rouse the Greek army to continue the war against Troy. When fortune sends storms, he declares, ‘valour’s show and valour’s worth divide’ (TRO 1.3.45). If the day is fair and bright, ‘[t]he herd hath more annoyance by the breese / Than by the tiger’ (TRO 1.3.47–9). His implication is that in times of peace, anyone can boast of their ability to withstand (what are only minor) troubles. But when the breeze blows into a fierce storm, ‘when the splitting wind / Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks / And flies flee under shade’, then only those who are truly courageous respond with defiance to outrageous fortune (TRO 1.3.49–51). In ANT , Scarus calls Cleopatra first a ‘nag’ and then ‘a cow in June’ with ‘[t]he breeze upon her’ when she ‘[h]oists sails and flies’ from the Battle of Actium, an action that leads to Antony’s defeat (3.10.10, 14–15). Scarus’s insult may allude to the myth of Io, turned into a heifer by her lover, Zeus, and tormented with a gadfly by Hera. The parasite Mosca (from L. musca, flying insect) in Jonson’s play Volpone is both a fly and a breese: he is attracted to Volpone’s ‘sweets’, but he does not hesitate to suck blood from his host when the sweets are gone. KE brock. A badger, a large, short-legged member of the family Mustelidae. Badgers are known for fighting fiercely when cornered, as well as for creating a terrible stench; the badger (a cousin to the skunk) produces a heavy musky odour from its scent glands 78

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when threatened or startled. Sir Toby exclaims, ‘Marry, hang thee brock!’ (TN 2.5.102) while listening to Malvolio construe Maria’s letter to refer to himself, thus expressing an almost visceral disgust for the steward. KR buck. A male deer, usually smaller than a stag, although they are often the same species of red deer. References to bucks in Shakespeare’s plays revolve mainly around the animal’s horns, which are the sign of a cuckold. Thus, Dromio of Ephesus, shut out of Antipholus’s house with his master, comments, ‘It would make a man mad as a buck to be so bought and sold’ (ERR 3.1.72). The image he uses is that of a wild or angry male deer, but with the added suggestion that a buck’s madness arises from sexual frustration (as in ‘horn-mad’, the phrase Dromio of Ephesus also uses at 2.1.56). Master Ford plays on the idea of the buck’s horns as the sign of marital infidelity: he returns to his home expecting to find his wife dallying with Falstaff, who is hiding in the buck basket – that is, the basket of dirty laundry, ‘buck’ in this case referring not to the animal but to lye for bleaching. When his wife asks him what Ford has to do with ‘buck- washing’ (WIV 3.3.143), he rants, ‘Buck? I would I could wash myself of the buck! Buck, buck, buck! Ay, buck! I warrant you, buck – and of the season too, it shall appear!’ (3.3.144–6). ‘Buck’ as laundry slips into ‘buck’ meaning ‘in season’, used to indicate a horned deer. Ford defends his right to monitor household activities in terms that reveal his obsessive fear of being cuckolded, of being given metaphorical buck’s horns to wear. Of course, the fact that Falstaff ends up in the buck-basket means Ford is in a sense partly right, that Falstaff is indeed attempting to cuckold him and has been appropriately deposited in an item whose name is interchangeable with that of a male deer. But Ford is entirely wrong about Mistress Ford (referred to later by Falstaff as a doe, 5.5.15, 18), who is merely tricking Falstaff for fun and to punish him for his presumption. Pandarus also uses the language of bucks and does in his song in TRO : ‘For, O, love’s bow / Shoots buck and doe’ (3.1.110–11). Love is the great leveller: it turns everyone into an animal. Given LLL ’s relentless punning on the hunt as an analogue to courtship and sexual congress, we might expect sexual innuendo in Nathaniel’s remark that the deer killed was ‘a buck of the first head’ (4.2.10). A buck of the first head is a five-year-old with its first rack of antlers, rather than the ‘pricket’ or twoyear-old, as Dull insists (4.2.21). But in this instance, knowledge about the typical prey of noble hunts is the real problem. Holofernes, Dull and Nathaniel attempt to demonstrate familiarity with the details of the sport, yet are unable to agree on its application, revealing themselves not to have the kind of knowledge that would signal they are truly high born. KR bug, bugbear. (A) A name for something producing terror, usually imaginary (such as an evil spirit or supernatural creature) but not necessarily so. ‘Bug’ is the older term; ‘bugbear’, which emerged in the mid-sixteenth century, more pointedly mocks an imagined terror by pairing the bug with the bear, the animal that perhaps above all rouses childish fear. The semantic relationship between ‘bug’ as a terror-inducing agent and 79

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‘bug’ as an insect is not altogether clear, although the OED suggests that evil spirits or monsters were in earlier centuries sometimes assumed to take the form of a flying insect. (B) Petruchio wields a proverb – ‘bugs (or bugbears) to scare babies’ (Tilley 1950: B703) – in his proud declaration in SHR that he is determined to woo Katherina and will not be deterred by others’ warnings. I have heard lions roar, the sea rage and the thunder of artillery, he declares, and yet ‘you tell me of a woman’s tongue’ that is not half as loud as a chestnut popping ‘in a farmer’s fire’ (1.2.206–8). ‘Tush, tush’, he scoffs; ‘fear [i.e., frighten] boys with bugs’ (1.2.209). A woman’s scolding is nothing for a manly man to fear, he means. In 3H6, King Edward taunts the fatally wounded Warwick, who is in the king’s eyes a traitor to the house of York, which he had once loyally supported: ‘So lie thou there’, jeers Edward. ‘Die thou and die our fear, / For Warwick was a bug that feared us all’ (5.2.1–2). ‘Bug’ hints at Edward’s astonishment that Warwick should ever have ‘feared’ or frightened the Yorkists; his rapidly approaching death shows him to be but a mortal being. Bugs appear in another martial context when Posthumus recounts the effect that the sight of Belarius, Guiderius and Arviragus has on their countrymen. By their example, the old man and the two stripling youths turn the fleeing English soldiers into troops capable of slaughtering the Romans: ‘those that would die or ere resist are grown the mortal bugs o’th’field’ (CYM 5.3.50–1), that is, those who before were willing to die without even fighting have been transformed into troops who produce terror and mortality. These are non-imaginary bugs. Upon reading the royal commission that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are carrying to the King of England, Hamlet discovers (so he tells Horatio) that Claudius has invented various fictions about him to horrify the English king into executing him. There is some irony in Claudius’s invention of ‘bugs and goblins’, as Hamlet calls them, in a play that features an actual ghost, the archetypal ‘bug’ (HAM 5.2.22). When in WT Leontes ends his denunciation of his queen by threatening to execute her on grounds of adultery, Hermione stops him: ‘Sir, spare your threats. / The bug which you would fright me with I seek’ (3.2.89–90). Death for Hermione, bereft of her children and of Leontes’s love, has lost its power to terrify. Pandarus invokes a ribald bug in TRO when he mocks Cressida after she spends her first night with Troilus. Pandarus pretends sympathy: ‘Ha, ha! Alas, poor wretch! [. . .] Would he not – ah, naughty man – let it sleep? A bugbear take him!’ (4.2.32–4). In Pandarus’s mouth, ‘bugbear’ sounds faintly obscene. Ironically, the bugbear that Troilus fears, that Cressida will be unfaithful, turns out not to be a bugbear after all. (C) Psalm 91.5, which appears in the Geneva version as ‘Thou shalt not be afraid of the fear of the night’, appears in the 1535 Coverdale Bible as ‘So yt thou shalt not nede to be afrayed for eny bugges by night.’ In his Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande, Bishop John Jewel calls purgatory ‘a bugge meete onely to frate Children’ (1567: 299). In The Faerie Queene, the cowards Braggadochio and Trompart hide in a forest ‘from causeless feare, / For feare them followes still, where so they beene, / Each trembling leafe, and whistling wind they heare, / As ghastly bug does greatly them affear’ (Spenser 2001: 2.3.20). KE 80

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bull. (A) The intact (uncastrated) male of the Bos taurus species; in the Renaissance, the term applied to any type of common cattle. Castrated male animals of the species are referred to as steers; those trained for labour are usually also castrated and called oxen. While intact males of other species may be called bulls, in Shakespeare’s works it is nearly always used in reference to cattle only. Bulls are more muscular, with denser bones than cows and often appear larger; however, in the Renaissance prior to the breeding programmes of the eighteenth century, they would have been smaller than many modern breeds. Bulls are known for their aggressive behaviour and require careful handling. The ring often depicted in a bull’s nose was designed to allow humans to control the animal, since tugging on the ring causes pain. Like bears – and almost certainly more frequently, since they were more widely available – bulls were used for entertainment, although bullfighting was not popular in England, as it was in Europe. Instead, England favoured bull-baiting events, in which the bull was chained to a wall and dogs were set on it. The bull would use its horns to defend itself while the dogs attempted to grasp it by the throat, dewlaps or other parts of the face and head. In general, the perceived ferocity and wrath of the animal made it a formidable cultural figure. In heraldry, bulls represented strength, bravery, steadfastness and generosity, and were relatively widespread including, not surprisingly, in the coat of arms of the Worshipful Company of Butchers (extant from the Middle Ages but granted its charter in 1605). (B) Many references to bulls in the plays turn on their reputed savagery: at the Battle of Towton, for instance, the young Prince Edward warns his father to flee the field since ‘Warwick rages like a chafed bull’ (3H6 2.5.126). Puck includes bulls in his list of frightening creatures who might end up as objects of Titania’s adoration after she is dosed with love juice (MND 2.1.180). In order to excuse his carrying a sword, Sebastian in TMP claims to have heard a ‘hollow burst of bellowing, / Like bulls or rather like lions’ (2.1.312–13). Elsewhere, bulls, especially as they allude to the Europa myth, signify the bestiality of sexual desire and its power to transform. Benedick in ADO comically counters Don Pedro’s quotation of the adage, ‘ “In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke” ’ (1.1.242– 3), with ‘The savage bull may, but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead’ (1.1.244–6). Benedick plays not only on the bull’s incorrigible bad temper, but translates the horns that mark a virile animal into those that signal a cuckold. The moment is more ominous than it seems, since it not only summarizes Claudio’s transition from bachelor bull to (he thinks) cuckolded husbandto-be, but is echoed later when Claudio agrees to marry sight-unseen the woman whom he believes to be Hero’s cousin. Again, the men banter: Don Pedro inquires after Benedick’s serious face, and Claudio jokes, I think he thinks upon the savage bull. Tush, fear not, man: we’ll tip thy horns with gold, And all Europa shall rejoice at thee,

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As once Europa did at lusty Jove When he would play the noble beast in love. (5.4.43–7) Benedick’s answer is that Claudio is the calf of a liaison between ‘some such strange bull’ and his father’s cow, since he bleats like a calf (5.4.48–51). Although Claudio and Don Pedro have theoretically learned their lesson after falsely accusing Hero of infidelity, this exchange indicates that they may be poised to repeat their errors, since they rely on the same stock images that make even sanctioned acts of sex into opportunities for female betrayal. Claudio tries to turn the image of Benedick’s gilded horns into an instrument of ascension (making Benedick a worshipped object like the golden calf; see AR3 312, n. 45), but the narrative remains one of female lust and infidelity. Benedick’s answer implies that Claudio is a bastard and thus like the bastard Don John, who has plotted against all of them in more ways than Claudio imagines. Greek myth told the story of Europa, the mother of King Minos of Crete, who was seduced by Jupiter in the form of a bull; the related tale of the Cretan Bull depicts Minos’s wife, Pasiphae, being cursed by the gods with lust for Minos’s prize bull, with whom she copulated to bear the Minotaur. The monster is eventually captured and killed by Theseus, who with the aid of Minos’s daughter Ariadne navigates the labyrinth in which the Minotaur is kept. These tales appear in a number of ancient sources, including Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In SHR , Lucentio compares himself to Jove who ‘humble[d] him[self]’ to Europa when he ‘kissed the Cretan strand’ (1.1.168– 9), thus invoking Europa to describe his sudden infatuation with Bianca. The horned Falstaff in WIV calls on the same myth to inspire himself as he imagines pursuing his ‘doe’ Mistress Ford: ‘Remember Jove, thou wast a bull for thy Europa: love set on thy horns. O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other a man a beast’ (5.5.3–5). Both SHR and WIV touch on the bestial metamorphosis that sexual love can cause, as well as its unpredictable results. In TRO , Thersites calls Menelaus, whose wife Helena decamped with Paris to start the Trojan War, the ‘transformation of Jupiter [. . .] the bull – the primitive statue and oblique memorial of cuckolds’ (5.1.52–4). Later, Thersites eggs on Paris and Menelaus, ‘Now, bull! Now, dog’ and cries ‘The bull has the game’ (5.8.2–4). Whereas Jupiter became a bull to lure Europa into a sexual liaison, Menelaus is an ‘absurd transformation’ of Jupiter (AR3 309, n. 52) and only an indirect paradigm for cuckolds because he is no god but a ridiculous human. Florizel uses Jupiter’s lust for Europa to justify his continued pursuit of Perdita, despite her apparent lowly status: The gods themselves, Humbling their deities to love, have taken The shapes of beasts upon them. Jupiter Became a bull and bellowed [. . .] (WT 4.4.25–8) 82

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Of course, what Florizel defends is not entirely positive: first, the idea that humans become bestial in love is already part of the lore of animals like the bull, and second, Jupiter’s rape of Europa is hardly the pattern a legitimate suitor would want to follow. The Prince recounts how at Gads Hill Falstaff ‘roared, as ever [. . . did] a bull-calf’ (1H4 2.4.253): while a bull might be terrifying for its basso profundo bellow, here Falstaff howls instead like a bloated child (a calf). In 2H4, Falstaff discovers one Peter Bullcalf on his recruitment roll. He makes a joke about Peter’s name: ‘Come,’ he says to Shallow, ‘prick Bullcalf till he roar again’ (3.2.176–7). ‘Pricking’ here means ticking off his name on a list, but given Falstaff’s use of the term elsewhere in the scene to suggest sexual penetration, it also refers to poking or stabbing. In keeping with Falstaff’s corrupt and arbitrary selection of cannon fodder for the battlefield, Falstaff is ready to ignore Bullcalf’s ‘roaring’ – that is, his claim that he is diseased and so can’t fight. Bullcalf, however, eventually pays his way to freedom (3.2.221–2). (C) Bevington (2004: 828) links Falstaff’s treatment of Bullcalf with Shallow’s use of bullocks (3.2.38) as a sign of the wealth that demonstrates the lower-class characters’ ‘complacent interest in their own prosperity’ and the resulting increased lawlessness that necessitates Prince Hal’s intervention. Berggren (1985) makes the case that the Europa myth as it informs both SHR and WIV can reflect the abasement of Jove/Zeus as much as his bestial power over Europa. According to Thomas, the Protestant theologian William Perkins condemned bear-baiting, but acknowledged that baiting bulls was necessary to make them suitable as food (1983: 153). A. Taylor (1994–5) discusses ADO ’s use of Europa as an example of the play’s ‘icy, misogynistic undercurrent’, derived from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid. KR bunting (see also bird, lark, finch). (A) a songbird of the family Emberidizidae (seedeating birds, a family that includes the finches). Harting mentions that the bird was sometimes known as the bunting-lark, and easily mistaken for one from its size and colouring (1965: 136), although taxonomists are now clear that the birds belong to a different family. (B) When old lord Lafew discusses Paroles with Bertram in AWW , he is surprised to learn that Bertram sets some store by Paroles, who is clearly a hanger-on: ‘Then my dial goes not true,’ he tells Bertram, ‘I took this lark for a bunting’ (2.5.5–6), referring to the two birds’ similar plumage and perhaps also the bunting’s less beautiful song. Topsell, however, says the bunting’s song is ‘preferred before the Larkes, as much sweeter and more acceptable (1658: 71). The subsequent interaction between Lafew and Paroles confirms Lafew’s low opinion, and he warns Bertram ‘there can be no kernel in this light nut [. . .] I have kept of them tame, and know their natures’ (2.5.42–5). In other words, he knows his birds and Paroles is merely a bunting. KR 83

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butterfly, moth. (A) colourful winged insect of the order Lepidoptera that passes through several stages: eggs hatch into caterpillars that pupate in a chrysalis after feeding, sometimes destructively, on vegetation, and finally hatch as adult insects. The common name of the species derives from the OE ‘butorflēoge’, perhaps referring to the season of their emergence (when grasses are rich for cattle in the fields, thereby producing the best milk), or to the yellow colour of some common species. Moths are difficult to reliably distinguish from butterflies: they may be nocturnal, smaller and more drab, but not in all cases. From Renaissance natural histories it is clear that distinctions between moths and butterflies, not to mention between butterflies and other similar flying insects, were even more unclear. The ‘butterflies’ described in the first book of Moffet’s The Theatre of Insects include a few examples of what appear to be small flies of the order Diptera, or even a type of beetle (1658: 996). Both butterflies and moths provide the occasion for moral reflection on pride: butterflies, because no matter how nimble or beautiful human beings may be, they pale in comparison to the extraordinary delicacy and showiness of many butterflies, and moths, because their capacity to decimate clothing is a warning that all worldly things are fragile and temporary. Moths are also, of course, famous for flying into candle flames, which occasions Moffet’s moralizing on the allure of beautiful women: ‘But if may be thou art in love with some female beauty, and desirest to please her; O fool, remember the Phalena butterfly which being invited by the light of a candle, as by a fair beauty, is consumed by the flame it fell in love withal’ (975). (B) Shakespeare’s butterflies are often ‘gilded’ and a symbol of innocence or simple pleasure. Thus, when a chastened Lear is reunited with Cordelia, he imagines living with her in prison where they will ‘tell old tales, and laugh / At gilded butterflies’ (LR 5.3.12–13). Valeria, visiting Virgilia and Volumnia in COR , describes Coriolanus’s son running ‘after a gilded butterfly, and when he caught it, he let it go again, and after it again, and over and over he comes’; but the child’s momentary gentleness turns to violence an instant later when ‘he did so set his teeth and tear it’. (1.3.62–6). The traditional fascination of boys with flying things, and their tendency to damage what fascinates them, reminds Volumnia of her own son’s ‘moods’ and suggests the violent end in store for Coriolanus and those who are caught up in his rages. Later in the play, Cominius repeats the image of the butterfly while complaining that Coriolanus is now the Volscians’ deified leader: ‘[T]hey follow him / Against us brats with no less confidence / Than boys pursuing summer butterflies’ (4.6.93–5). As in Valeria’s description, childhood or childishness is evoked through butterfly-chasing – but for Cominius such infantilization is intolerable when it affects adults, particularly Roman adults. Butterflies’ ability to metamorphose from caterpillar to spectacular winged creature informs Shakespeare’s use of the insect in another example from COR : describing the evolution of Martius into Coriolanus, and from the hero Coriolanus into Rome’s dire enemy, Menenius explains, ‘There is a differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub. This Martius is grown from man to dragon. He has wings; he’s more than a creeping thing’ (5.4.11–14). According to Moffet, some types of butterflies produce venomous dung while others are responsible for terrible 84

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destruction of crops and land at one time in Germany (975), so the metamorphosis of Coriolanus from butterfly to dragon is perhaps not so impossible to imagine. Innocence and violence also converge when Titania directs her fairies (including Moth) to minister to the transformed Bottom by bringing him all the forest has to offer, including ‘pluck[ing] the wings from painted butterflies’ (MND 3.1.166) to offer him their beautiful colours. Achilles in TRO compares men’s honours, derived from things external to them, to butterflies that ‘[s]how not their mealy wings but to the summer’ (3.3.79): only when the light allows the best display of their bright colours do they bother unfolding them. Moths in Shakespeare’s plays turn out to be present more often as characters than as metaphors or allusions. Moth in LLL and Moth in MND , although very different in nature and status, both partake of the insect’s flighty nature. If, that is, either is truly a moth – the word would have been pronounced ‘mote’ in Shakespeare’s time, meaning it is possible that both ‘Moths’ are meant to be read as mere specks of dust, insignificant in size. Amado’s page Moth in LLL while young, and so perhaps a mote of a man, is both witty and insightful, and annoyingly ever-present, which might well align him with the insect. MND ’s fairy Moth joins Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Mustardseed, all figures associated with folk medicine: night moths were included in potions to treat kidney and bladder trouble, and in plasters applied to sores on the skin. The play’s association with the night and its frequent use of moon imagery also hint that Moth is more than simply a mote. Elsewhere, Shakespeare refers to the moth’s attraction to the flame, as in MV when Portia dismisses the unsuccessful Aragon, ‘Thus hath the candle singed the moth’ (2.9.78); and in OTH , Desdemona begs to accompany Othello to Cyprus lest she ‘be left behind, / A moth of peace, and he go to the war’ (1.3.256–7), possibly suggesting that without the light of her husband she would be left in the dark like a moth without a flame to dance attendance on. (C) Moffet rightly does not divide nocturnal and diurnal butterflies into moths versus butterflies, but names as moths only ‘garment-eating’ butterflies, which he includes along with other pests like lice, fleas and worms (and caterpillars) in the second book of the volume (1658: 1100–1). Spenser uses the butterfly’s size and apparent powerlessness in his mock epic ‘Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie’, in which young Clarion draws the enmity of one of Arachne’s children, Aragnoll, and is caught in a spider’s web and killed (1960: 262–7). E. Brown (2006b) analyses the butterfly imagery in COR , arguing that the insect in that play matures into a dragon. Barrett (2016) argues that butterflies, although not common in the plays, signify humanity’s ‘iridescent vulnerability’ and the ‘effervescent ephemerality’ of the humane (287). Gven (1997) discusses the butterfly imagery in COR, and especially its appearance in Valeria’s tale of young Martius’s play, as part of Coriolanus’s compulsion to self-destruction as a reaction against being dehumanized by Rome’s mob. KR buzzard. (A) The common buzzard, Buteo vulgaris, alternatively called Buteo buteo, is a predatory species of raptor that occasionally eats carrion; generally, buzzards should 85

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be distinguished from species of vultures, which are exclusively carrion-eaters, but Shakespeare’s plays do not always clearly reflect such divisions. The buzzard is also sometimes conflated or confused in the plays with the kite or puttock (which are in turn confused with vultures). Topsell notes that the buzzard was classed as a hawk by Aristotle, but places it himself among the kites ‘because it is a cowardlie and slouthfull bird’ (1658: 81). Buzzards are medium-sized birds and attack smaller species of birds, rodents and small mammals, but can also confront other birds of similar size. They are woodland dwellers, territorial and therefore aggressive toward their own species. (B) Shakespeare’s buzzards are often deployed in contrast to more noble birds like eagles. This sentiment colours Hastings’ remark in R3: ‘More pity that the eagle should be mewed, / While kites and buzzards play at liberty’ (1.1.132–3). Hastings has been released from prison, and Richard promises to do the same for Clarence, thereby (Hastings thinks) restoring the proper hierarchy of creation. Petruccio and Katherina exchange witticisms linking the orders of insects with birds in SHR : when Katherina defends herself against the charge of being too ‘light’, and claims instead to be ‘as heavy as [her] weight should be’, Petruccio responds with ‘buzz’, a play on her ‘should be’ (which he pretends to hear as ‘bee’, 2.1.204–7). However, Katherina quips, ‘Well ta’en, and like a buzzard,’ upon which Petruccio picks up the bird analogy, calling Katherina a ‘slow-winged turtle’, a turtledove liable to be caught by a buzzard (2.1.207–8). Throughout, their conversation is larded with sexual innuendo – weight, heavy and light are all terms that hint either at the sexual act itself, or a woman’s reputation for promiscuity – and Katherina’s jibe about being of the right weight invites audiences to see her translate her worth into terms that apply to coinage. Indeed, buzzards are, according to Topsell, ‘verie lasciviouslie venerous’, and he reports the medicinal use of the bird’s testes to remedy sexual impotence (1658: 86–7). But Petruccio’s introduction of the ‘turtle’, a bird associated with fidelity, which is ‘taken’ by a larger predatory buzzard, also aims at returning Katherina to a powerless position. Her comeback once more moves from birds to insects: she responds ‘Ay, [taken] for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard’ (2.1.209), which seems to imply that Petruccio would be mistaken in taking her for a loyal wife and would end up as dinner in the same way a turtledove would feed on a buzzing beetle (another possible meaning for ‘buzzard’, i.e., one who buzzes). After this the verbal duel returns to the realm of insects, with references to wasps and stings in subsequent lines. The two characters’ wordplay, with its confusion of species and orders of being, reflects both the topsy-turviness Katherina has introduced into the play-world with her behaviour, and participates in the bestialization that the play associates at different times with both its froward female and its shrew-taming male. (C) Harting (1871) discusses the buzzard or puttock, quoting an ornithologist who saw it as comparable to the eagle and noting that the buzzard in SHR is likely a beetle (47–8).

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C calf, veal. (A) A calf is a juvenile cow or bull, an immature ungulate of the family Bovidae. Veal, from the French veau, refers to the meat of the calf. (B) The terms can be used metaphorically or analogically to denote immaturity, as in the case of Katherine and Longaville’s interchange in LLL . At the masked ball, the men in disguise, believing they are unknown to the women, attempt to woo their chosen targets. To Longaville’s remark about her double tongue, Katherine responds, ‘ “Veal” quoth the Dutchman. Is not veal a calf?’ (5.2.247). She plays on the Dutch accent (‘well’ becomes ‘vell’ or ‘veal’), but also on Longaville’s ‘veiled’ (‘vealed’) face, playing with half his name (‘ville’). Introducing a calf into the conversation, however, lets Katherine brand Longaville a fool when he confirms that veal is indeed a calf. ‘Then die a calf before your horns do grow,’ she advises (5.2.253). When Dogberry states that ‘the ewe that will not hear her lamb when it baas will never answer a calf when he bleats’ (ADO 3.3.68–70), he directs his watchman to ignore signs of disorder in the community, thus demonstrating his foolishness. Leontes’s affectionate treatment of his son Mamilius in WT is tainted with his suspicion of Hermione’s infidelity. Thus, ‘you wanton calf! / Art thou my calf?’ (1.2.126–7) proceeds directly out of his jealous aside, ‘And yet the steer, the heifer and the calf / Are all called neat [i.e. without horns]’ (1.2.124–5): ‘wanton’ along with the open question, ‘are you my calf’, signal his distrust. The idea that calves take after the bulls who sire them underwrites Benedick’s taunt to Claudio that ‘some such strange bull leaped your father’s cow / And got a calf in that same noble feat / Much like to you, for you have just his bleat’ (ADO 5.4.49–51). Benedick packs into this one moment a series of slurs: Claudio bleats like a beast, was conceived out of wedlock and is thus a bastard, and will presumably soon be given horns since he is the progeny of animals and is about to enter marriage. Heritability also underwrites Aaron’s overheard comment in TIT that his son might have been emperor if he had taken after his mother alone, ‘But where the bull and cow are both milk-white, / They never do beget a coal-black calf’ (5.1.31–2). Coriolanus despises the plebeians who are not true Romans ‘though calved i’th’ porch o’th’ Capitol’ (COR 3.1.241). In all these cases, calves emblematize sexual animality, cross-species or adulterous breeding, or simple bestial stupidity. Calves can also provoke pity for their fate at slaughter, as when King Henry laments Gloucester’s arraignment in 2H6: ‘And as the butcher takes away the calf / And binds the wretch and beats it when it strains, / Bearing it to the bloody slaughterhouse, / Even so remorseless have they borne him hence’ (3.1.210–13). Calves’ skin and guts were used in many capacities, as were those of other herd animals; 87

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hence, when the Bastard taunts Austria in JN , he repeats three times the slur that Austria should don a calf’s-skin rather than a lion’s (3.1.129–33). (C) Duncan-Jones (2004) investigates the possibility that Shakespeare might have slaughtered calves himself, linking that biographical fact to scenes of butchery in the plays. KR Caliban. (A) A character in TMP listed in F1 as a ‘salvage and deformed slave’ (Vaughan and Vaughan, AR3: 32). Caliban is half-human, half-animal, regarded as a monster by the play’s other characters: he is described through many terms and epithets, the bulk of which revolve around his bestial attributes. He is the child of the witch Sycorax, who gave birth to him on the island after being banished there from Algiers. She dies before Prospero and Miranda arrive. Caliban’s name may be an anagram of the sixteenth-century spelling of ‘cannibal’; or it might be an allusion to Calibia, an African location; or it might derive from the Arabic word for vile dog, or from the Romany for black thing (Vaughan and Vaughan, AR3: 32). (B) The range of possible origins for Caliban’s name, along with the plethora of descriptions attached to him, suggest his thoroughly indeterminate nature. He is a ‘freckled whelp’ (1.2.283), ‘puppy-headed’ (2.2.151–2) and most famously a ‘thing of darkness’ (5.1.275). Stephano first describes him as fish-like – ‘What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? (2.2.24–25) – perhaps because Caliban smells like a fish, but also because he may resemble one in some way. Stephano mentions he is ‘[l]egged like a man and his fins like arms’ (2.2.32–3) but later adds that he has ‘four legs’ (2.2.64– 5). Stephano and Trinculo between them refer to Caliban as a monster more than two dozen times throughout 2.2. According to Prospero, Sycorax ‘did litter’ the ‘hag-born’ who is ‘not honoured with / A human shape (1.2.282–4). When he first appears before the audience, Prospero addresses him as ‘Thou earth’, ‘tortoise’, ‘poisonous slave’ and ‘[f]ilth’ (1.2. 314, 317, 320, 347), while Miranda describes him in her first encounter with him as ‘gabbl[ing] like / A thing most brutish’ (1.2.357–8). Prospero and Miranda are both enraged at his attempted rape of Miranda, so their repertoire is insulting, while Stephano and Trinculo find him a congenial drinking partner, an amusement and possibly something to make money from if they ever make it home to Italy. Stephano muses, ‘If I can recover him and keep him tame, and get to Naples with him, he’s a present for any emperor’ (2.2.67–9), and so he sticks to somewhat more benign insults. But all characters clearly see Caliban as more beast than human, if confusingly hybrid. He is also, in the eyes of most of the other characters, deformed: Stephano calls him ‘mooncalf’ (2.2.105), referring either to a monstrous birth caused by the moon or to the product of a molar pregnancy (AR3 235, n. 105), and Prospero identifies him to Antonio, Alonso and others as a ‘misshapen knave’ (5.1.268). The varied bestializing imagery and language applied to Caliban is a reminder of how unstable the category and status of the human is in Renaissance thought and how easily it was believed humans could devolve from or fail to develop into full humanity. 88

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That belief aligned with the determination that an individual or a people were either civilized or barbaric. It is clear that Miranda and Prospero both see Caliban’s potential humanity when they first arrive on the island: Miranda, after all, finds him capable of learning to speak, and she names him among the three men she has seen after Ferdinand arrives (1.2.446). And not only does Caliban have special and necessary knowledge of ‘The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile’ that help the two Milanese exiles survive (1.2.339), he clearly has in fact learned to speak, although according to him his only advantage is that he now ‘know[s] how to curse’ (1.2.365). Audiences and readers would have perceived Caliban through several lenses. One was the tradition of the wild or savage man, a frequent character in Renaissance literature and art. Savage men were liminal dwellers in uncivilized parts of the world; they belonged more to nature than culture, and expressed Renaissance anxieties about human capacities for beast-like behaviour. For early moderns, savage men could belong to any of a number of categories: the Irish were perceived as less than fully civilized, as were natives of the Americas or of Africa; they might, as Montaigne’s famous essay ‘Of the Cannibals’ indicates, be capable of violating any taboo, even that of eating their fellow men. Yet Montaigne uses the story of cannibals to satirize the pretensions of his fellow Europeans whose greed and rapaciousness toward the poor are abhorrent and degrading to human beings. Savage men were thus not reliably condemnable: Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for instance, includes two, one who kidnaps and threatens to rape Amoret in Book IV, but another in Book VI who is educable and capable of social and moral elevation through instruction from Calidore, the Knight of Courtesy. Caliban is an amalgam of both of these extremes, endowed with a tremendous eloquence in his arguments with Prospero, even poetry in his descriptions of the island, yet also filled with lust and rage and seeking revenge. Racial and ethnic others were frequently lumped together as savage men. Even near neighbours like the Irish struck many Englishmen and women as close kin to animals: they were frequently condemned for rebellion, for barbarous actions like rape and murder and for being dirty, smelly and unkempt. The play, however, also invokes two further flung geographical settings with particular resonance for Caliban. The island appears to be located in the Mediterranean not too far from the coast of Africa, since Alonso’s ship is blown off course while returning from his daughter’s wedding in Tunis (2.1.71–2), and Caliban’s mother was exiled from Algeria, allowing audiences to imagine Caliban as a kind of African native. Prospero’s reference to him as a ‘thing of darkness’ would as easily have signified his skin-tone as any more abstract quality. Given Europe and England’s interest in exploiting the resources of North Africa, exploration constantly resulted in a stream of captured natives returned to European cities to be displayed, much as Stephano imagines displaying Caliban. At the same time, it is clear that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were fascinated by the tale of the London ship the Sea Venture, which wrecked on Bermuda in 1609. Leaking in the aftermath of a hurricane, the ship was run aground by her captain on Bermuda’s reefs to prevent her total loss. The stranded crew spent nine months creating two new ships from 89

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the timbers of the old, along with scrub wood they found on the island, but they struggled for survival in an alien environment that was at once beautiful and in some ways bountiful, yet uninhabited and constrained in its resources. While William Strachey’s account of the voyage, A True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, was not published until 1625 (in Purchas’s Hakluytus Posthumus, bk.4, ch. 6), the story was much discussed in the years after the voyage and clearly influenced the play. Caliban’s genealogy thus includes New World Native Americans, again often perceived by Europeans in terms of their relative comparability to animals. The effect of these different contexts is to make Caliban a register for audiences’ conviction that Christian, European humans stood just below the angels atop a scale of nature, a Great Chain of Being. Non-European populations were less fully or clearly human and might be assumed to occupy rungs alongside higher animals. The scale, however, was a slippery device. Stephano, the drunken butler, and Trinculo, the jester, may behave as European explorers did when confronted with strange and unusual people, working through their confusion about how to classify them, but they themselves are of doubtful stature. Both are lower status characters who quickly become inebriated, introducing Caliban to the pleasures of wine while parodying religious rites in their drinking practices (Stephano calls taking a swig ‘kiss[ing] the book’, i.e., reverencing the Bible, at 2.2.127, 139). Early moderns considered drunkenness a troubling sin that produced irrational, wild behaviour. Pamphlets, medical treatises and satirical poems on drinking agreed that too much wine made one into a beast, that it enslaved those who partook and that it corrupted both the body of the drinker and by extension the state itself. As Cassio laments in OTH , ‘O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths, to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, pleasance, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!’ (2.3.285–8). Caliban is an easy target for liquor’s temptations, but it is Stephano and Trinculo who are purveyors of demon rum (or in this case, sack). Their cowardice, their greed and their willingness to join the plot against Prospero make them mirror-images of Caliban despite their supposedly civilized European background. They are no less bestial and therefore further disruptive of any stable distinction between human and animal or monster in the play. (C) Hankins (1947) discusses Caliban’s bestial nature. Vaughan and Vaughan (1993) provide an exhaustive analysis of Caliban’s identity and the cultural history that informs criticism of the character. Reinhard (2000) discusses Caliban as a ‘creature’, resistant to both universalization and particularization. Borlik (2013) considers the connections between Caliban and the fen demons of Lincolnshire, while Rundle (2007) locates Caliban in nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses about apes. KR camel. (A) A large ungulate, either the Dromedary (with one hump) or the Bactrian (with two humps) used widely as transport throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia because of its tolerance of drought. Camels were beasts of burden, but also important instruments of travel, war and in some cases agricultural work. Pliny calls the Dromedary 90

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canker

the ‘Arabian’ camel (NH 8.26 [1940: 51]), while Topsell notes the Dromedary’s smaller size and relative swiftness. Dromedaries, Topsell observes, have been known to go ‘a hundred miles in a day bearing a 1500 weight’ (76). Both report that camels ‘possess an innate hatred of horses’ (NH 8.26 [1940: 51]; Topsell 1658:72). Edwards speculates that Topsell’s conclusion that the camel is ‘disdainful and discontented’ (1658: 5) arises from its posture, since its long neck places its nose high in the air while its split lip ‘seems to sneer’ (2005c: 246). The camel’s connection to transport of goods was so strong that by the end of the seventeenth century the Worshipful Company of Grocers used the image of a camel on its crest (Smith 1629: 215). (B) The camel’s role as a bearer of burdens is alluded to in TRO when Pandarus calls Achilles ‘a drayman, a porter, a very camel’ (1.2.240); Pandarus may be associating Achilles’s low thuggishness with the passing crowd of common soldiers when to impress Cressida he thus dismisses the Greek to emphasize Troilus’s superiority. Thersites also insults Ajax in TRO by taunting him, ‘Do, rudeness, do, camel, do, do’ (2.1.52), possibly meaning that Ajax is as huge, dumb and misshapen as the camel. The camel’s odd shape seems to justify Hamlet’s purported discovery of the shape of a cloud when he asks Polonius, ‘Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?’ (HAM 3.2.367–8). Polonius quickly agrees, ‘By th’mass and ’tis like a camel indeed’ (3.2.369), but then agrees yet again when Hamlet finds the same cloud is instead ‘backed like a weasel’ or like a whale (3.2.371–3). The irregular shape of the supposed cloud might support any of these imaginative connections if the cloud is in fact humped – except that the scene occurs at night and Hamlet is, in Polonius’s mind, quite dangerously mad. Perhaps the best-known instances of camels in literature are the biblical references in Luke (18.25), Matthew (19.24) and Mark (10.25) to its prohibitive size: ‘For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’ (KJV). Richard II echoes this passage during his soliloquy in prison where he meditates on his predicament, moving from thoughts of things divine, to thoughts of worldly ambition, and those directed at reconciling with his new status. He cites scripture on the ease versus the difficulty of entering the Kingdom of God: ‘ “It is as hard to come as for a camel / To thread the postern of a small needle’s eye” ’ (R2 5.5.16–17). Forker, however, points out that ‘camel’ in this case might refer not to the animal, but to a device (AR3: 462, n. 16–17) – the word ‘camel’ might actually indicate a ‘cable-rope’ and needle might refer to a postern or gate, meaning the reference is either to the way a fat rope cannot be threaded through a needle’s eye, or to the fact that a camel cannot squeeze through a narrow pedestrian doorway. (C) Vienne-Guerrin (2016) considers the ways ‘camel’ functions as an insult in Shakespeare’s works (129–30). KR canker. (A) A general name for a devouring worm or caterpillar that attacks young plants and flower buds. (Today ‘cankerworm’ denotes two North American species of 91

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inchworm, or spanworm, Paleacrita vernata and Alsophila pometaria.) ‘Canker’ also means an invisible agent or influence that causes decay, corruption, sickness or death, which may be figuratively represented as a devouring worm. Additionally, ‘canker’ can refer to a non-healing sore or ulcer that implies a devouring of the body, perhaps based on observations of untreated cancer. (‘Canker’ in this sense merged with and was gradually overtaken by the term ‘cancer’.) Rather confusingly, ‘canker’, ‘cankerblossom’ and ‘canker bloom’ are alternative names for the dog rose (Rosa canina) and other wild roses that have no fragrance (as in SON 54), although even in these instances there may be a hint of the canker as a corrupted or diseased version of the rose (as at 1H4 1.3.175). This entry will confine itself to the canker as a worm or a worm-like devourer, the latter typically signalled by verbs of eating, gnawing or biting. (B) Among those instances in Shakespeare’s plays in which ‘canker’ clearly indicates a harmful worm is Titania’s direction to her fairies ‘to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds’ (MND 2.2.3). Obediently, several lines later the second Fairy exhorts ‘Worm nor snail [to] do no offence’ (2.2.22). The speaker of SON 35 cites a well-known proverb – ‘The canker soonest eats the fairest rose’ (Tilley 1950: C56) – when he forgives but does not forget the injury done to him by the beloved: ‘loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud’ (4), he observes. The conceit of SON 99 is that spring flowers have stolen their best attributes from the beloved. The carnation, i.e., pink, rose not only steals the colour of red and white roses; it also steals its perfume from the beloved’s breath – and is then punished for the theft: ‘A vengeful canker ate him [the rose] up to death’ (13), reports the speaker. In a complex simile that twists back upon itself, the speaker of SON 95 declares that the beloved makes shame ‘sweet and lovely’, the same shame that, ‘like a canker in the fragrant rose / Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name’ (1–3). The point appears to be that while the canker’s corruption of the rose is visible, shame’s corruption of the beloved’s reputation remains unnoticed, hidden by the beloved’s physical beauty. The metaphorical canker worm is often assumed to be injurious to women. In an aphoristic style reminiscent of Polonius, Laertes cites the canker’s action to warn Ophelia that she must guard her honour against the allure of Hamlet’s expressions of love: ‘The canker galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons be disclosed’ (HAM 1.3.38–9). The buttons and infants of the spring are budding flowers, endangered by the devouring worm, but they are also symbolic of Ophelia’s maidenhood; hence the canker in Laertes’ warning clearly suggests the loss of virginity. When Lucrece mournfully asks, ‘Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?’ (LUC 848), she is lamenting the loss of her chastity. Hiding both identity and true feelings, Cesario tells Orsino a story about a maiden who ‘never told her love, / But let concealment like a worm i’th’ bud / Feed on her damask cheek’ (TN 2.4.110–12). Her true name, Viola (Italian for ‘violet’), emphasizes the self-referentiality of her story. Old Montague invokes the metaphoric canker in relation to his son, subtly feminizing him. Romeo, Montague complains to Benvolio, will not reveal why he is so melancholy, and he describes his son as being ‘to himself so secret and so close, / So far from sounding and discovery / As is the bud bit with an envious worm / Ere he can spread his sweet leaves 92

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to the air, / Or dedicate his beauty to the same’ (ROM 1.1.147–52). Weis (AR3: 135, n. 151) notes that ‘same’ here is often emended to ‘sun’, more appropriate to the image of the bud preparing to open. When Prospero observes of the shipwrecked Ferdinand that ‘he’s something stained / With grief (that’s beauty’s canker)’ (TMP 1.2.415–16), ‘beauty’ may well be metonymic for ‘rose’, and ‘stained’ rather than the harsher ‘eaten’ or ‘devoured’ is appropriate for grief that will prove to be unfounded. The canker worm appears in several Shakespearean works to imply corruption that works secretly to devour from within, universalized as mortality itself when Venus calls death ‘Grim-grinning ghost, earth’s worm’ (VEN 933). Edgar depicts treason as a devouring canker when he appears, without an identifying coat of arms, to fight his brother Edmund. In answer to the herald’s challenge, ‘What [i.e., who] are you?’ (LR 5.3.117), Edgar replies, ‘my name is lost, / By treason’s tooth bare-gnawn and cankerbit’ (5.3.119–20). In JN , Constance laments that her son, her ‘pretty Arthur’ (3.4.89), will die of grief: ‘But now will canker-sorrow eat my bud / And chase the native beauty from his cheek, / And he will look as hollow as a ghost’ (3.4.82–4). The canker grief, she knows, will devour Arthur’s vitality from within. As Friar Lawrence muses on the flower that both cheers and numbs (perhaps foxglove or belladonna), he likens it to an individual who is torn between grace and will. When ‘rude will’ wins out, says the friar, ‘Full soon the canker death eats up that plant’ (ROM 2.3.24, 26). Trying to explain to Adonis why she insistently warns him to avoid the boar, Venus blames ‘dissentious Jealousy’, ‘[t]his canker that eats up Love’s tender spring’ (VEN 657, 656). In TGV , love itself is the canker that destroys a young man’s plans for making his way in the world. When Valentine warns Proteus against love’s corrosive effect on the brain, Proteus (in effect praising himself) cites the well-known proverb, ‘as in the sweetest bud / The eating canker dwells, so doting love / Inhabits in the finest wits of all’ (1.1.42–4). Valentine refutes Proteus’s self-flattering defence: And writers say, as the most forward bud Is eaten by the canker ere it blow, Even so by love the young and tender wit Is turned to folly, blasting in the bud, Losing his verdure, even in the prime, And all the fair effects of future hopes. (1.1.45–50) The canker love, according to Valentine, deforms and halts the full flowering of a young man’s aspirations and ambitions. The speaker of SON 70 evokes the same proverb to warn the beloved that virtue, like a good reputation, is subject to attack: ‘canker vice the sweetest buds doth love’ (7). When Timon curses Alcibiades for intruding into his solitude, he invites the devouring worm to do its invisible, destructive work: ‘The canker gnaw thy heart / For showing me again the eyes of man!’ (TIM 4.3.50–1). The canker is pressed into political service in the history plays. In 2H6, when Gloucester’s wife Eleanor, ‘sweet Nell’, urges her husband to seize the crown (in a way 93

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that perhaps foreshadows the actions of Lady Macbeth), he protests: ‘if thou dost love thy lord, / Banish the canker of ambitious thoughts’ (1.2.17–18). Ambition eats away at love, he may imply. In 1H6, the canker appears in an extended passage that purports to explain the origin of the badges of white and red roses that represent the houses of York and Lancaster, respectively. Richard Plantagenet and the Duke of Somerset exchange insults that centre on roses, making it almost inevitable that a canker will be mentioned. ‘Hath not thy rose a canker, Somerset?’ (2.4.68), asks Richard, and Somerset replies, ‘Hath not thy rose a thorn, Plantagenet?’ (2.4.69). Somerset’s failure to refute the accusation that his rose is cankered gives Richard the opportunity to turn the thorn and the canker to his own rhetorical advantage. ‘Ay’, he flings back at Somerset, its thorn is ‘sharp and piercing to maintain his [i.e., its] truth, / Whiles thy consuming canker eats his [i.e., its] falsehood’ (2.4.70–1). In 1H4, Falstaff admits that he has ‘misused the King’s press damnably’ (4.2.12–13) and has ended up with a company not of soldiers but of scarecrows, ‘the cankers of a calm world and a long peace, ten times more dishonourable-ragged than an old feazed ensign’, or worn-out flag (4.2.29–31). His company is composed of the destitute and unemployable, the bit of the population that fails to flourish in times of peace and hence gnaws at national prosperity. In 2H4 the canker appears as a destroyer of youthful innocence, although the king’s page, corrupted by Falstaff and his followers, is hardly innocent, as Poins’s sarcasm implies: ‘O that this blossom could be kept from cankers!’ (2.2.92). (C) In the Geneva and Authorized versions of the Bible, a plague of cankerworms (‘locusts’ in modern translations) signals God’s anger at his people (Joel 1.4). In The Reason of Church Government (1642), Milton asks, ‘And must tradition then ever thus to the worlds end be the perpetuall canker-worme to eat out Gods Commandements?’ (1953–82: 1.779). Thomas and Faircloth (2014: 68–70) provide a detailed discussion both of the canker as a plant disease and of the canker worm as a general name for a caterpillar or worm that attacks plants. Ivengar (2011: 51–4) approaches cankers from a medical perspective. Hunter (2004) discusses the intersection of different kinds of cankers in ROM as they affect the individual and the social body. J. Harris (1998) considers the intertwined metaphors of disease and economics in TRO by way of Gerard de Malynes’s Treatise of the Canker of England’s Commonwealth (1601). A revised version of the article appears in J. Harris 2004: 83–107. KE capon. (A) A male chicken that has been castrated, usually cooped in a small space and fattened for eating. Capons are associated with luxury, indulgence and impotence, because they were expensive to raise, required ‘cramming’ or force-feeding to fatten quickly, and unlike cocks were not aggressive. (B) Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the character who has most traffic with capons is Falstaff. When we first meet him in 1H4, Prince Hal accuses him of taking no notice of the time, ‘Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons’ (1.2.6–7); shortly thereafter, Poins jokes that Falstaff likely sold the devil his soul ‘for a cup of madeira 94

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and a cold capon’s leg’ (1.2.110–11). When Hal and Falstaff later play the roles of king and prince, Hal (playing his father Henry IV) hurls epithets at the fat knight: ‘that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend Vice [. . .] Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it? Wherein neat and cleanly but, to carve a capon and eat it?’ (2.4.440–4). And indeed, when the Prince and Peto rifle the sleeping knight’s pockets, they find a bill for his meal, which includes a capon and two gallons of sack, among other items (2.4.522–6). Falstaff’s appetite for capons signals moral weakness through self-indulgence. Although early modern capons were smaller than today’s capons, a whole capon eaten at one meal was a prodigious amount of food for a single person to consume. In the course of his speech about the stages of life during which a man plays several roles, Jaques uses the capon to illustrate the prosperity that comes with middle age, describing a justice in the fifth age who boasts a ‘fair round belly with good capon lined’ (AYL 2.7.155). In ERR , a play that revolves around meals that either include the wrong people or fail to happen at all, Dromio of Ephesus imagines how his household’s kitchen routine is upset by events: ‘The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit’ (1.2.44). Hamlet alludes to the practice of cramming capons in his mad exchange with Claudius. When his uncle asks after his condition, Hamlet takes the word ‘fares’ as a reference to eating: ‘Excellent, i’faith, of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so’ (HAM 3.2.89–91). But as often in the plays, ‘capon’ is a term of mockery, or a reference to the puerility of a character. Cloten is called a ‘capon’ (CYM 2.1.23), or fool. When Benedick challenges Claudio to fight after Claudio scorns Hero, Don Pedro and Claudio both have trouble believing their witty companion is serious, leading to extended wordplay on the idea of feasting: Don Pedro cries, ‘What, a feast, a feast?’ and Claudio responds, ‘he hath bid me to a calf’s head and a capon, the which if I do not carve most curiously, say my knife’s naught’ (ADO 5.1.151–3). The likely meaning is that Claudio will skewer Benedick’s foolish behaviour in pursuit of Beatrice (with a sexual joke about sharp knives). A more obscure use of the capon comes in LLL , in which the Princess tells Boyet he can ‘carve’ a letter she has intercepted from Berowne to Rosaline: ‘Break up this capon,’ she tells Boyet (4.1.56–7). In this instance, a capon is a love letter (OED 4), an obsolete use related to the French poulet or chicken, meaning a billet-doux, possibly so called because the folded message resembled a chicken’s wings. Appropriately, the contents of the letter make Berowne look a fool or ‘a plume of feathers’ (4.1.93), that is a vain poser. (C) Boehrer (2002: 71–98) and Fitzpatrick (2011) note the capon’s eunuch status, while Vienne-Guerrin (2016) accounts for the ways capon functions as an insult for Shakespeare’s characters (132–4). KR carp: (A) A carnivorous freshwater fish widely distributed through Europe and England. Because of its adaptability, and particularly its ability to survive in murky or brackish water, the carp was cultivated for food in small ponds that often 95

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became turgid with offal and excrement, allowing the carp to be associated with rot or corruption. (B) The lowly and corrupt nature of the carp complicates Polonius’s remark that the ‘bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth’ when he instructs Reynaldo to ‘[b]y indirections find directions out’ (2.1.60, 63). Polonius trivializes truth by zoomorphizing it as the easily-caught carp, and inadvertently reflects on his spying as a kind of corruption. In AWW , Lavatch insults Paroles with a stream of comments involving the latter’s rank smell, ending with his introduction of Paroles to Lafeu: ‘Here is a purr of Fortune’s, sir, or of Fortune’s cat – but not a musk-cat – that has fallen into the unclean fish-pond of her displeasure and, as he says, is muddied withal. Pray you, sir, use the carp as you may, for he looks like a poor, decayed, ingenious, foolish, rascally knave. I do pity his distress in my similes of comfort, and leave him to your lordship’ (5.2.18–24). If ‘purr’ could mean cat dung (which some editors claim but the OED denies: see AR3: 303), then Lavatch has just called Paroles cat scat. The term might refer instead to ‘paw’, with the consequent meaning that Paroles is as pathetic as a carp pawed out of the filthy pond of bad luck by a cat to lunch upon (even worse luck). It is possible that when Leontes raves about Hermione’s supposed infidelity in WT , he is thinking of the murky waters of a carp pond as he muses on the man who ‘holds his wife by th’arm, / That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence, / And his pond fished by his next neighbour’ (1.2.192–4). (C) Walton (1653: 161) notes that the carp ‘is the queen of rivers; a stately, a good, and a very subtle fish; that was not at first bred, nor hath been long in England, but is now naturalised’, even though the carp had featured in English diet for at least two centuries by the time he wrote. Moffet (1658: 144) is of the opinion that the pond carp ‘is soon fatted through abundance of meat and want of exercise; but they are nothing so sweet as River-fish’. Blagrave (1675), however, finds the carp a less tasty fish than Moffet, an opinion shared by many. Brayton (2020: 30) calls carp pond fish breeding ‘charnel-house pisciculture’ in part because carp are carnivorous, so the decomposing detritus left from from feeding them would have made their ponds smell especially foul. KR cat, kitten. (A) Felis silvestris catus or Felis catus (silvestris is a recent addition to the Linnean designation Felis catus, reflecting scientific recognition of the domestic cat’s relationship to wild cats), the domestic house cat, is a mammal ubiquitous throughout early modern Europe, Africa and Asia, and now present nearly everywhere else. It is mainly a nocturnal opportunistic predator of several species of rodents considered pests by humans. Thus, the cat was domesticated as long as 10,000 years ago when humans began practising settled agriculture. The cat’s reputation has always been complex and has changed over time depending on the institutions and ideologies at work in any given culture or historical moment. On the one hand the cat was associated in medieval and early modern Europe with nefarious activities like witchcraft and sorcery, as well as with feminine lust and sensuality (cats were considered highly promiscuous, probably 96

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because their courtship involves much vocalization, calling loud attention to itself). But on the other hand, its devoted attention to its offspring and general usefulness in keeping down pests meant that it could be used to signify admirable virtues like maternal love, fertility, watchfulness and selflessness. Its small size but occasionally fierce disposition also gave it dual functions as both victim and treacherous adversary. Because pets were a drain on resources, keeping a cat could be associated with indulgence and the temptations of pleasure. Yet the medieval Ancrene Wisse, a set of rules for female monastic orders, advised that nuns be allowed to keep a cat rather than any other animal, most likely because cats were not clearly a form of property, being relatively independent and therefore less of a worldly distraction (2000: 8.76–9). Topsell acknowledges that the ancient world saw cats in a positive light, and recounts that one Roman author reports his delight in playing with his cat. Topsell also warns, however, that cats can corrupt the lungs with their breath, and anyone who eats cat’s flesh risks being poisoned, since cats, he explains, eat creatures which themselves feed on poison (1658: 83). (B) Mistreatment of cats figures in several plays, as when Iago mocks Rodrigo’s desire to die for love of Desdemona, ‘drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies’ (OTH 1.3.336–7), he scoffs. Benedick swears that if he is ever in love ‘hang me in a bottle like a cat and shoot at me’ (ADO 1.1.239–40), implying that cats have even less value than ‘blind puppies’ and provide a useful target for archery practice. If cats are marked as trivial or insignificant animals because of their size, kittens in the plays signal an even greater degree of trivialization. Hotspur mocks Glendower in 1H4 for claiming that his birth was attended by omens: ‘at my birth,’ Glendower reports, ‘The frame and huge foundation of the earth / Shaked like a coward.’ ‘Why so it would have done,’ retorts Hotspur, ‘if your mother’s cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born’ (3.1.14–19). Hotspur suggests not merely that Glendower’s mother did no more than any animal when she birthed him, and that the earthquake at his birth was a random event, but casts Glendower as analogous to a kitten, an insult to the grandeur the Welsh leader attributes to himself. Later in the same scene, Hotspur rejects the criticism that, unlike the Welsh, he is no poet, saying, ‘I had rather be a kitten and cry “mew” / Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers’ (3.1.125–6). Cornelius confirms cats’ insignificance in CYM when he confesses to using them as test cases for the efficacy of the queen’s poisons (5.5.251). The cat is associated with downright evil when Tarquin is compared to ‘a foul night-walking cat’ when he assaults Lucrece (LUC 554). Paroles is called a cat by Bertram when his lies are revealed in AWW : ‘I could endure anything before but a cat, and now he’s a cat to me,’ says Bertram, and despite Paroles’ pleas, declares, ‘A pox on him; he’s a cat still’ (4.3.233–4, 268). Antonio in TMP is dismissive of the company that has been marooned on Prospero’s island, telling Sebastian that he could murder Alonso and the crew would ‘take suggestion as a cat laps milk’ (2.1.289). In other words, in Antonio’s estimation, they are naturally inclined, even eager, to be led by him. All cats were referred to as ‘she’ in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, but the prowling of tomcats was noted in many early modern texts, not least because of their 97

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loud courting or fighting yowls. In ROM , Capulet’s wife teases her husband by suggesting that in his younger days he kept watch for ‘mice’ (a term of endearment): ‘Ay, you have been a mouse-hunt in your time’ (4.4.11), she says, pointing out that he was once a bit of a tomcat with women. Edgar as Poor Tom claims to eat the kinds of small vermin that a cat would hunt: ‘Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt [. . .] But mice and rats and such small deer / Have been Tom’s food for seven long year [. . .] Peace Smulkin, peace thou fiend’ (LR 3.4.125–37). His allusion to the cat by way of its usual prey (frogs, toads, rats and mice) and his reference to ‘Smulkin’, a minor devil (see Foakes AR3: 281, n. 136), subtly hint at the context of witches and witchcraft, linking Poor Tom’s madness to demonic possession. A cat shows up in the Chorus’s speech in PER to create suspense after the marriage of Pericles to Thaisa: ‘The cat with eyne of burning coal / Now couches from the mouse’s hole’ (3.0.5–6). Here, the cat is associated with both night and with sexual desire: while Gower as chorus marks the passing of time for the audience, he also hints at the terrible events to come, the shipwreck that appears to kill Thaisa and the separation of Pericles and Marina. His image of the hunting nocturnal cat is thus designed to suggest that fate waits to prey on Pericles’ happiness. Gower references the tapedum lucidum in the cat’s eyes, which reflects light in the dark and may make the cat’s eyes appear to be ‘burning’ when seen at night in low light, with obvious results for its demonic reputation. Shylock, however, calls cats necessary and harmless (MV 4.1.54). There is some irony here, in that he is himself repeatedly dehumanized and called a dog by Venice’s Christians. A heavily anthropomorphized cat features in Lance’s recollection of his family’s reaction to his leave-taking in TGV : his dog Crab is unmoved, despite ‘my mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands’ (2.3.5–7). A more extensive merging of human and feline character occurs in ROM , in which Mercutio calls Tybalt ‘Prince of Cats’ and ‘Good King of Cats’ (2.4.19, 3.1.76), a reference to the resemblance of Tybalt’s name to ‘Tybert’, the cat who appears in Reynard the Fox and who defends the trickster Reynard but is himself deceived. Tybalt is a renowned swordsman (for Mercutio, a source of sexual jokes) and thus as quick on his feet as a cat. Since Mercutio is a witty trickster figure, his playful teasing of Tybalt seems at first to evoke the lightness of the Reynard fables, until the fatal sword fight with Tybalt. Yet Mercutio keeps up his wordplay even as he dies: ‘I am peppered [. . .] Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death!’ (3.1.100– 3). In 1H4, Falstaff reflects on his low state of mind, claiming, ‘I am as melancholy as a gib [tom] cat’ (1.2.70–1). His simile alludes to the fact that cats were understood to be prone to melancholic humour and therefore to aggravation and morbidity. (C) Lockhart (1975) argues that LR ’s oblique use of the adage ‘in the dark, all cats are gray’ is tied to issues of blindness and judgement in the play. Boehrer (2009, 2010) argues that while Catholics persecuted cats as agents of evil, Protestants regarded cats as legitimate targets of abuse because they could represent Catholics. Paster (2004) argues that the passions were understood to cross species barriers, as attested by 98

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Falstaff’s reference to melancholy cats. Raber (2009) uses the Renaissance cat as the exemplar of difficulties in tracing the quotidian history of actual animals and their relations to humans. Elsewhere, Raber (2013) argues that the cats and dogs of ROM provide evidence of the constitutive role of animals in creating urban geographies. Shannon (2013) uses the adage ‘a cat may look at a king’ as the starting point for her argument that cats’ nocturnal habits, encouraged by their ability to see at night, could generate challenges to the idea of human exceptionalism. Hadfield (2015) compares Shakespeare’s treatment of Celts to the cats of Baldwin’s 1561 novel Beware the Cat. Vienne-Guerrin (2016, 139–41) discusses ‘cat’ as an insult. KR cat-a-mountain, cat o’ mountain. (A) Also called cat of the mountain and catamountain, the name may signify the leopard (Panthera felix) but is equally likely to signify any large, wild feline. Except for the lion, species of big cats were not precisely distinguished in early modern England. Prospero’s ‘pard or cat o’ mountain’ (see below) may be an appositional phrase, but it may also mean that two different creatures are intended. (B) ‘Cat-a-mountain’ appears as an adjective in Falstaff’s furious argument with Pistol in WIV . When he refers to Pistol’s ‘cat-a-mountain looks’, Falstaff implies that Pistol looks feral, that is, uncivilized and unkempt. Falstaff is making the (self-serving) point that he, a knight, must struggle to preserve his honour, what with keeping Pistol in funds and out of prison, even having at times ‘to shuffle, to hedge, and to lurch’ (2.2.24– 5), that is, to compromise. ‘[A]nd yet you, you rogue’, he charges Pistol, ‘will ensconce your rags, your cat-a-mountain looks, your red-lattice phrases, and your bold beating oaths, under the shelter of your honour!’ (2.2.25–8). The very idea that Pistol should claim to stand upon his honour – Pistol, who looks like a wild man and repeats the oaths of the alehouse (which typically had red shutters) – the very idea is absurd, Falstaff means. In TMP , Prospero orders Ariel to torment Caliban, Stefano and Trinculo until they are ‘more-pinch-spotted [. . .] / Than pard or cat o’mountain’ (4.1.260–1). In Prospero’s eyes, the three are already figuratively spotted, for their characters are stained by their dissolute behaviour. In TIT , Aaron compares himself, should he be defied, to a ‘mountain lioness’ (4.2.140). Because ‘mountain’ does not elsewhere in Shakespeare’s works characterize lions and lionesses, it is possible that the term signifies a cat-amountain. The quality of the beast that Aaron invokes is its wildness and implacable ferocity. (C) The cat-a-mountain appears in Tyndale’s New Testament of 1526 at Revelation 13.2: ‘And the beast which I sawe was lyke a catt of the mountayne’. The Bishop’s Bible (1568) uses the same name at Jeremiah 13.23: ‘May a man of Inde chaunge his skinne, and the cat of the mountayne her spottes?’ Other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century translations of the Bible, such as the Geneva and the King James versions, use ‘leopard’ instead. The wild cat to which the Bible refers may be the Arabian leopard (Panthera pardis nimr), now critically endangered, or perhaps the cheetah, also native to the 99

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Near East (Bodenheimer 1935: 105, 114). A ‘cat-a-mountain’ appears, along with an owl, bat, toad, ant, mole and frog, in one of the witches’ songs in Jonson’s The Masque of Queens (1969: 82). KE caterpillar. (A) The larva of various species of flying insects such as butterflies and moths. The caterpillar has a formidable capacity to devour leaves and shoots. Hence the name was thought in the early modern period to derive from ‘pillage’ (OED etym.) and is frequently used as a derogatory epithet for those who are thought to be parasites on the body politic, including whole categories of persons, such as beggars, poets, thieves and favourites of the monarch. (B) The prevailing metaphor in R2, that England is a garden – or, in John of Gaunt’s words, an ‘other Eden, demi-paradise’, a ‘blessed plot’ (2.1.42, 50) – gives added rhetorical heft to Bolingbroke’s use of ‘caterpillars’ as an insulting term for Richard’s followers. As he raises arms against Richard, Bolingbroke announces his intention to go to Bristol Castle to capture and execute ‘Bushy, Bagot and their complices, / The caterpillars of the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away’ (2.3.165–7). Their very names, Bush, Bagot (suggesting ‘maggot’) and Green, emphasize the appropriateness of Bolingbroke’s epithet. Cairncross (2H6, AR2: 491, qtd. in Vienne-Guerrin 2016: 97) suggests a subdued wordplay: these ‘caterpillars’ ought to be pillars of the state. The political implications of ‘caterpillar’ are made more explicit in a later, allegorical scene, in which Richard’s queen and her ladies overhear the Gardener instructing his two men to cut back ‘too fast-growing sprays / That look too lofty in our commonwealth’ (3.4.34–5). He himself ‘will root away / The noisome weeds, which without profit suck / The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers’ (3.4.37–9), he says. The First Man objects, asking why they should keep order in the garden, When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined, Her knots disordered and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars? (3.4.43–7) ‘Swarming’, a word more usually associated with flying, stinging insects like wasps and hornets, heightens the sense that huge numbers of noxious parasites are devouring the wealth of the nation. In an indirect allusion to England as a garden in 2H6, Richard seethes at the news brought by Somerset, that English territory in France has been lost. To Somerset’s news, King Henry says simply, ‘God’s will be done’ (3.1.86). But in an aside, Richard rages against what he sees as the blighting and diminishing of the garden of England, which he is determined to remedy by seizing the throne: 100

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Cold news for me; for I had hope of France As firmly as I hope for fertile England. Thus are my blossoms blasted in the bud, And caterpillars eat my leaves away; But I will remedy this gear ere long, Or sell my title for a glorious grave. (3.1.87–92) Who or what precisely these caterpillars are is not specified, but York’s determination to ‘remedy’ the ruined garden by seizing the throne suggests that they are simply those who thwart his ambition. In 2H6, Jack Cade’s rebels are reported by the Messenger to have adopted the insulting terminology that is typically used against them and to have aimed it at the ruling classes. Cade’s army, the Messenger reports, is a ragged multitude Of hinds and peasants, rude and merciless. Sir Humphrey Stafford and his brother’s death Hath given them heart and courage to proceed. All scholars, lawyers, courtiers, gentlemen, They call false caterpillars and intend their death. (4.4.31–6) The addition of ‘false’ to ‘caterpillars’ creates a kind of double negative, cancelling out the notion of ‘caterpillars’. Echoing Jesus’ words on the cross at Luke 23.24, the king’s response to the messenger – ‘O, graceless men! They know not what they do’ (4.4.37) – calls attention to the rebels’ profound ignorance. They do not even know how to use the language of conflict. ‘Caterpillars’ appears in the torrent of comically inappropriate abuse that Falstaff lets loose against the travellers he intends to rob in 1H4: ‘Strike! Down with them! Cut the villains’ throats! Ah, whoreson caterpillars, bacon-fed knaves! They hate us youth. Down with them! Fleece them!’ (2.2.81–3). As Vienne-Guerrin observes (2016: 98), the imagined root of ‘caterpillars’ is applicable to Falstaff himself, who pillages travellers. Moreover, he implies that his victims are soft-living, elderly burghers. But given his relationship with Prince Hal, there is more than a hint of selfportraiture when he calls them fat parasites. The reference to caterpillars in PER hints at the biblical plagues visited upon the Egyptian pharaoh in Exodus. When Pericles’s ship arrives in Tyre, Helicanus asks Lysimachus, the governor, if they might have fresh provisions. Lysimachus immediately agrees, adding that ‘if we should deny [Pericles’s request], the most just gods / For every graft would send a caterpillar / And so inflict our province’ (5.1.51–3). Every green shoot in our fields would be devoured, that is, if we refuse. Lysimachus seems to understand, as the pharaoh did not, that these strangers have divine protection, and that if he refuses to grant their request, the land will be punished. Caterpillars’ pillaging of

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tender leaves provides a simile for Adonis in his rejection of Venus’ amorous demands in VEN . ‘Love to heaven is fled’ (793), he declares, and has been replaced on earth by sweating lust, which stains and spoils beauty, ‘[a]s caterpillars do the tender leaves’ (798). (C) Moffet’s chapters on caterpillars (Topsell 1658: 1029–44) include realistic visual representations. For representations of imaginary caterpillars in the late sixteenth century, see Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg (1997: fols. 6, 39, 51, 74, 81, 92). VienneGuerrin (2016: 97–8) discusses ‘caterpillar’ as an insulting epithet. For Cade’s echoing of York, including his vow to rid the court of caterpillars/parasites, see Riggs (1971: 174). Forker (AR3: 491, n. 3.2.166) provides several sixteenth-century uses of ‘caterpillar’, meaning those who are thought to be guilty of draining the resources of the state. Gaudet (1982) offers a detailed look at Shakespeare’s representation of Richard II’s councillors as ‘caterpillars’. Seelig (1995: 359–61) analyses the allegorical garden scene in R2 and argues that Richard’s failure to exercise the disciplined violence necessary for an ordered state – beheading ‘weeds’ – has allowed caterpillars, parasitical hangers-on, to multiply. Menon (2003: 665) observes that Bolingbroke in R2 merges caterpillars with the weeds they devour. E. Brown (2006a: 37–40) discusses plagues of caterpillars (and other insects) in PER . KE cattle, kine. (A) Domesticated ungulates of the family bovidae, farmed for meat (beef and veal), for dairy products (milk), and also exploited for their labour, hides (leather) and other body parts. The term ‘cattle’ derives from ‘chattel’, referring to all forms of property; from the fifteenth century, the word evolved to designate livestock held as property, referring to a wide variety of animals from fowls to dogs. Topsell names cattle ‘the first riches and such things wherein our elders gat the first property’ (1658: 53). However, by the late sixteenth century, the word began to be used more narrowly to refer to bovines. Kine is an archaic plural for cow or heifer (the former usually an animal that has borne a calf, the latter, one that has not); calf is the juvenile of the species. A steer is a castrated ox. Oxen are cattle trained as draft animals used to pull wagons, ploughs and other vehicles or objects. All of these are encompassed by the term ‘cattle’. The dung of cattle was an important part of husbandry, having at one time been burned for heat, like peat, and, as Conrad Heresbach notes in his Four Books of Husbandrie, important for manuring fields for cultivation (1596: 112). Because the terms ‘cattle’ and to a lesser extent ‘kine’ straddle multiple registers – collective group, possessions, livestock – they permit complex metaphoric gestures. Cattle function in a sexualized context, given the species’ ubiquitous association with breeding. ‘Kine’, on the other hand, is a near-homonym for words like ‘kin’ and ‘kind’, and so may be used to mark boundaries between groups. (B) When Mistress Page in WIV hatches a plot against Falstaff by mobilizing the tale of Herne the hunter, who ‘blasts the trees, and takes the cattle, / And makes milch-kine yield blood’ (4.4.30–1), she rewrites Falstaff’s attempted adulterous seduction of 102

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Windsor’s female cattle – the wives – as the unnatural plunder of their husbands’ property and wealth. In AYL , to wean Orlando off his love as she purports to have done with another lovelorn man, Rosalind remarks that ‘boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour’ (3.2.396–7). She advises Orlando that she will reprise on his behalf her successful performance of the woman’s part as fickle, changeable, ‘apish’ (3.2.394), or in sum, she will act less than fully human by playing the female role. Earlier in the play, Touchstone had characterized the country life pursued by shepherds as ‘get[ting] a living by the copulation of cattle’ (3.2.76–7), which, although he refers specifically to sheep, invokes the sexual focus of all animal husbandry. Indeed, cattle and breeding are virtually synonymous for early moderns, since the primary concern about livestock was the reliable increase and quality of offspring: Topsell spends most of his entries on cows and bulls detailing techniques for their procreation, not surprisingly a preoccupation of the many husbandry books of the period. When Aaron claims unnatural motives and powers in TIT , saying that he has made ‘poor men’s cattle break their necks’ (5.1.132), he depicts himself as an alien force that destroys vulnerable populations who rely on livestock for sustenance. The term ‘kine’ appears only once, and then comically, in Shakespeare’s works. In 1H4, Falstaff alludes to Pharaoh’s dream in Genesis 41: ‘If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved’ (2.4.460–1). But ‘kine’ echoes throughout moments when characters like Shylock in MV are persistently called kin or kind (see 1.3.149 and 174, for instance). Shylock is divided from Venice’s Christian community by kosher food laws and has been the victim of violent Christian contempt; thus, those echoes simultaneously emasculate him, mark him as overly-intent on flesh as food, and locate him as an outsider to the ‘herd’. (C) Cattle are the main concern of a number of early modern husbandry manuals, including those by Heresbach (1596) and Mascall (1662), who each devote several chapters to various types of cattle, their breeding and upkeep. Duncan-Jones (2012) examines Shakespeare’s biographical links to cattle, butchering and the leather trade. KR centaur. (A) A mythical creature that has the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse. There are multiple lineages for centaurs: in one set of Greek tales, the centaurs are Zeus’s offspring; in another, they are the offspring of Ixion, king of the Lapiths, and Nephele, a cloud nymph; and yet other sources cite Centaurus, a human who mated with mares of Thessaly, and whose brother was progenitor of the Lapiths. The Lapiths are central figures in most centaur myths. Having been invited to the wedding of Pirithous, king of the Lapiths, and Hippodamia, the centaurs became drunk and lustful; they attack the Lapith women (and in some accounts, young Lapith men), attempting to carry them off and rape them. The Greek hero Theseus is present at his friend’s wedding and helps the Lapiths triumph in the battle, killing a number of the centaurs – even ‘riding’ one of them in the frenzy of combat (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, 103

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12: 327–92). Centaurs have been frequent subjects of artistic representation, and the battle of the Lapiths was an especial favourite for Renaissance artists for whom it represented the conflict between civilization and bestial barbarism. While most centaurs are characterized by their lack of self-control, the centaur Chiron is the exact opposite: wise and rational, he is portrayed in mythical sources as an educator, skilled in the arts of hunting, medicine and music, which he passes on to a number of Greek figures including Achilles, Theseus and Perseus. His lineage is usually distinguished from that of other centaurs as is his appearance. He is fathered by the Titan Kronos, and in some Greek art is depicted with the front legs of a human, suggesting his closer affiliation with that species. The appeal of the centaur figure lies in its representational flexibility: it can stand for social or civil degradation, for the battle between reason and passion within the individual, the dangers of racial or other forms of hybridity, or for the triumph of the human ability to control nature. At its root in all cases is the instability of distinctions between human and non-human animals. (B) Centaurine bestiality informs Lear’s description of his daughters Regan and Goneril: ‘Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, beneath is all the fiend’s’ (LR 4.6.121–3). The two women have gradually stripped Lear of all the trappings of what he believes is still his royal status, treating him with contempt and finally driving him to madness. Lear’s odd description – since centaurs are already animal below the waist, calling them centaurs from the waist down doubles the focus on what lies below the ‘girdle’ – emphasizes his focus on what he imagines as their ‘riotous’ (4.6.121) sexual appetites. Since he is not aware of the two sisters’ desire for Edmund, Lear’s comments instead reflect his sense that his daughters violate all the accepted standards of virtue, not just the requirements for hospitality or parental respect. He muses in the same speech about his perception that Edmund has been a better, more comforting son than Lear’s legitimate children, though Edmund is a bastard. But by harping on his daughter’s monstrous nature, embodied in their female genitalia, Lear exhibits a misogyny that trumps his apparent tolerance for Edmund’s origins in an act of adultery. He also displays intense self-hatred since he indicts himself as a human who is necessarily also born from the ‘sulphurous pit’ of hell that he imagines between his daughters’ – and by extension all women’s – legs (4.6.124). Titus names himself a kind of centaur when he begins preparing Tamora’s two sons for being baked in a pie: ‘Come, come, be everyone officious / To make this banquet, which I wish may prove / More stern and bloody than the Centaurs’ feast’ (TIT 5.2.201–3). Titus imagines himself creating the fare for a more violent meal than the Feast of the Lapiths, but in calling it ‘the Centaurs’ feast’ he oddly shifts the reference, making the centaurs the provisioners of the wedding celebration. Whatever horrifying brutality Titus is able to enact thus makes him, along with all his familial assistants, as monstrous as Tamora and her kin. Perhaps this is why Shakespeare chooses to name Tamora’s son, ironically, after the ‘good’ centaur, Chiron, as if to say that no one is truly humane in this play – even Chiron is bestialized in its world. 104

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Centaurs populate other plays in more indirect fashion. The inn in which Antipholus of Syracuse is staying in ERR is called the Centaur (first mentioned 1.2.9, and repeatedly thereafter). Since centaurs are divided creatures, combining different species in hybrid form, the name of the inn may reflect the uncanny nature of twins like the two Antipholuses, the intense connection which leads to the self-division and incompleteness that Antipholus articulates when he calls himself ‘a drop of water / That in the ocean seeks another drop’ (1.2.35–6). The name may resonate with the play’s other uses of animal imagery (especially among the Dromios, who compare themselves to apes and asses), which highlights the slippery distinction between human and non-human. In MND , Theseus is given the option of hearing ‘ “The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp” ’ (5.1.44–5), or in other words a rehearsal of Theseus’s own role in the Lapith wedding debacle. He immediately declines. He claims to have already told Hippolyta the story. But it is equally likely he finds the tale an unwelcome reminder of his past, dotted with episodes of seduction and violence or abandonment. He now intends to marry a newly defeated horsewoman, herself a bit of an Amazon centaur, whom he won ‘doing [. . .] injuries’ (1.1.17). Meanwhile, Bottom is transformed into an inverted centaur, with the head of an ass and the body of a human, suggesting not only his own irreducible foolishness, but MND ’s general interrogation of love’s bestializing potential. When the sometimes-violent shrew-tamer Petruccio in SHR comes to his wedding feast on horseback it is possible to read his appearance as another instance of centaurine confusion: in this case, Petruccio appears late, in shabby clothing, on a broken-down horse (3.2.43–61). He swears at and punches the priest (3.2.162–4), drinks copiously and forces a kiss ‘with such a clamorous smack’ on Katherina (3.2.177) that the church echoes from it. Gremio warns the men that after the ‘mad marriage’ the ‘rout’ is returning to Baptista’s house (3.2.181, 180). The wedding is a parody of the Lapiths’s wedding, while Petruccio’s disruptive behaviour foreshadows his subsequent brutal battle of wills with Katherina. More broadly, it is fair to consider the links between many of Shakespeare’s skilled horsemen and the centaur myth, since the image of the horse-human is deployed frequently in Renaissance literature to describe the apparent union of horse and rider that results from great horsemanship. Lamord, the ‘gentleman of Normandy’, mentioned by Claudius to Laertes in HAM as an example of great riding, is one of these centaur-like equestrians; according to Claudius, the man ‘grew unto his seat / And to such wondrous doing brought his horse / As had he been incorpsed and demi-natured / With the brave beast’ (4.7.84–7). Hotspur, too, is a veritable centaur, bested only by Prince Hal, who rides like ‘an angel’ on a ‘Pegasus’, ‘witch[ing] the world with noble horsemanship’ (1H4 4.1.107–9). And the beloved swain in LC is notable for his skill in the ‘manage’ or manège riding (106–12). In these examples, the horseman is not degraded by his association with his mount, but rather elevates the horse and creates a new kind of superhuman centaurine being. (C) Philip Sidney’s Arcadia offers one of the most thorough descriptions of the centaur rider, Musidorus, who is invincible when mounted for the joust: 105

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But he, as if centaur-like he had been one piece with the horse, was no more moved than one is with the going of his own legs; and in effect so he did command him as his own limbs; for though he had both spurs and wand they seemed rather marks of sovereignty than instruments of punishment, his hand and leg with most pleasing grace commanding without threatening, and rather remembering than chastising [. . .] nor the horse did with any change complain of it; he ever going so just with the horse, either forthright or turning, that it seemed as he borrowed the horse’s body, so he lent the horse his mind. (1977: 248) Andrews (1965) connects Lear’s reference to being ‘bound on a wheel of fire’ (4.7.47) – a description of the punishment given Ixion for his sexual union with a cloud resembling the goddess Hera from which the centaurs were born – with Lear’s repudiation of his centaur daughters, not merely for sexual promiscuity but for violating the sacred bond between host and guest (as had the centaurs at the Lapiths’ feast). Stewart (1977) argues that Falstaff serves as a centaur figure in the second tetralogy, filling the role Chiron held with regard to the development of mythic heroes; for Prince Hal, Falstaff is a similar, if more Dionysian, father-figure. The name Antipholus in ERR might, Garton (1979) argues, be derived from the myth of the centaur Pholus. Hoover (1989) notes that the idea of female centaurs in LR goes against the mythic tradition in which the creatures are uniformly male, demonstrating Lear’s disgust with sexuality in his reaction to betrayal and social disorder. E. Brown (1998) discusses a host of centaurine characters in the plays, including Antony, Petruccio, Benedick and Caliban, before turning to an examination of OTH , in which Othello and Iago’s initial meeting at the Saggitary (the name of the hostel Desdemona and Othello elope to, and a reference to Chiron, depicted as an archer) sets up their evolution into a martial version of a hybrid creature. Iago, Brown points out, already imagines himself Othello’s ass, while Othello embodies hybridity. The two ultimately meld into a single monster. KR Cerberus. (A) The three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades in Greek mythology, preventing souls from escaping. Hesiod gave Cerberus fifty heads in his Theogony, and in some texts or depictions the hound is portrayed as part snake. Cerberus is captured by Hercules as his twelfth labour for King Eurystheus. (B) It is this mythical contest that is referred to by Holofernes in LLL ’s masque of the Nine Worthies: ‘Great Hercules is presented by this imp, / Whose club killed Cerberus, that three-headed canus / And when he was a babe, a child, a shrimp, / Thus did he strangle serpents in his manus’ (5.2.582–5). Since Moth plays the part of Hercules, these lines not only diminish Hercules’ triumph by badly rhyming ‘canus’ (instead of the

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proper ‘canis’) with ‘manus’, but visually prompt laughter. Thersites accuses Ajax of being as full of envy at Achilles ‘as Cerberus is at Proserpina’s beauty, ay, that thou bark’st at him’ (TRO 2.1.31–3). Proserpina was Queen of Hades; however, more important to Thersites is the nature of Cerberus as a dog, since Ajax and others have repeatedly called Thersites cur and dog. Cynicism, Thersites’ governing attitude, is derived from the Greek for dog-like or churlish. He takes every opportunity to throw insults related to doggishness back at his targets (Vienne-Guerrin 2016: 136). Pistol too invokes Cerebus during his drunken rant at Doll Tearsheet, launching into a series of angry speeches in 2H4 that echo melodramatic contemporary plays by Peele, Chapman and Marlowe (see Bulman, AR3: 59–61). In his comically boastful and hyperbolic speeches, Pistol mentions ‘King Cerberus’ (2H4 2.4.168) who will reign in hell over various imagined groups (Greeks, Trojans, Cannibals). Pistol’s random rhetorical elements are derived from earlier heroic plays and emphasize the ‘decline of English chivalry’ in the Machiavellian world of Henry IV and Prince Hal (Bulman, AR3: 60). In TIT , Marcus alludes to Cerberus’s capacity to appreciate poetic beauty when he laments Lavinia’s condition upon finding her in the woods after she has been raped and mutilated: the monster who cut out her tongue would never have done so had he ‘heard the heavenly harmony’ that was her voice; rather, her attacker would have ‘dropped his knife and fell asleep, / As Cerberus at the Thracian poet’s feet’ (2.3.48, 50–1). Marcus alludes to the tale of Orpheus, whose singing charmed the monstrous dog of Hades when he attempted to rescue his dead wife, Eurydice. While the myth expresses the power of poetry over even the most terrifying beast, it is also a tale of failure – Orpheus could not resist a forbidden backward glance, sending his wife back to the realm of the dead. KR chameleon. (A) A reptile belonging to the order Squamata, the scaled lizards. The specialized morphology, or form, and the physiology of chameleons sharply distinguish them from other lizards, especially their long, retractable tongues, their ability to change colour, their independently rotating eyes and their prehensile tails. Chameleons are mentioned in the early modern Bible, and references to them abound in classical antiquity. The creature’s distinctive physical characteristics lend themselves to symbolic and superstitious appropriation. Its ability to shoot out and draw back its tongue with great speed to capture an (almost invisible) insect leads to the notion that it feeds on air. Its variable colour makes it useful as a metaphor for anyone or anything skilled at shifting shape or stance, an ability often extended to include those who flatter or toady to those in power. (B) As he plots to seize the throne of England in 3H6, Richard enrols himself at the head of a list of famous deceivers, hypocrites, flatterers and pretenders, a list that includes the chameleon: Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile, And cry ‘Content!’ to that which grieves my heart, And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,

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And frame my face to all occasions. I’ll drown more sailors than the mermaid shall, I’ll slay more gazers than the basilisk, I’ll play the orator as well as Nestor, Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could, And, like a Sinon, take another Troy. I can add colours to the chameleon, Change shapes with Proteus for advantages, And set the murderous Machiavel to school. Can I do this, and cannot get a crown? Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down. (3.2.182–95) Richard’s list may also be understood as a disquisition on the art of acting – in his case, acting as a means of gaining power over others to advance self-interest. Acting is the subtext, too, of an allusion to the chameleon in HAM . The ostensible point of the allusion is the creature’s feeding on air. As Claudius and Hamlet prepare to watch the play within the play, Hamlet deliberately misinterprets the king, who asks, ‘How fares our cousin Hamlet?’ (3.2.88). Hamlet pretends to understand that by ‘fares’ the king means ‘dines’: Hamlet:

King: Hamlet:

Excellent, i’faith! Of the chameleon’s dish – I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so. I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet. These words are not mine. No, nor mine now, my lord. (3.2.89–94)

Claudius’s ‘nothing’ (perhaps inadvertently) confirms Hamlet’s witty reference to the chameleon’s dining on no-thing. Turning then to Polonius, Hamlet asks, ‘You played once i’th’university, you say?’ (3.2.94–5). Hamlet is implying that both Claudius and Polonius are bad actors, Thompson and Taylor noting that there may also be a pun on ‘air’ / ‘heir’ (AR3: 303, n. 89). In this meta-discussion of acting, that is, Claudius’s protestations of regard for Hamlet as heir apparent are, like Polonius’s expressions of concern, unconvincing, just so much (hot) air. The chameleon is mentioned twice in TGV . To Speed’s reminder that it is dinner time, his master Valentine replies that he has already dined. Speed interprets this correctly: Valentine has dined on love. Alluding to the commonplace that love feeds on air (AR3: 173, n. 159–60), Speed immediately identifies love as a chameleon: ‘Ay, but hearken, sir: though the chameleon Love can feed on the air, I am one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain have meat’ (2.1.159–61). The chameleon’s other fabled quality, its ability to change colour, is relevant to its second appearance in what Silvia

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calls ‘a fine volley of words [. . .] quickly shot off’ (2.4.32–3) between Valentine and his rival Turio. Silvia taunts the latter, who has come out worse in the battle of wit: Silvia: Valentine: Turio: Valentine: Turio: Valentine:

What, angry, Sir Turio? Do you change colour? Give him leave, madam, he is a kind of chameleon. That hath more mind to feed on your blood than live in your air. You have said, sir. Ay, sir, and done too, for this time. I know it well, sir. You always end ere you begin. (2.4.23–31)

Turio’s attempt to portray himself as a blood-supping chameleon backfires, as Valentine shows that Turio does what the chameleon allusion implies: he survives on air, that is, on empty words. (C) Aristotle calls the chameleon a kind of lizard (1965: 109 [HA 2.11]); Pliny likens the chameleon to the crocodile and sceptically recounts the numerous magical properties attributed to it (1940: 87 [8.51]). In both the Geneva and King James versions of the Bible, the chameleon, with other kinds of lizards, is listed at Lev. 11.30 among ‘unclean’ animals prohibited as food. In A True and Admirable Historie, an account of the maiden of Consolens (in Poitiers), who was reported to live without eating, the chameleon is cited as evidence that both human and non-human creatures can exist on air alone (1603: fol. 45r–45v). In his account of the plague year 1603, Thomas Dekker describes the futility of physicians’ treatments: ‘in such strange, and such changeable shapes did this Cameleon-like sicknes appeare, that they could not (with all the cunning in their budgets) make pursenets to take him napping’ (1603: sig. D1r). Topsell captures the metaphoric usefulness of the chameleon with admirable conciseness: it is a figure for someone who ‘chang[es] himself into every mans disposition’ (1658: 674). In The Anatomie of Absurditie, Nash turns the chameleon to misogynistic purposes: ‘constancie will sooner inhabite the body of a Camelion, a Tyger or a Wolfe, then the hart of a woman’ (1589: sig. ¶iiiv). Lloyd (1971: 110–12) discusses European naturalists’ encounters with the chameleon in the sixteenth century. See Ashworth (1985) for early modern visual representations of the chameleon. Fietz (1992) discusses the relationship between English and continental attitudes toward acting by way of Shakespeare’s and others’ chameleon imagery. KE chicken. (A) Gallus gallus domesticus is one of the earliest domesticated animals and one of the most widespread, cultivated for its eggs, flesh and feathers. The general designation ‘chicken’ denotes female hens, male cocks and neutered capons but can be 109

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applied across species; the shortened form ‘chick’ is often used to refer to the young of many bird species as well as to human children. Ancient cultures, especially Rome, used chickens and their behaviour for scrying, and from ancient to early modernity their flesh was believed to have medicinal powers: Pliny credits the cock with controlling ‘our officers of state’ (NH 10.24.49 [1940: 323]) through augury, while eggs feature in many of the remedies he describes. (B) In the plays, chickens mainly refer to children or other weak or timid humans, as when Macduff laments his family has been murdered by Macbeth: ‘What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / At one fell swoop?’ (MAC 4.3.221–2). Othello calls Desdemona ‘chuck’ (OTH 3.4.49, 4.2.24), probably a term of endearment derived from ‘chick’; Antony likewise calls Cleopatra chuck (ANT 4.4.2) and Macbeth reassures Lady Macbeth ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck’ (3.2.46). Prospero affectionately calls Ariel ‘chick’ in TMP (5.1.317), while Posthumus describes the Romans who suddenly flee the battlefield in the face of the reinvigorated Britons as ‘[c]hickens’, the OED ’s first example of the term meaning cowardice (CYM 5.3.42). In TIM , chickens are used as a similar insult when Apemantus encourages the Fool to respond to a group of servants seeking money from Timon. One servant asks after the Fool’s mistress: ‘She’s e’en setting on water to scald such chickens as you are,’ he answers (2.2.70–1). Given the context of the discussion, which has been about usurers and bawds, the Fool’s remark might suggest that scalding here is meant not only to refer to removing feathers from fowl, but the effects of venereal disease. The adage about the fox guarding the henhouse underpins York’s remark in 2H6 that to make Gloucester Protector to the young King is to set ‘an empty [hungry] eagle . . . / To guard the chicken from a hungry kite’ (3.1.248–9). (C) The enormously prolific sixteenth-century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi included a lengthy section on the humble chicken in his compendious work Ornithologiae, which appeared in Latin in 1599; see Lind (1965). Vienne-Guerrin discusses chicken as an insult (2016, 14–145). KR Chiron. (A) One of Tamora’s two sons in TIT ; the name Chiron is taken from Greek myths in which Chiron is a centaur, half human and half horse. His parents were the Titan Cronos and the ocean nymph Philyra, but he was raised by Apollo who taught him to hunt, introduced him to music and augury, and cultivated his reason. Unlike other centaurs who were depicted as driven by their bestial appetites, Chiron became a paragon of civilization and was responsible for educating many Greek heroes in archery, healing and astrology, among other arts. (B) Since the character in TIT is responsible for the rape and mutilation of Lavinia, the name is evidently used ironically to highlight his bestial nature by reminding audiences of Chiron’s usual wisdom and humanity. The fact that Lavinia’s barbarous treatment comes at the climax of a hunt reinforces the allusion to skills of the mythological Chiron and the inappropriate substitution of Lavinia for animal prey. The ironic effect is magnified further when Titus bakes him along with his brother in a pie 110

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for Tamora, reducing Chiron fully to the status of beast, mere flesh suitable for eating. In contrast, the mythological Chiron was elevated at his death by Zeus, who made him a constellation among the stars. (C) E. Brown (1998) believes the coexistence of Chiron-like centaurs and more rapacious centaurs in Shakespeare’s plays reflects the flexibility of centaur imagery, its ability to convey multiple meanings. Raber (2018) analyses the layering of the Chiron myth in TIT , concluding that the play demonstrates that there is no process for purging the ‘bestial’ from the ‘human’: all humans are irreducibly always and already hybrids. KR chough, chewet. (A) Birds of the family Corvidae, the name ‘choughs’ may refer to the red-billed and red-legged chough (Pyrrhocorax pyrrhocorax) or to the whole family of crows or an individual member of the crow family. (B) Macbeth groups all such birds together, for instance, in referring to those that act as omens (MAC 3.4.123). Both crows and choughs occupy the cliffs of Dover in LR (4.6.13); in TNK , the chough is grouped with the raven and other ‘boding’ birds (1.1.19– 21). Like magpies and daws, choughs are said to chatter, as when the Lord in AWW conspires to confuse Paroles by speaking nonsense among his company – ‘choughs’ language: gabble enough and good enough’ (4.1.19–20) – and when Puck compares the mechanicals in their frightened flight from the ass-headed Bottom to ‘russet-pated choughs, many in sort / Rising and cawing at the gun’s report’ (MND 3.2.21–2). Chewet is a variant name, used only in 1H4 when Hal tells Falstaff to hush his chattering: ‘Peace, chewet, peace’ (5.1.29). KR civet, civet-cat. (A) A small cat-like mammal native to Africa, Viverra civetta. The civet is both the term for this animal and the name for the musky scent used in perfume obtained by expressing its anal glands. Civet was a valuable commodity by the late sixteenth century, having been discovered barely a century earlier as England began to trade in African goods. Because of the perfume’s origin and because its expense ensured that only the wealthy could afford it, references to it often reflect the hypocrisy of courtly manners and adornment, and by extension exaggerated human self-regard. (B) When the shepherd Corin tries to insist that kissing hands as courtiers do would be a filthy practice in the country, where labourers must handle sheep and the tar to treat them, Touchstone points out that the courtiers who use civet to perfume their hands are equally repulsive: ‘Civet is of a baser birth than tar, the very uncleanly flux of a cat’ (AYL 3.2.64–5). Don Pedro and Leonato tease Claudio for falling in love, the sign of which is that he rubs himself with civet so that they can ‘smell him out by that’ (ADO 3.2.46–7); they associate the scent with callow youth and its follies, especially the desire to smell better for Hero’s sake than he did as a soldier. The mad Lear rages at his faithless daughters, calling for ‘an ounce of civet’ from Gloucester, whom 111

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he imagines to be an apothecary, to ‘sweeten’ his imagination. Gloucester tries to kiss his hand, but Lear tells him, ‘Let me wipe it first, it smells of mortality’ (LR 4.6.126–9). (C) For Fudge (2012), civet’s ability to invade the body as a smell aligns it with other animal-made objects like leather and fur which, because humans rely on them, trouble the notion of human exceptionalism. Dissociating civet from its source, Lear tries to restore the world he has lost, one in which perfumes and clothing make him a king; that remedy, however, is illusory, since in Fudge’s view Lear is (like any human) an animalmade thing. Iyengar (2011) details civet’s role as a medicine (98). KR claw. (A) The sharp, pointed and often curved nail at the tip of some animals’ digits. (B) Like fangs and other bodily weaponry of non-humans, claws can be used to theriomorphize – that is, attribute animal characteristics to – violent humans, as is the case when Tarquin is depicted as ‘the gripe’ (griffin) whose ‘sharp claws’ threaten Lucrece (LUC 543); his bestiality removes him and his prey from the ‘laws’ of humankind, allowing Tarquin to obey only the law of his ‘foul appetite’ (544, 546). Orlando’s arm is sliced open by the claws of the lion from which he defends his brother Oliver, letting Rosalind later joke about wearing his heart on his ‘scarf’ (or sleeve): ‘I thought thy heart had been wounded with the claws of a lion,’ she responds when he seems not to get the joke (AYL 5.2.22–3). If the lion’s claws in AYL are supposed to be real, the ones in MND are clearly parodic replicas: to perform the lion’s part in Pyramus and Thisbe, Bottom advises ‘let not him that plays the Lion pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the Lion’s claws’ (4.2.38–9). In LLL , Nathaniel and Dull joke about the pedant Holofernes’s ‘talent’ (pronounced as a homonym for ‘talon’): ‘If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent’ (4.2.63–4). Prince Hal imagines Doll Tearsheet clawing Falstaff’s poll like a parrot (2H4 2.4.262), while Don John claims to ‘claw no man in his humour’ (ADO 1.3.17), meaning he does not try to stroke anyone out of a mood (AR3: 173, n. 17). KR cock. (A) A male bird or rooster, usually belonging to the domesticated species of chickens. The variant ‘cockerel’ or ‘cock’rel’ refers especially to young cocks. Cocks were used in fighting or, when gelded and fattened as capons, for food. They were notable for a number of physical qualities, including their combs (fleshy crests, often brightly coloured, on the bird’s head), their posture, which is upright with a puffed chest, and their loud crowing. (B) The cock’s loud crowing is frequently mentioned as a means of measuring time, as when Capulet marks the late hour on the night before Juliet’s anticipated wedding, ‘The second cock hath crowed, / The curfew bell hath rung, ’tis three o’clock’ (ROM 4.4.3–4). The Chorus in H5 marks the same hour on the eve of battle: ‘The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll, / And the third hour of drowsy morning name’ (4.0.15–16). In MND , Oberon instructs Puck to anoint the lovers and then meet him again ‘ere the 112

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first cock crows’ (2.1.267) since he and the other fairies must be home by sunrise (AR3: 167). And in R3, Ratcliffe reports that Norfolk was moving around the war camp listening to the troops at twilight or ‘cock-shut time’ (5.3.70). Perhaps the most famous case of the cock’s crow occurs in HAM . The guard Barnardo remarks that the ghost they have seen on the castle ramparts ‘was about to speak when the cock crew’ (1.1.146), prompting Horatio to elaborate on the bird’s function: ‘The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn / Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat / Awake the god of day’ dispersing spirits who walk abroad (1.1.149–51). The discussion here is equivocal: where, exactly, those ‘erring’ (1.1.153) spirits Horatio names dwell is related to the problem of the ghost’s status – is he in hell, as some of his speeches to Hamlet suggest, with their dark imagery of his confinement in fires for his ‘foul crimes’ (1.5.12), or is he in Purgatory expiating his crimes? If the former is true, his influence on Hamlet is malign; and as the play progresses, the answer to that question is increasingly difficult to pin down. Cocks’ strutting gait and phallic comb prompts comparisons with foppish humans, usually to render the latter ridiculous. Thus, when Cloten complains that he cannot get a fair match in bowls because of his noble rank, ‘I must go up and down like a cock that nobody can match’ (CYM 2.1.21–2), he is preening as much as regretting the situation. His companion snidely remarks in an aside, ‘You are cock and capon, too, and you crow cock with your comb on’ (2.1.23–4), meaning that Cloten is cocky but like a capon (which is castrated) incapable of performing and so simply a coxcomb, or fool. The sexual connotations of the cock’s comb make the Nurse’s description of the child Juliet’s bruise in ROM a bawdy joke: ‘it had upon it [sic] brow / A bump as big as a young cockerel’s stone’ (1.3.53–4). Not only has the child ‘fallen’, which the Nurse’s husband promises will one day be repeated when she falls backward (for a man), but she has the mark of male potency already on her: stones in early modern parlance are testicles. When Katherina and Petruccio engage in verbal sparring in SHR , he figuratively gelds himself to rebut her proposition that he is a coxcomb, claiming that he will be ‘a combless cock, so Katherina will be [his] hen’ (2.1.228). In AYL , Jaques asks, ‘Of what kind is this cock come of?’ when Orlando accosts the Duke’s company in the forest to steal their food (2.7.91), indicating his opinion of Orlando’s swagger and contemptuous words (Dusinberre also notes that this line might indicate that Orlando is in the wrong place if it refers to cockfighting, something that the Globe hosted on nights when there were no plays put on, AR3: 223). Sebastian and Antonio also allude to cockfighting, as well as age and posture, when they take bets on whether Adrian will get a word in edgewise while Gonzalo holds forth: Antonio: Sebastian: Antonio: Sebastian:

Which, of he or Adrian, for a good wager, first begins to crow? The old cock. The cockerel. Done! The wager? (TMP 2.1.30–4)

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Gonzalo here is the old cock, Adrian a young cockerel, but both are the butt of the joke. On the other hand, Speed knows that Valentine is in love in TGV because he used to ‘crow like a cock’ but no longer exhibits such robust or simple behaviours (2.1.24). The cock mentioned in PP seems rather oblivious: ‘The wiles and guiles that women work [. . .] The cock that treads them shall not know’ (18.37–40). The poem plays on the meaning of cock as ‘penis’ as well as on the act of mating, called ‘treading’ the hen (AR3: 412). The sentiment fits the poem’s general point that reason should control the passions, allowing a couple to rise above female quirks and foibles. (C) Harting (1871) details some of the practices common to cockfighting (172–4), including the bird’s feeding regimen and its physical modifications. Edwards (2005d) notes that the cock’s function as a paradigm of an ordered life through its regulation of time (by crowing) often conflicted with its reputation for ‘lechery and subservience to the female’ (255). Cockfighting is for Fudge an example of relations that transformed humans into ‘bestialists’, confusing assumed boundaries between species (2000b: 136), while Hamill (2009) investigates cockfighting as a ‘mode of social description’ in early modern culture, an allegorical means of establishing social identity. KR cod, ling. A fish of the genus Gaddus, although in the past, as now, a number of species may be referred to as ‘cod’; all are common bottom-feeders with flaky white flesh when cooked. When Iago describes a good woman as ‘[s]he that in wisdom never was so frail / To change the cod’s head for the salmon’s tail’ (OTH 2.1.154–5), he refers to the fact that fish tails were more edible and so more valuable than fish heads – hence a good woman would know not to give up something of worth for something empty. Iago’s speech is a rather sour response to Desdemona’s interrogation of his opinion on her sex, in which he insists that a virtuous, wise and beautiful woman simply does not exist in nature. His use of the terms ‘cod’ and ‘tail’ has sexual connotations. ‘Cod’ points to a codpiece (and so a penis), and ‘tail’ refers to the pudendum; any ‘exchange’ between them involves sexual intercourse. Engler (1984) adds that the phrase may also refer to the foolishness of ambition (203), which is appropriate in light of Iago’s obsessions. KR colt. (A) A young male horse. (B) Young men, especially naïve or inexperienced ones, are often referred to as colts in the plays; for instance, York warns those attending Gaunt at his deathbed to treat King Richard carefully, ‘For young hot colts, being raged, do rage the more’ (R2 2.1.70). But a colt was also a figure for lustfulness, as when Posthumus, enraged at what he believes is Innogen’s unfaithfulness with Iachimo, tells Philario, ‘she hath been colted by him’ (CYM 2.4.133). Moth similarly uses ‘colt’ in LLL : Armado has fallen for the wench Jaquenetta, and thinks she is the target of Moth’s ditty about hobby-horses. Moth 114

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responds, ‘The hobby-horse is but a colt, and your love perhaps a hackney’ (3.1.29–30), meaning that Armado is a young fool and Jaquenetta, a prostitute. Falstaff uses an alternate definition of ‘colted’, meaning cheated, when Hal and Poins take his horse away from him – ’What a plague mean ye to colt me thus?’ – but Hal quips that he has not been colted (cheated) but merely uncolted (unhorsed) (1H4 2.2.36–7). Quince’s prologue to the play Pyramus and Thisbe in MND is critiqued by Lysander: ‘He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt: he knows not the stop’ (5.1.119–20). ‘Rid’ here refers both to riding a young horse, but also the way Quince ‘rids’ himself of the speech too quickly (AR3: 256, n. 119). MV uses the colt in two very different ways: in the first act, Portia refers to her Neapolitan suitor as a ‘colt’, or an inexperienced youth, because he talks only of his horses (1.2.38). But later, Lorenzo weaves a beautiful image to explain Jessica’s reaction to music: The reason is your spirits are attentive. For do but note a wild and wanton herd, Or race, of youthful and unhandled colts Fetching mad bounds, bellowing and neighing loud, Which is the hot condition of their blood; If they but hear, perchance, a trumpet sound, Or any air of music touch their ears, You shall perceive them make a mutual stand, Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music. (5.1.70–9) Drakakis sees ‘stand’ as an allusion to sexual potency (AR3: 374), which, since this is the communion of young lovers, seems not impossible, although the general tone of the speech is more oriented toward the taming of power and virility than otherwise. But the sexual connotations are clear in H8 when Chamberlain asks Sandys, ‘Your colt’s tooth is not cast yet?’ and Sandys replies ‘Nor shall not while I have a stump’ (1.3.48–9). Sandys has not shed the proverbial colt’s tooth (Tilley 1950: C525) that signifies lusty youth and won’t as long as some part of him can stick up (whether the stump of a tooth or a penis able still to rise erect). (C) Berger (1999: 45) discusses the way ‘colting’ defines the relationship between Falstaff and Prince Hal. KR cony (coney), rabbit. (A) A small mammal of the family Leporidae, most commonly the European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus. The cony or rabbit could be either wild or domesticated and is morphologically distinct from the much larger hare. Conies are social creatures that live in underground warrens. They have long ears and strong hind legs, both of which, along with their unremarkable fur, aid them in escaping predators. Conies were bred for both fur and meat. Given how fecund they are, they offered a 115

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ready-made emblem of fertility, and because they are small prey, they could also represent innocence or weakness. ‘Cony’ or ‘coney’ could also be used as a term of endearment for a woman, or as a term for female genitalia (sometimes written ‘cunny’). Rabbits might be hunted with dogs, or trapped with snares, which is why swindling and cheating came to be called ‘cony-catching’. (B) In responding to Armado’s plan to have Costard deliver a letter to Jacquenetta, Moth describes the posture of an infatuated suitor, ‘with your arms crossed on your thinbelly doublet like a rabbit on a spit’ (LLL 3.1.16–18). The picture he paints is meant to illustrate the successful technique for seducing women: the doublet should make the suitor look more handsome, but the image of a rabbit cooking on a spit comically undermines Moth’s advice (though Armado remains most impressed). Biondello claims in SHR that he ‘knew a wench married in an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley to stuff a rabbit’ (4.4.97–9), a claim that seems only to offer a prosaic role for the rabbit. But the reference to stuffing a rabbit (with its possible sexual meaning) alongside a description of what is essentially an elopement lends the moment added sexual overtones: the rabbit (cunny) that will be stuffed in this instance is likely human. Since such an elopement would be tantamount to theft of a woman from her father (AR3: 278, n. 97–8), Biondello’s glancing reference prepares the audience for Gremio’s warning to Baptista that he risks being ‘cony-catched’ (5.1.90–1) – which, of course, is exactly what has happened, since Lucentio has eloped with Bianca, and he and Tranio (pretending to be Lucentio) have conspired to deceive Baptista throughout. When Orlando meets the disguised Rosalind in the forest in AYL , he asks her whether she is native to it. Rosalind’s answer, ‘As the coney that you see dwell where she is kindled’ (3.2.327–8), means she is as native as the rabbit that remains where she was conceived (‘kindled’) and born. As in the case of SHR , the reference here to a coney has multiple layers: Rosalind pretends to be a young man, with a young man’s coarse language, but she is also about to ensnare Orlando, deceiving him about her identity and promising to educate him as a lover (thus, coney-catching him in more ways than one). Falstaff’s complaint in WIV that he ‘must cony-catch’ (1.3.30) likewise works on several levels. He is indeed in need of food and out of pocket and so might be reasonably expected to snare a few conies. But he is also about to try to seduce the wives, giving the reference a sexual meaning. Although Falstaff is himself a bit of a cony-catcher, since he is both a swindler and a poacher – Slender calls Falstaff and his company ‘cony-catching rascals’ (1.1.117) – he is destined to be deceived by his intended prey, making him something of a cony himself. Given the gendering of so many references to conies, his role as prey appropriately involves his emasculating experience being beaten when Ford catches him in disguise as an old woman (4.2). In 1H4, Falstaff complains that Hal’s effort to ‘[d]epose’ him by swapping roles when they play the scene of Hal’s meeting with King Henry is intended to make him ‘a rabbit sucker or a poulter’s hare’ (2.4.423, 425), that is, a baby rabbit or dead hare. (C) Cony-catching pamphlets like those by Robert Greene (The Defence of ConnyCatching, 1592) or Thomas Dekker (The Bel-man of London, 1608) were abundant and 116

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widely read; they detailed the activities of the criminal underworld and their tricks for unsuspecting marks. They undoubtedly influenced Shakespeare’s creation of Autolycus in WT , although Autolycus is not explicitly linked to coneys or rabbits. Harley (1985) discusses the possible associations between Rosalind’s rabbit and hare references and the animal’s purported hermaphroditism; Gray Campbell (2015) places AYL in the context of the cony-catching pamphlets. KR coral. (A) A group of marine invertebrates or polyps with calcareous skeletons whose colonies form reefs; early moderns, however, were uncertain about whether coral was plant, animal or mineral and classified it variously, as they did pearls. Pliny calls corals ‘shrubs’ that produce ‘berries’ (NH 32.11.21 [1963: 477]) that harden when removed from water. Nonetheless, coral’s ability to respond to sensory stimulation suggested it was part animal, as Aristotle proposes in a discussion of ascidians, coral-like creatures (1937: 681). Theophrastus, whose fourth-century BCE text On Stones was an important source for Renaissance lapidaries, considered it a kind of stone (1956: 55). Coral also refers to the pink or red colour of Mediterranean coral, genus Corallium, used in making jewellery and other precious objects. Pliny comments on the beauty of red coral, as well as on coral’s general usefulness in medicine (NH 32.11 [1963: 479]). (B) Coral mainly appears in Shakespeare’s works as a measure of the beloved’s lips, as in SON 130, when the poet declares, ‘Coral is far more red than her lips’ red’ (2), and in Lucrece’s ‘coral lips’ that entice Tarquin (LUC 420). In TMP , however, Ariel’s song – ‘Full fathom five thy father lies, / Of his bones are coral made’ (1.2.397–8) – leads Ferdinand to think that Alonso has drowned even as it turns his skeleton into a living organism (if coral is regarded as part animal) or into a semi-precious relic. (C) Kelley (2014) notes the ‘taxonomic indeterminacy’ of coral, and discusses its resistance to decay, which she argues TMP associates with Alonso’s apparent resurrection. KR courser. (A) A strong, fast horse used by knights both for travel and for battle. Coursers were lighter weight than the heavy battle destrier. Since the specific role of the courser in war was obsolete by the sixteenth century, early moderns occasionally use the terms ‘courser’ and ‘palfrey’ interchangeably; the palfrey, however, was often associated with female riders because of its smooth gait and passive nature. (B) In VEN , for instance, Adonis’s mount is called both courser and palfrey (31, 261, 403). The Dauphin in H5 does the same, referring to his beloved horse by both terms (3.7.44). It is tempting to argue that in both these instances the effeminacy of the horse and its relation to the threatened masculinity of the rider is somehow implicated: Adonis is snatched by the goddess, who ‘pluck[s]’ him from his horse and carries him under her arm alongside his ‘lusty courser’ (VEN 31), indicating his powerlessness, while the 117

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Dauphin is teased by the Constable and Orleans for what they see as his inappropriate attachment to his horse. When Iago tells Brabantio that Othello is married to Desdemona, his slur, ‘you’ll have coursers for cousins and gennets for germans!’ (OTH 1.1.111–12) seems inspired mainly by the alliteration it allows, but the animals involved reflect European fears about miscegenation conveyed in Iago’s warning that Desdemona is being ‘covered with a Barbary horse’ (1.1.110). A mare is ‘covered’ by a stallion when breeding. Coursers are usually mentioned in the history plays as a proper accoutrement of the mounted knight. King Edward’s comment that ‘two braver men / Ne’er spurred their courses at the trumpet’s sound’ (3H6 5.7.8–9) places his two opponents, the two generations of defeated earls of Northumberland, on suitably warlike mounts in order to emphasize their military prowess, and by extension his own. When the Duchess of Gloucester prays that ‘Mowbray’s sins [be] so heavy in his bosom / That they may break his foaming courser’s back / And throw the rider headlong in the lists’ (R2 1.2.50–2), she simply portrays the knight on the appropriate steed for jousting. Once he has recovered his armour, lost at sea but found by fishermen, Pericles provides himself a courser so that he can joust for Thaisa’s hand in marriage (PER 2.1.154). Antony refers to the courser’s ‘hair’ in alluding to spontaneous generation (ANT 1.2.199–201): according to AR3 (106, n. 200–1), it was thought that horse hair in river water could breed new life. Antony uses the image to convey the way that political events back in Rome continue to generate threats, requiring his attention and his departure from Egypt and the jealous Cleopatra. (C) Raber (2020a, 2020b) discusses the Dauphin’s paean to his courser in H5. VEN ’s courser episode is the subject of essays by Doebler (1918) and Blythe (1995) as well as Raber (2013). KR crab. A crustacean of the order Decapoda. Its ‘oblique trajectory’ as it scuttles across the sand is one of its most distinctive characteristics (Edwards 2005e: 261). Hamlet alludes to it in a conversation with Polonius, observing that old men have gray beards, wrinkled faces, rheumy eyes, poor memory and weak thighs. He continues, ‘For yourself, sir, shall grow old as I am – if, like a crab, you could go backward’ (HAM 2.2.199–201). Thus, Hamlet obliquely and wittily suggests that Polonius is old and could only be as young as Hamlet if time itself went backward. KR Crab. (A) Lance’s dog in TGV , who accompanies the character in most of his scenes (2.3, 2.5 and 4.4, although not 3.1) and is the comic straight ‘man’ to Lance’s performance. Crab might have been played by a human actor in a dog costume, or might have been an actual dog, since dogs were not uncommon on stage, appearing for instance in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1599) and Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611). Shakespeare’s other plays include possible prompts for real dogs (see TMP ’s stage direction at 4.1.254, MND 5.1.253 and SHR Ind. 1.15; for more, see 118

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TGV , AR3: 67). It is certain that there was a pool of performing animals to choose from, given dogs’ presence in a variety of popular entertainments, and the likelihood is that Crab was one of these rather than a cumbersome human in costume. The play does not specify what kind of dog Crab is, except to note that he is larger than the lap dog Proteus buys as a gift for Silvia (most likely a small spaniel, common as ladies’ dogs in the period). Given Crab’s behaviour and size, however, and his association with a lowerclass figure in the play, he is likely meant to be a cur, marked mainly by his coarseness. Crab’s name reflects his disposition, bitter and sour like the crabapple. (B) We first meet Crab when Lance is taking leave of his family to accompany Proteus: although Lance’s entire household – including the cat – is miserable at his departure, Crab seems unmoved, living up to his name as the ‘the sourest-natured dog that lives’ (TGV 2.3.5). In the course of Lance’s tirade, he confuses objects, people and animals: the maid ‘howl[s]’ while the cat ‘wring[s] her hands’ (2.3.7), and as he acts out the scene anew, Lance makes parts of his clothing stand in for his family: ‘This shoe with the hole in it is my mother, and this my father [. . .] this staff is my sister [. . .] This hat is Nan, or maid.’ Finally, Lance names himself a dog: ‘I am the dog. No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog. O, the dog is me, and I am myself’ (2.3.16–22). Crab remains silent throughout, a provocative witness to this series of boundary-crossings and confusions. The scene interrogates human exceptionalism from more than one angle, suggesting that Lance cannot tell the difference between one kind of thing and another, that as a servant and a clown he is less than fully human in his own right, and that Crab may be a quasi-human audience-substitute, viewing with scepticism the folly Lance acts out. In 2.5, Valentine’s servant Speed quizzes Lance about whether Proteus will marry Julia. Lance’s replies are comically equivocal, a kind of early modern version of ‘who’s on first’, with Lance claiming the pair will not marry but are not ‘broken’ (i.e., broken up) either. As Speed presses the question of whether a marriage will happen, Lance says to him, ‘Ask my dog. If he say “Ay”, it will; if he say “No”, it will; if he shake his tail and say nothing it will’ (2.5.31–2). As in Crab’s first scene, the dog’s nonresponsiveness is the vehicle of the scene’s comedy: Lance’s confounding answers and the dog’s failure to speak at all, except by random dog behaviours, are of equal usefulness, demonstrating the clown’s lack of full control over that supposedly unique human ability, language. By the fourth act, Lance has reportedly been charged by Proteus with giving a ‘little jewel’ of a lapdog (4.4.46) to Silvia, with whom Proteus has fallen in love, but Lance has lost the ‘squirrel’ (the tiny dog, 4.4.53) to some boys in the market and substituted Crab. The trick goes badly for Lance: Crab steals a capon off Silvia’s plate, pisses under the table and gets Lance punished for his transgressions, since Lance claims to have been the one who actually urinated. ‘O, ’tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself in all companies,’ laments Lance, who then asserts his own generosity and ‘wit’ in taking the dog’s fault upon himself to save it from hanging (4.4.9–10, 13). ‘How many masters would do this for his servant?’ Lance goes on (4.4.28–9), hinting at a connection between his altruistic defence of Crab and his own rough treatment by 119

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Proteus; and to Crab he complains, ‘I remember the trick you served me when I took my leave of Madam Silvia. Did not I bid thee still mark me, and do as I do? When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman’s farthingale? Didst thou ever see me do such a trick?’ (4.4.33–8). This scene further erodes the assumed boundary between important categories. In language reminiscent of Iago’s angry speech about service in OTH (1.1.41), Lance invokes a relationship of service between Crab and himself only to translate it into Crab’s ‘serving a trick’ on him. In a play about multiple forms of betrayal, Crab and Lance are situated analogously to other characters’ duplicity, unreciprocated affections, substitutions and violent interactions; Proteus even calls himself ‘spaniel-like’ in his doting on Silvia, who has replaced Julia in his affections, thus encouraging him to be ‘false’ to Valentine (4.2.14, 1). Crab’s blankness and his lack of all the qualities for which dogs are valued – loyalty, love of his master, and selflessness – point to the play’s inversion of expectations. Just as Crab’s behaviour is un-doglike, so the behaviour of the play’s other characters is un-humanlike. (C) As the only actual named performing animal to appear on stage in Shakespeare’s plays, Crab has attracted a significant amount of critical attention. Much of it relates to Crab’s breed, as is the case with Beadle (1994), who examines the many theatrical traditions and histories into which Crab seems to fit. Brooks (1963) emphasizes the satiric connections between the clowns and Crab and the play’s lovers, while Carroll (AR3: 67–75) covers the issue of breeds as well as the theatrical history of the various kinds of dogs who have played Crab on stage along with some of the interpretive implications of the dog’s performance. States (1983) argues that Crab’s scenes are comic because of ‘an intersection of two independent and self-contained phenomenal chains, natural animal behaviour and culturally programmed human behaviour’ (379), ultimately leading to self-reflection regarding illusion and the nature of theatre itself. Boehrer positions Crab as a macro-critique of theatre, arguing that the dog’s scenes with Lance amount to a theatrical ‘black hole’ in a play that is all about theatre, disguise and illusion (2002: 160). Fudge examines the pissing Crab as ‘a representation of nature as the uncivilized that stands against the rational civility that is understood to be truly human’ (2008: 194). Raber (2018) argues that Lance’s first scene with Crab demonstrates the slippage that makes humans merely one object among many. Kesson (2020) addresses the dog’s ‘performance’ and its relation to other dogs on early modern stages. Bartolovich (2020) uses Crab as the focus for an argument about moving past capitalist models of resource use. KR cricket. (A) A typically dusky brown or black insect belonging with the grasshopper to the order Orthoptera and noted for its chirping and its ability to leap. Native to Africa and the Middle East, the house cricket (Acheta domesticus) is common in buildings throughout Europe, including Britain. It prefers warm locations, like kitchens, but it is also found on rubbish heaps (where fermentation produces heat). Its characteristic chirp is achieved 120

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when it rubs its forewings together, a process called stridulation. This ‘song’ is responsible for the proverb, ‘as merry as a cricket’ (Tilley 1950: C825). The house cricket is crepuscular, that is, active at twilight; the two crickets native to Britain, the field cricket and the wood cricket, are diurnal, or active during the day. Although well established now in the rest of Europe, field and wood crickets are increasingly rare in Britain. (B) Whether the crickets in question are crepuscular or diurnal is at issue in TNK , as the speech of the Jailer’s Daughter reveals her growing madness: So, which way now? The best way is the next way to a grave: Each errant step beside is torment. Lo, The moon is down, the crickets chirp, the screech-owl Calls in the dawn; all offices are done Save what I fail in. But the point is this: An end, and that is all. (3.2.32–8) Time signals are confused here. Screech-owls do not herald the dawn; they hunt for prey at night. Yet the moon’s ‘sinking’, or disappearance, suggests the growing brightness of the rising sun. If the crickets are house crickets, they, too, indicate that it is already daylight, and the fact that their stridulation is described as chirping strikes a note of comfortable domesticity at odds with the desperate disorientation of the Jailer’s Daughter. The cheerful song of the cricket similarly contrasts with the ominous moment in CYM when Iachimo emerges from the trunk in which he has been concealed and readies himself for his voyeuristic survey of the sleeping Innogen: The crickets sing, and man’s o’er-laboured sense Repairs itself by rest. Our Tarquin thus Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened The chastity he wounded. [. . .] (2.2.11–14) There is a chilling contrast here between the world of those taking their deserved rest at the end of the day, lulled to sleep by crickets’ song, and those who, like Iachimo and the rapist Tarquin, work under cover of darkness to destroy a reputation for chastity. In MAC , the sound attributed to crickets is appropriate for the sinister context, as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, after Duncan’s murder, confront the changed and terrible world they now inhabit. Macbeth: Lady: Macbeth:

I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise? I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry. Did you not speak? When?

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Lady: Macbeth: Lady:

Now. As I descended? Ay. (2.2.15–18)

Macbeth has indeed descended into a world from which cheerful domesticity has vanished forever. The voices of creatures now convey to him and Lady Macbeth only anguish and threat, their stichomythic dialogue representing not unity but the loss of a coherent natural and political order. The crickets alluded to in WT similarly point to the destruction of order. Imprisoned with her child, Hermione asks Mamillius to tell her a story. ‘Merry or sad shall’t be?’ he asks, and his mother chooses a tale ‘[a]s merry as you will’ (2.1.23–4). Mamillius chooses a sad tale, however, and promises to ‘tell it softly’ so that ‘[y]on crickets shall not hear it’ (2.1.30–1). The twice-repeated ‘merry’ in the vicinity of ‘crickets’ allows the saying, ‘as merry as a cricket’, to hover ironically over Hermione and Mamillius’s sad plight. The saying is quoted directly in 1H4 at the conclusion of the practical joke played by Hal on Francis the drawer. Responding to the prince’s question, ‘Shall we be merry?’ (now that Falstaff and company have arrived), Poins declares, ‘As merry as crickets, my lad!’ (2.4.86–7). ‘But hark ye’, he continues, ‘what cunning match have you made with this jest of the drawer? Come, what’s the issue?’ (2.4.87–9). There is no issue, or punch line, to Hal’s taunting of Francis other than his own merriment, a merriment that Poins and undoubtedly Francis fail to share. Only in PER , in Gower’s depiction of a household asleep after a feast, do crickets seem associated with true merriment: the ‘crickets [which] sing at the oven’s mouth / Are the blither for their drouth’ (3.0.7–8), that is, the warm dryness emitted from the oven makes the crickets even more blithe. Crickets’ association with fairies and fairy superstitions is invoked in two of Shakespeare’s comedies. Queen Mab’s whip is made ‘of cricket’s bone’ in Mercutio’s description of her chariot (ROM 1.4.66), although invertebrates have no bones. In WIV , Falstaff witnesses what he thinks is a gathering of fairies and pretends to be asleep, for ‘he that speaks to them shall die’ (5.5.47). He has just heard Pistol, disguised as Hobgoblin, utter the command: Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap; Where fires thou find’st unraked and hearths unswept, There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry – Our radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery. (5.5.43–6) Crickets, because they are drawn to the warmth of hearths, are perfectly fitted for the role of chimney inspectors. The diminutive size of the cricket gives it a place in Petruccio’s (mock) flyting of the tailor who fashions a new gown for Katherina: ‘thou thread, thou thimble, / Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail, / Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket, thou!’ (SHR 4.3.109–11). Hodgdon (AR3: 267, n. 111) observes that some scholars think the insults indicate that the tailor was played by a boy

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actor, although she also notes the proverbial smallness of tailors (‘Nine tailors make a man’, Tilley 1950: T23). Their reputation for being small perhaps attests to their impoverished and hence malnourished condition; one recalls that the tailor in MND is named Robin Starveling. (C) In Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Quarlous warns Winwife that ending up with spiders’ legs and the ‘voyce of a Cricket’ (1982b: 1.3.83) will be the result of marrying an aged widow, a warning that echoes satirical verses in Martial and Juvenal (see Jonson 1982b: n. 1.3.69–83). Delio in The Duchess of Malfi sneers at those superstitious people who find the ‘singing of a cricket’ (like the ‘crossing of a hare’ or ‘[b]leeding at nose’) to be a bad omen (2009: 2.2.70–2). (There is no evidence that hearing a cricket’s song has ever been seen as bringing bad luck.) The narrator of one of Milton’s most Shakespearean poems, ‘Il Penseroso’, longs to be in a gloomy but fire-lit room, ‘Far from all resort of mirth, / Save the cricket on the hearth’ (1997: 148 [ll. 81–2]). Knight (1949: 145–6) includes the crying cricket in the disordered animal world represented in MAC . Stavig (1995: 80–3) argues that Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in ROM is a sexual fantasy about female genitalia, in which cricket bones are pubic hair. Lamb (1998: 533) measures Mamillius’s developmental closeness to his mother via his reference to crickets, finding that the play represents a crisis in the transition from boyhood to manhood. Wall (2001: 92–3) argues that maintaining the hearth against sluttery (a task assigned to the cricket) is equivalent in WIV to maintaining sexual propriety as exemplified by Queen Elizabeth. KE crocodile. (A) A large, amphibious, carnivorous reptile having tough, scaly skin, a v-shaped snout and powerful jaws. Crocodiles (and alligators) can be found in tropical and semi-tropical regions throughout the world. Their ancestors survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs; their closest relatives are birds. The crocodile was familiar to Western Europeans at first through references in classical literature, responsible for the story that it devours a man and then weeps for him. In medieval bestiaries, crocodrillus is a kind of dragon that embodies hypocrisy, evidenced by the fact that it spends its day on land (interpreted symbolically as appearing to lead an upright life) but returns at night to the water (which shows its true depravity). Its ability to function both on land and in water led to centuries of uncertainty about how to classify the crocodile: was it beast, serpent or fish? When in the sixteenth century Europeans began exploring other continents and brought back crocodile skins, a more zoologically accurate picture of the crocodile began to emerge, but the phrase ‘crocodile’s tears’ was apparently too useful to relinquish (and remains so). Whether Shakespeare ever saw a crocodile is doubtful, unless, like Romeo, he came upon a crocodilian skin hanging in an apothecary’s shop. (B) The lengthiest and least satisfying representation of the crocodile in Shakespeare’s works occurs in Antony’s conversation with the drunken Lepidus, who asserts that Egypt’s serpents are ‘bred, now, of your mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile’ (ANT 2.7.26–7). Antony had just explained that the Nile’s deposits of ‘slime 123

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and ooze’ produce flourishing harvests (2.7.22). It was believed that those deposits, acted upon by Egypt’s hot sun, also produced monstrous creatures of all sorts. Lepidus returns to the subject of crocodiles shortly afterwards. ‘What manner o’ thing is your crocodile?’ (2.7.41), he asks Antony, who replies: It is shaped, sir, like itself, and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with it own organs. It lives by that which nourisheth it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates. (2.7.42–6) Pythagoras taught the transmigration or reincarnation of creatures after their death. Lepidus accepts this, and indeed everything else Antony says about the crocodile, without difficulty, and he moves on to a final question: ‘What colour is it of?’ (2.7.47), he asks. ‘Of its own colour too’ (2.7.48), replies Antony. ‘ ’Tis a strange serpent’ (2.7.49), concludes Lepidus, and Antony agrees, ‘ ’Tis so, and the tears of it are wet’ (2.7.50). Antony’s tautological answer has the virtue of accurately reflecting early modern Europeans’ lack of information about the crocodile. Queen Margaret in 2H6 alludes to the crocodile’s tears to convey Gloucester’s treacherous hypocrisy. As she says to Suffolk, York and Cardinal Beaumont, the king, Henry VI, is so ‘full of foolish pity’ (3.1.225) that Gloucester’s appearance of loyalty ‘[b]eguiles him, as the mournful crocodile / With sorrow snares relenting passengers’ (3.1.226–7). When Desdemona weeps after Othello strikes her, Lodovico begs him to ‘Make her amends’ (OTH 4.1.243). Instead, Othello calls her ‘devil, devil’, and declares, ‘If that the earth could teem with woman’s tears / Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile’ (4.1.243–5). Othello seems to sketch here a version of the story told in Lucan’s Civil War: as Perseus carries the severed head of Medusa, drops of her blood falling onto the sands of Libya engender venomous serpents (1928: 555–61). Othello imagines that women’s false and therefore poisonous tears, falling on the earth, engender noxious crocodiles, which themselves produce more false tears. Although Othello’s use of ‘woman’s tears’ universalizes his misogyny, he aims specifically at Desdemona and what he assumes is her feigned sorrow, for shortly afterwards he describes her tears as ‘well-painted passion’ (4.1.257). In their furious and despairing competition to prove who loved Ophelia more, Hamlet demands of Laertes, ‘What will thou do for her?’ (HAM 5.1.260). As for me, he says, whatever you would do, so would I: ‘Woul’t weep, woul’t fight, woul’t fast, woul’t tear thyself, / Woul’t drink up eisel, eat a crocodile? / I’ll do it’ (5.1.264–6). ‘Eisel’, note Thompson and Taylor (AR3: 430, n. 265), is probably vinegar, and there may be an allusion to the mixture of gall and vinegar that Jesus on the cross was given to drink. Eating a crocodile was thought to be impossible, as its skin was believed to be so tough that iron could not penetrate it. But the whiff of hypocrisy is ever present in the vicinity of the crocodile in the early modern period. Hamlet’s words may imply that Laertes’s tears, compared to his own profound grief for Ophelia, are but a ‘well-painted passion’. 124

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(C) Pliny calls the crocodile ‘a curse on four legs, and equally pernicious on land and in the river’ (1940: 65 [NH 8.37]). The crocodile may also be present in the Bible as leviathan at Ezekiel 29.3 and Isaiah 27.1. For the crocodile of medieval bestiaries, see, for instance, T. White (1954: 202) and Morrison (2019: 27). In The Faerie Queene, Spenser compares Duessa’s weeping to that of the ‘cruell craftie Crocodile, / Which in false griefe hyding his harmefull guile, / Doth weepe full sore, and sheddeth tender teares’ (2001: 75 [1.5.18]). In Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, envy is said to be ‘a crocodile that weeps when he kills, and fights with none but he feeds on’ (1985: 81). See Lloyd for a detailed history of Europeans’ knowledge of the crocodile; she observes that early Western ideas about the crocodile’s appearance were derived from representations of the creature on ancient statues, coins and medals (1971: 103–10). L. Ross (1961) observes that the crocodile was once regarded as a symbol of the devil, a fact that contributes to the diabolical imagery in OTH . J. Bates (2012) analyses Antony’s tautological description of the crocodile in the context of Hegelian phenomenology. R. Lewis (2017) argues that Antony’s empty description of the crocodile reveals Rome’s construction of Egypt to be a fantasy available for Roman shaping. KE crow. (A) A bird of the family Corvidae, crows are notable for their glossy black plumage and raw, grating caw. Crows as a group include a number of species from jackdaws to ravens (the largest corvid); they are intelligent scavengers that have adapted well to cohabitation with humans, taking advantage of human settlements to steal food and objects that interest them. They are also aggressive, willing to attack even small predators. They can eat carrion (although because of their beak morphology, this is only possible once a dead body has been opened up by other animals or by significant wounds), and in England and Europe they were traditionally associated with war because they were so often found on battlefields eating the dead. Early Germanic peoples who settled in England revered the crow: ravens were Odin’s familiars, for instance, and they make frequent appearances in ancient Celtic art. Their cleverness makes them a feature of many of Aesop’s fables. Their black plumage and hoarse cry contribute to their reputation as omens of evil; biblically, however, the raven, a close relative of the crow and distinguished mainly by its larger size, is the first bird sent from Noah’s ark to seek land. For farmers, crows are pests, stealing seed and small plants from fields during the growing season. The first incarnation of what would come to be called a scarecrow was a young boy, a ‘crow-keeper’, hired to run off or shoot at the birds. (B) Perhaps the most famous crow in Shakespeare is the playwright himself, called by his rival Robert Greene the ‘upstart crow’ in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte (1592a). Shakespeare was the son of a glove-maker (albeit a fairly prosperous one who owned land, if one who also suffered from significant debt). He was educated only at grammar school rather than at Cambridge as Greene and his set were and became an actor before he was a playwright. Greene’s advice to other authors is based on his disgust at the jumped-up commoner who scavenges material as a crow does and ‘sings’ with a raspy 125

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voice. Greene’s speaker warns his audience to ‘trust them [i.e., actors] not: for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart, wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shakescene in a countrie’ (sig. F2v). To translate, Greene calls Shakespeare a jumpedup (upstart), aggressive (Tyger) jack-of-all-trades (Johannes Factotum), who steals other poets’ ideas and presumes that he can write poetry. He thinks too well of himself, insists Greene, who is himself an older but less successful playwright. While few in Shakespeare’s world embraced Greene’s estimation of the young Shakespeare, the epithet ‘upstart crow’ has become famous. The crow’s association with death and evil makes it an appropriate bird for MAC , a play full of kites, owls and other ominous birds. Macbeth greets the night of Duncan’s death thus: ‘Light thickens, / And the crow makes wing to th’ rooky wood. / Good things of day begin to droop and drowse, / While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse’ (3.2.51–4). Iden and York both invoke the crow as carrion-feeder in 2H6: Iden describes leaving Cade’s body ‘for crows to feed upon’ while he takes the head to the King (4.10.83), and York reports killing Clifford’s horse, which he has ‘made a prey for carrion kites and crows’ (5.2.11). When Leontes has his child sent to its death through exposure, Paulina rants that he ‘cas[t] forth to crows [his] baby daughter’ (WT 3.2.188). Mistress Quickly imagines Falstaff finally dying to ‘yield the crow a pudding’ (H5 2.1.87), or in other words, to become carrion. Later in the same play, Grandpré calls the English ‘island carrions’ who are overflown by ‘knavish crows’ looking to become ‘their executors [. . .] all impatient for their hour’ (4.2.38, 50–1). For Grandpré, the battered and downtrodden English forces are living corpses – although the audience would also know that the hovering crows are part of a prophecy that promises the English will triumph over the French. There is some overlap between Grandpré’s speech and that of Cassius in JC when the latter worries that ‘ravens, crows and kites / Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us’ immediately before the battle at Philippi (5.1.84–5). These crows are more direct omens than most in the plays. Coriolanus uses the crow to register his loathing of the Roman citizens, referring to them as ‘crows’ come ‘to peck the eagles’ (COR 3.1.139), and later calling Rome ‘the city of kites and crows’ (4.5.43). Crows are the symbol and the agent of death and disease in MND , when Titania and Oberon’s quarrel results in ecological disaster: ‘The fold stands empty in the drowned field, / And crows are fatted with the murrain flock’ (2.1.96–7). Wet conditions were believed to generate sheep ‘murrain,’ killing the animals who would otherwise be ‘fatted’ for human consumption and leaving their carcasses to instead feed only crows. On a lighter note, Benvolio promises to show Romeo some women at the Capulet’s party who will make his beloved Rosaline seem like a crow in comparison to swans (ROM 1.2.88). Portia remarks that ‘The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark / When neither is attended’ (MV 5.1.102–3), meaning when no one is around to note the difference, the ugly caw of the crow is indistinguishable from the famously beautiful song of the lark. SON 113 offers a variant on the same theme when the speaker claims 126

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that his mind’s eye cannot distinguish between ‘crow, or dove’, because it sees only his beloved’s face (113.12). Scarecrows and crow-keepers are alluded to in ROM (1.4.6), MM (2.1.1) and LR (4.6.87–8). (C) Harting (1871: 111–15) provides an overview of the many guises of the crow. Berek (1984) discusses Greene’s insult and its origins in Aesopian fables and other sources that depict crows as mimics. KR cuckoo. (A) Of the family of birds known as Cuculidae, cuckoos are medium-sized birds, one species of which, the common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), is well known as a nest- or brood-parasite, that lays its eggs in the nest of another species. Doing so requires that either the cuckoo produce an egg that looks enough like that of the host species to pass muster as the host’s own (and avoid being thrown out of the nest), or an egg that is dark in colour, making it harder to identify. Aristotle observes that only one egg is laid in a host’s nest, which is accurate, but his comment that the bird first destroys the host’s other eggs before laying its own is probably an error (1970: 25 [6.7]). Chicks of the common cuckoo, however, do expel all other hatchlings from the nest in order to secure the full supply of food provided by the adoptive parents. It is from this behaviour that Shakespeare’s England drew its most frequent association of the cuckoo with a wife’s infidelity: the husband being cheated on was known as a cuckold, a term derived from the bird’s name, since the unfaithful wife presumably substituted her lover’s offspring for her husband’s, allowing children not of the husband’s bloodline to consume his resources. Pliny notes that because they are deceiving thieves, cuckoos are the target of other species’ hatred; ‘even the very small birds will attack it’ (NH 10.11.9 [1940: 309]). The cuckoo’s very simple song (one version of which is familiar from cuckoo clocks, consisting of the repetition of two notes) is identified with spring. A migratory bird, the cuckoo disappears for the winter in England and Europe and reappears when the weather warms. (B) Cuckoos as heralds of spring and symbols of cuckoldry both feature in LLL when ‘Ver’ (probably Holofernes) sings: When daisies pied and violets blue And lady-smocks all silver-white And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then on every tree Mocks married men; for thus sings he: ‘Cuckoo! Cuckoo, cuckoo!’ O, word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear. (5.2.882–90) Spring is associated with sexuality in general, with the growth indicated by budding flowers like cuckoo-buds (i.e., buttercups; see AR3: 295, n. 884), and so this song with 127

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its ‘pied’ plants, that is, plants with varied colouration, conveys both the joyful arousal and the lurking fear that hovers over all love matches like those represented in the play. The pied daisies might hint at the lust for difference and variety that leads to infidelity in the first place, a hint made concrete in the last lines of the song, in which the cuckoo’s call is a ‘word of fear’. Bottom in MND makes the same allusion to sexual betrayal when he sings for Titania: ‘The plain-ong cuckoo gray, / Whose note full many a man doth mark, / And dares not answer nay’ (3.1.127–9). As in LLL , the context here is everything: the comedy’s job is to make marriages, which inevitably leads in Shakespeare’s plays to thoughts of future cuckoldry. But since Titania is here doting on a low-class weaver with an ass’s head, the song is more pointed with regard to Oberon’s need to police and disrupt the fairy queen’s attachments to others like the changeling child or the votaress who was his mother. Love for any of them seems to Oberon to involve a kind of theft, for which Titania’s humiliation with Bottom is a kind of homeopathic remedy. In WIV , the threat of the cuckoo is even more direct, with Falstaff attempting to woo Mistress Ford away from her husband. Pistol eggs Ford on with allusions to Actaeon and the horn he hints Ford will wear: ‘Take heed, have open eye, for thieves do foot by night. / Take heed, ere summer comes, or cuckoo-birds do sing’ (2.1.111–12). The cuckoo’s actions toward its host are used to represent several other kinds of usurpation in the plays. Pompey wryly responds to Antony’s overture in ANT by noting that ‘since the cuckoo builds not for himself’ Antony is welcome to stay in the house he has stolen from Pompey (2.6.28). When characters in 1H4 fling around apparently innocent mentions of cuckoos, they touch on one of the principal fears the play mobilizes, that once King Henry IV took the crown from Richard II, he and all future kings of his line faced the charge of ruling illegitimately. King Henry himself wishes his son had been swapped in his cradle for Hotspur; Hotspur then excoriates the king for not being Richard’s legitimate heir. Thus, when Falstaff calls Prince Hal a cuckoo (2.4.344), the moment has a more ominous subtext. Likewise, when King Henry tries to instruct his son by comparing the deposed Richard to ‘the cuckoo [. . .] in June’ (3.2.75), saying the bird is not much noted except when it first appears, he thinks he is advising his son to be more restrained with his company, but he is equally reminding audiences that it was not Richard but Henry who stole the crown. Worcester makes the explicit case that King Henry is himself the cuckoo, responsible because of his previous betrayals for the rebellion that now threatens him. Henry, Worcester charges, ‘forgot [his] oath to us at Doncaster’, that he would not take more than his inherited lands when his followers supported his return from exile (5.1.58). Then, Worcester goes on to complain, ‘being fed by us, you used us so / As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo’s bird, / Useth the sparrow: did oppress our nest, / Grew by our feeding to so great a bulk’ that no one could approach the king out of fear (5.1.59–62). Acts of theft large and small thus reproduce the cuckoo’s parasitism and savage violence as fit images for the political world. Lear’s Fool chants, ‘The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long / That it’s had it head bit off by it young’ (LR 1.4.206–7). Like the cuckoos in the history plays, the Fool’s bird conveys the ugly cruelty in Goneril and Regan’s treatment of their father. 128

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(C) Boehrer touches only briefly on the etymological connection between cuckoo and cuckoldry, but examines at length the animal menagerie associated with cuckolds (2002: 71–98). Bach (2016: 79–84) reads Bottom’s song as an example of animal language. KR cur, mongrel. (A) A cowardly or vicious dog, or simply one of mixed origin. The word ‘cur’ seems originally to have been onomatopoeic: in ancient Scandinavian languages, ‘kurre’ meant ‘grumbling’ or ‘growling’. While ‘mongrel’ simply means mixed, the idea of mixed breeds implies a lower kind of animal. In Of English Dogges (1576), John Caius describes mongrels or ‘rascals’ as exercising no ‘worthy property of the gentle kind’ unless they work in houses or on farms, and ‘banishes’ them from his book (34). (B) In most instances in the plays it is humans who are currish or behave like mongrels. Thus, the most common use of the terms comes in diatribes about scurrilous human characters. Thersites calls Ajax a cur who ‘grumblest and railest’ against Achilles (TRO 2.1.30), although he later names Ajax and Achilles, respectively, ‘that mongrel cur’ and ‘that dog of a bad kind’ (5.4.12–13). In return, Ajax calls him ‘cur’ multiple times (2.1.39, 51). In MV , Shylock says that he was ‘footed’ by Antonio ‘as you spurn a stranger cur’ (1.3.114). Indeed, Shylock is kept an outsider because he is Jewish, and so is a ‘stranger’ or alien to Venice’s dominant Christian community. ‘Is it possible / A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ (1.3.117–18), Shylock asks, pointing out the hypocrisy of denying the Jew fully human status, yet relying on him to provide a purely human service. Along with the many other insults Coriolanus flings at the Roman citizens, he calls them curs: ‘What would you have, you curs, / That like nor peace nor war’ (COR 1.1.163–4). In this instance, it is their unwillingness to be satisfied with anything (in Coriolanus’s mind) that makes them dogs; he goes on to compare them to geese and hares (1.1.166–7), naming them both stupid and cowardly. Margaret calls King Richard III ‘carnal cur’ (R3 4.4.56) – carnal because he feeds on those in his own bloodline (and possibly hinting at his identification with the tusked boar). Buckingham finds Wolsey a ‘butcher’s cur’ (H8 1.1.120) because Wolsey was believed to be a butcher’s son, and so of the lower classes. The butcher’s dog, which helped chase or worry the bulls and other cattle brought to slaughter, was thought to be the most vicious type of dog: Tilley cites the proverb ‘As surly as a butcher’s dog’ (1950: B764). In H5, it is Pistol who wields the insult, calling a French soldier a cur (4.4.1, 18). The one ‘real’ cur in Shakespeare’s plays, that is, a dog of mongrel origin, is Crab in TGV , who fails utterly to demonstrate the loyalty of a good dog to his owner Lance, and unlike a lady’s well-bred lapdog (for which he is temporarily substituted), he steals food and pisses on the floor. Lance calls him a ‘cruel-hearted cur’ for not weeping at Lance’s departure, although ‘a Jew would have wept to have seen our parting’ (2.3.9–11), Lance declares, and laments the dog’s bad behaviour: ‘ ’tis a foul thing when a cur cannot keep himself in all companies!’ (4.4.9–10). (C) Vienne-Guerrin (2016) discusses the many uses of cur as an insult in the plays (188–90). KR 129

D dace. Any of a number of small fish; European dace belong to the genus Leuciscus. Falstaff compares Justice Shallow to a dace when he repeats the adage about big fish eating smaller ones: ‘If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him (2H4 3.2.329–30). The natural order of things turns out to rule in favour of the larger, predatory Falstaff. KR Dauphin. The title for the heir to the French throne and the term in French for dolphin. Indeed, the various characters who go by that title are referred to in the original Q and F versions of the plays as ‘Dolphins’. The name derives from the coat of arms of an early French noble, Guigues IV of Vienne, and is also associated with a specific region of France, the Dauphiné, the traditional seat of the heir apparent. Dauphins as characters appear in JN , 2H4 and H5, but by far the most significant with regard to animals is the Dauphin of H5, who enrages King Henry with his taunting gift of tennis balls in 1.2. As the French prepare for war with the English, the Dauphin celebrates the sterling qualities of his palfrey, the horse he will ride into battle, in language that his companions, the Constable and Orleans, mock mercilessly. Mentz (2012) and Brayton (2012a, 2012b) link the Dauphin’s dolphin-like playfulness with the expansion of human knowledge that made the sea and its inhabitants a suitable comparative domain for establishing human traits. Raber (2020) discusses the queer erotics of the Dauphin’s paean to his palfrey. KR daw. (A) A bird of the family Corvidae, the jackdaw is a vocal black bird with a gray head. It is proverbially associated with foolishness, partly for its habit of chattering and squawking (Tilley 1950: D50). (B) Warwick in IH6 dismisses his ability to judge between Suffolk and Richard, claiming that ‘in these nice sharp quillets of the law, / Good faith, I am no wiser than a daw’ (2.4.17–18). The image of the daw helps express Beatrice’s disgust at being forced to ask Benedick to come in to dinner in ADO. She responds to Benedick’s ingratiating question about the pleasure she takes in her task by declaring ‘just so much as you may take upon a knife’s point and choke a daw withal’ (2.3.245–6). Iago scornfully tells Rodrigo that he would as soon ‘wear [his] heart upon [his] sleeve / For daws to peck at’ as show true loyalty to Othello (OTH 1.1.63–4). Again, the reference 130

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is to the bird’s reputation for foolishness which lets Iago display his contempt for the ideals of loyal service: only a fool would serve up his heart that way. Likewise, Malvolio reveals his imagined superiority to Maria and the other members of Olivia’s household by responding to Maria’s greeting, ‘Yes, nightingales answer daws’ (TN 3.4.33–4). Watching the common soldiers file by while he chats with Cressida, Pandarus sums up their inadequacy in comparison to Troilus and the other heroes who passed by before them, saying ‘the eagles are gone; crows and daws, crows and daws!’ (TRO 1.2.235–6). KR deer. (A) Any member of the family Cervidae. Early modern species of importance include the red deer (Cervus elaphus), a large animal the male of which species grows branching antlers; the roe deer (Capreolus capreolus), a smaller animal also with branched antlers; and the fallow deer (Dama dama), whose antlers are broad and palmate. A male red deer of at least five years’ age is called a hart or stag, the female, a hind. The male of other species is referred to as a buck, and the female, a doe. These terms are somewhat fluid, however: Gascoigne in The Noble Art of Venerie (1575: 238), for instance, asserts that he would not call a deer a ‘Harte’ unless it had been killed by a prince. Deer are sometimes identified by their coat colour, which can also be confusing since a red deer might have a brown, red or fallow (yellowish) coat. Deer are one of the primary prey animals for the royal or noble hunt, and thus participate in social, political and economic constructions of human identity. The play on words that the term ‘deer’ makes possible (deer/dear) is part of that tradition, but so is the deer’s role as prized possession, as we see in Thomas Wyatt’s poem, ‘Whoso list to hunt’, in which the deer (probably representing Anne Boleyn) wears the collar of ‘Caesar’ or the king. The deer’s reputation as meek and vulnerable also lends itself to imagery expressing ideas about feminine subordination or the dangers of sexual violation. (B) Titus and his brother Marcus mobilize both the play on deer/dear and the idea of the wounded doe when they describe Lavinia’s mutilated body: Marcus says he ‘found her, straying in the park, / [. . .] as doth the deer / That hath received some unrecuring wound’ (TIT 3.1.89–91). Titus responds, ‘It was my dear, and he that hath wounded her / Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead’ (3.1.92–3). Lavinia’s role as proper Roman daughter, maid and later matron makes her ‘dear Lavinia’ to Titus (3.1.103), but a ‘dainty doe’ (1.1.617) for Chiron and Demetrius to hunt. Deer appear often as part of the repertoire of images associated with love and courtship, or with sexual desire. Thus, deer hunts in various plays, especially LLL and WIV , serve as allegories for the sexual pursuit of women. The Princess and her ladies are pursued by the King and his men in LLL , and the two wives are hunted by Falstaff in WIV – or poached, since they are not his property – and before hunting the women, the play establishes that Falstaff has already illegally killed Justice Shallow’s deer (1.1.104–5). Deer might dwell in parks or pales, maintained as a private herd for 131

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aristocrats, or they might range in forests (lands that included woods, pastures, even villages). Under the Normans, however, the availability of forests for the sustenance of commoners was eroded, until only the wealthy and well-born had clear hunting rights, especially to deer. John Manwood’s A Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forrest (1598) made it clear that the openness of forests did not mean open season on its game animals; poaching laws created a complex bureaucratic system for determining who could hunt what, and where. In both LLL and WIV the women/deer correlation allows for extended punning and witty jokes, as when during the hunt Boyet and Rosaline in LLL (4.1.107–27) play on terms like ‘shooter’ (for suitor), ‘hitting’ (wounding, but also a sexual act) and horns (a sign of a male cuckold). In SHR , on the other hand, the deer hunt is part of the frame that introduces the courtship involving Katherina and Petruccio, since in the play’s Induction the Lord tricking Sly invites him to hunt. At the play’s conclusion, Tranio asserts to Petruccio that ‘ ’Tis thought your deer does hold you at a bay’ (5.2.57), but his assumption that Katherina has triumphed over her husband is proven quite wrong when Katherina enters and behaves as an entirely submissive wife. In VEN , the goddess tries to disrupt Adonis’ boar hunt by making herself part of a less dangerous form of courtship: ‘I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer’ (231), she tells Adonis: as a park she may ensnare and entrap him, and guarantee that ‘no dog shall rouse’ him while she feeds him with her mountains and dales and ‘pleasant fountains’ (240, 234). The usual gendering of the deer as female, clear in the examples above, is here upended, a sign that Venus’ pursuit of Adonis threatens his masculinity. Prince Hal comically laments Falstaff, who he believes has died in battle, by borrowing the deer/dear reference to use satirically: ‘Death hath not struck so fat a deer today, / Though many dearer in this bloody fray’ (1H4 5.4.106–7). Because the hunt itself was considered good training for martial men, the image of the hunted deer is also a more serious commonplace in the history plays. Talbot refutes the French forces’ denigration of the English for being ‘timorous deer’ that the French have ‘parked and bounded in a pale’: he encourages them instead to fight like ‘desperate stags’ (1H6 4.2.45–50). ‘Sell every man his life as dear as mine / And they shall find dear deer of us, my friends’ (4.2.53–4), he rallies them, again turning the usual language of love poetry toward an articulation of military honour. Pursuit is likewise characterized as a deerhunt in 2H6 (5.2.15) and in 3H6, in which two forest keepers prepare to ambush any of Edward’s opponents: ‘[I]n this covert will we make our stand, / Culling the principal of all the deer’ (3.1.3–4), says one, and warns the other not to scare the ‘herd’ with the noise of his bow. The deer they entrap, ‘whose skin’s a keeper’s fee’ (3.1.22), is the deposed King Henry. The play raises the issue of whether the keepers, rather than ‘keeping’ the king’s deer safe, are themselves turned poachers, taking prisoner the man to whom they owed their prior allegiance. As if to enhance this possible reading, the play later has Richard of Gloucester interrupt a hunt meant to entertain King Edward while he is York’s prisoner. Edward sees Richard accompanied by Hastings, Stanley and soldiers, and refuses to accompany the huntsman who urges him toward the game, but 132

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instead goes toward the group, asking ‘Stand you thus close to steal the bishop’s deer?’ (4.5.17) – in other words, are you here to poach me, the bishop’s prisoner, away from him? And indeed they are: Edward leaves with the huntsman, who fears York’s ire if he is caught, and flees to Flanders. Gloucester, of course, will ultimately be proven a greater poacher than anyone knew when he manipulates and murders his way onto the throne after Edward dies. Because deer-hunting was both a violent sport and a significant aspect of social organization, it provided a ready structure for social commentary. According to one of the Duke’s exiled lords in AYL , Jaques finds the sight of a wounded stag poignant and addresses it: ‘Poor deer’ quoth he, ‘thou mak’st a testament As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more To that which had too much.’ (2.1.47–9) Jaques uses the deer’s example to condemn those who ‘Are mere usurpers, tyrants’ and who ‘fright the animals and kill them up’ (2.1.61–2). This ‘sobbing deer’ (2.2.66) is a literary convention; in this play, it forms part of a broader examination of human desires and prerogatives. Although he celebrates the simple life he and his exiled party have adopted in the woods, the Duke is himself uncomfortable with killing ‘poor dappled fools’ of the forest to survive (2.1.22). The Eden the Duke believes he has found is, in other words, not so Edenic: it requires hunting and killing for food, rather than for sport. When Jaques enters again in 4.2 to celebrate the Lord who killed a deer, however, the scene quickly turns toward the language of horns and cuckolds, more appropriate to the love-plot than the theme of political and social conflict. It is unclear whether Jaques is sincere – he does enact the rituals that were performed in the noble hunt, crowning the successful hunter – or mocking, since he uses the inflated rhetoric that makes the Lord a ‘Roman conqueror’ and swaps a laurel wreath for a rack of deer horns (4.2.3–4). (C) Theis (2001) discusses deer poaching’s cultural and ideological function. Franssen (2013) analyses the various tales of Shakespeare’s own deer-stealing. Uhlig (1970), Daley (1979) and Fitter (1999) discuss Jacques’ speech on the dying deer in AYL . KR Diana, Dian. (A) The Latin name of the goddess of wild animals, hunting, the moon, childbirth and chastity. Roman mythology derived Diana from the Greek goddess Artemis; both goddesses were virgins, and usually depicted in paintings and statuary in hunting attire, wielding a bow and arrow and accompanied by hounds or a deer, although there are slight and varying differences in their two histories, parentage and other qualities. (B) Most references to Diana in the plays capitalize on her association with chastity, either marking a female character’s virtue or her reluctance to marry. The tale of Diana 133

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and Actaeon is retold repeatedly in Renaissance literature. In Ovid’s version, Actaeon stumbles on the naked goddess bathing, and as punishment for seeing her is transformed into a stag and killed by his own hounds (1567: 3. 165–252). TN alludes to this tale at its outset. Prompted by his servant’s query about hunting, Orsino says that he has been tormented by unrequited love since he first saw Olivia: ‘That instant was I turned into a hart, / And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, / E’er since pursue me (1.1.20–2). Orsino internalizes Actaeon and his hounds so that it is his own thoughts that hunt him and give him no rest. Casting Olivia as Diana and himself as Actaeon reflects the potential violence and narcissism in Orsino’s persistent adoration. The two references to Diana in MND are to her altar, meaning to her cult of chastity (1.1.89), and to the flower Artemisia, possibly any of a large genus of plants of the daisy family, which Oberon uses to reverse the effects of the love juice (4.1.72). The flower restores rational control over sexuality, a version of a return to chastity. However, Diana’s presence is subtly woven throughout the play, in Hippolyta, a warlike Amazon, in the lovers’ escape to the forest, and in the moon’s constant presence over all the night-time action. In TIT , Bassianus calls Tamora a ‘Dian’, a figure ‘habited’ like the goddess (a reference to Tamora’s hunting outfit), ‘Who hath abandoned her holy groves / To see the general hunting in this forest’ (2.2.57–9). Answering his sarcasm, Tamora warns, ‘Had I the power that some say Dian had, / Thy temples should be planted presently / With horns, as was Actaeon’s, and the hounds / Should drive upon thy newtransformed limbs’ (2.2.61–4). Indeed, Tamora’s sons (her faithful hounds) kill Bassianus and then turn him into a posthumous cuckold (i.e., plant horns on his temples) by raping and mutilating Lavinia. Falstaff in WIV is no less a victim of Diana’s wrath: he is made to wear the stag’s horns through the trickery of Mistresses Page and Ford. They function as handmaids of Diana, not merely for their solid marital chastity, but because they are skilled at the ‘chase’ – in this instance, the punishment of the fat knight. (C) Barkan (1980) traces the literary heritage that informs Shakespeare’s uses of the Diana and Actaeon myth. Berry (2001b) also connects the goddess to several plays by way of the Actaeon myth (34–6). KR dive-dapper. The pie-billed grebe, or Podilymbus podiceps, is a stocky migratory water-bird, which, as its nickname suggests, dives to catch fish and to escape danger. This behaviour is probably responsible for the bird’s reputation as shy or fearful. Adonis submits to Venus’s demand for a kiss by raising his chin ‘Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave, / Who, being looked on, ducks as quickly in’ (VEN 86–7), only to turn his head away at the last moment. KR doe. (A) A female deer; a doe may be the female of several species (while a hind is specifically a female red deer). The term is often used to refer to female humans and 134

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thus to convey supposedly feminine attributes like timidity, submission or delicacy of features; its usage can be affectionate or dismissive, depending on context. Because it is a prey animal in the hunt, the ‘doe’ can also designate a tormented or assaulted woman. While early modern noble hunts aspired to chase the stag or hart above all other creatures, killing does was not unusual. Wyl Bucke His Testament (Lacy 1560), for instance, includes recipes to make three meals from a buck or a doe (sig. A3r), and deer fetus was considered a delicacy by some. Killing a doe during breeding season, however, would be a violation of noble standards as well as of the law (Gascoigne 1575: 238; Cox 1905: 50–2). (B) Falstaff calls Mistress Ford ‘My doe’ (5.5.15) in the final scenes of WIV , when he thinks he is about to overtake the sexual prey he has hunted throughout the play. Falstaff imagines himself to be a human analogue to Jove, who transformed himself into a bull to rape Europa, although Falstaff admits the difference between them, acknowledging that he is ‘a Windsor stag and the fattest, I think, i’ the forest’ (5.5.3, 12–13). He is not wrong; he is indeed a stag, but one about to be hunted down and punished for having the presumption to pursue the wives. The idea of the ‘double hunt’ (TIT 2.2.19) involving both animal and human prey is much darker in TIT , when Aaron persuades Chiron and Demetrius to join forces to assault Lavinia during the next morning’s hunt: The forest walks are wide and spacious, And many unfrequented plots there are, Fitted by kind for rape and villany. Single you thither then this dainty doe, And strike her home by force, if not by words. (1.1.614–18) Tamora’s two sons agree, and as Demetrius puts it, ‘we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound, / But hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground’ (2.1.25–6). Marcus finds the raped and mutilated Lavinia ‘straying in the park / Seeking to hide herself, as doth the deer’ (3.1.89–90). ‘It was my dear,’ Titus responds when he sees his mutilated daughter, the pun conveying infinite sadness (3.1.92). By preying on her, Lucrece protests, Tarquin does not live up to the standards of the noble hunt: ‘He is no woodman that doth bend his bow / To strike a poor unseasonable doe’ (LUC 580–1). Lucrece’s implication is that hunting a married woman is not, can never be, ‘in season’. (C) The hunt in WIV is discussed in Jonassen (1991), Stephen (2005) and Nardizzi (2011). Lavinia’s metaphorical identity as a doe is discussed in Berry (2001b), who points out that to Titus her assault is a form of poaching. KR dog, puppy. (A) Canis familiaris, the domesticated descendant of wolves, existed in many varieties in the early modern world, although fewer than exist today after further centuries of breeding for specific traits. Both ‘dog’ and ‘hound’ are derived from Old 135

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Figure 3 Five dogs turned towards one another, sixteenth century, anonymous, watercolour. Photo: Dietmar Katz. Kupferstichkabinett, Staätliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Art Resource, NY.

English; by the sixteenth century, ‘dog’ referred to all types of dogs, while ‘hound’ referred to those used in hunting. Further, in many cases ‘dog’ could have a derogatory inflection (OED II.5a), akin to the epithet ‘cur’, which indicated a cowardly or vicious dog. Puppies are juvenile dogs, with attendant connotations of immaturity or ineffectuality. Dogs were ubiquitous in Shakespeare’s world: indeed, the English were known for an unusual fondness for dogs. Lyly’s Euphues observes, as do works of the period, that the English ‘excel for one thing, their dogs of all sorts’ (1578: 438). Dogs served in a wide variety of roles, from powering kitchen devices to filling ladies’ laps to killing small vermin; they could themselves, however, be regarded as vermin, unless they were of the more valuable and recognized breeds. Early modern classification does not align with modern breed divisions, which can make sorting out what kinds of dogs are named in the plays more difficult. A hint of this problem can be found in John Caius’s Of Englishe Dogges (1576), which divides dogs into three groups: ‘gentle’ (i.e., noble) hunting dogs; ‘homely’ dogs; and ‘currish’ ones. Dogs’ ability to perform the physical signs of embarrassment could also make them vehicles for denoting human shame. A lady’s lapdog, on the other hand, could be a sign of the owner’s sexual desire and brazenness because the dog occupied an intimate space, and petting it invited attention. Dogs’ tendency to fawn on and appease their masters made them seem a pattern for the grovelling or self-abnegating position of cunning flatterers. At the same time, dogs were loyal to a fault – man’s best friend, reliable and 136

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docile in ways that humans might not be. For these reasons, dog imagery can be bound up with ideas of service and betrayal, faithfulness and rebellion. (B) Modern audiences may find it difficult to stomach the representation of canine loyalty in Helena’s declaration to the hostile Demetrius in MND : I am your spaniel, and Demetrius, The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. Use me but as your spaniel: spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you. What worser place can I beg in your love (And yet a place of high respect with me) Than to be used as you use your dog. (2.1.203–10) Lyly’s Euphues and His England observes, ‘The Spaniel that fawneth when he is beaten, will never forsake his master’ (1580: 392; see also AR2: 40, n. 203–4), reflecting the assumption that lapdogs are devoted beyond reason exactly as Helena promises to be. The verb ‘fawn’ carries overtones of flattery, and since spaniels were associated both with women and with Spain, a foreign Catholic country known in Protestant England as an enemy, Helena’s outburst carries undertones of inappropriate desire as much as doglike subservience. It is not surprising that to name or treat a person as a dog was to imply lowly social status, alienness, poor character or outright inhumanity. Disloyal or deceptive individuals were said to act like dogs; outsiders were dogs or curs; soldiers at war might behave like eager dogs panting for the fight. During the mock trial in LR , Lear points to ‘[t]he little dogs and all, / Trey, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me’ (3.6.60–1), registering the betrayal of his daughters as if they were pets like these imagined animals. Dogs also feature in Antony’s ramblings about his chaotic fate in ANT : ‘The hearts / That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave / Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets / On blossoming Caesar’ (4.12.20–3). Those who received treats from Antony in the past, and followed like dogs at his heels, now attach themselves to his opponent. In both Lear’s and Antony’s cases, it is the easy transfer of loyalty that hurts most: like dogs, human allies show themselves to be fickle, undermining important principles of filial affection or political allegiance. While dogs no longer played a major role in war during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, their use among Roman and Northern European militaries was a matter of historical and literary record. At the same time, the sense that men in battle were irrational, almost berserk in their blood-rage, informs references to dogs in Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies. The idea that military leaders could ‘unleash’ the horrors of war is made part of the Chorus’s description of King Henry V’s god-like sovereignty in H5, for instance: ‘Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, / Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels, / Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire / Crouch for 137

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employment’ (Pro. 5–8). In JC , Antony addresses the corpse of the murdered Caesar, vowing revenge on his killers with images of the consuming violence of civil war: And Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge, With Ate by his side come hot from Hell, Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice, Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial. (3.1.270–5) In its literal sense, Antony’s words here describe Caesar releasing his troops like dogs set free from the restraint of human law. (‘Havoc’ refers to a specific military order allowing pillaging and other crimes during war.) Figuratively, the speech turns the goddess of destruction, Ate, into Caesar’s pet who, like the ‘hounds’ famine, sword and fire we saw in H5, will turn men into mere dead flesh. The final lines uneasily conjure another role for dogs in war, that of carrion-eaters or scavengers which, along with kites and vultures, will dine on the dead. In other words, in both material and metaphoric ways, the dogs of war reduce human beings to beasts. While Hamlet only mentions dogs twice, the two occasions suggest a similar link between dogs, war and the degradation of human bodies into flesh fit for other wild creatures to eat. Early in the play the ‘mad’ Hamlet quizzes Polonius about Ophelia, alluding to her sexual availability with the image of a dog rotting in the sun: ‘For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion – have you a daughter?’ (HAM 2.2.178–9). The question associates women’s sexuality with corruption. Later, during their confrontation by Ophelia’s grave, Hamlet tells Laertes not to ‘whine’, and threatens, ‘[H]ave I in me something dangerous / Which let thy wisdom fear’ (5.1.251– 2). ‘Let Hercules himself do what he may,’ Hamlet goes on to conclude, ‘The cat will mew and dog will have his day’ (5.1.280–1). If in this scene Laertes is the noble Hercules, then Hamlet is the dog that will take violent revenge if pushed too far. It is hard to escape the implications of these two moments taken together, replete with allusions to violence, dead dogs and carrion. Together, they suggest the violence Hamlet wreaks throughout the play. His private war to avenge his father’s death makes him a ‘dog’ of war: but unlike his alter-ego Fortinbras, who simply sallies forth to fight real or perceived injuries from outsiders, Hamlet’s aggression is directed at those who are close to him, like the family dog that turns on its own. The proverb Hamlet cites, ‘every dog has his day’ (Tilley 1950: D464), means that even the lowest and least powerful will have the chance for vengeance. There are many other proverbial dogs in the plays; many of them invoke the violence linked to the dog’s occasional role as vermin. Gloucester complains to the King in 2H6 that he has been the victim of prejudice and conspiracy: ‘The ancient proverb will be well effected: / A staff is quickly found to beat a dog’ (3.1.170–1). The idea that dogs were routinely discarded if unwanted underwrites a number of references to drowning puppies (WIV 3.5.10; 138

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OTH 1.3.336–7). Dogs were also hanged for their crimes in medieval and early modern England and Europe, demonstrating that despite their lowly verminous condition they were still considered subject to religious and civil law (see Thomas 1983: 97–8; Shannon 2013: 228–48). Allusions to this practice occur in two of Shakespeare’s plays. Pistol tries to argue that Bardolph should not be executed in H5: ‘Let gallows gape for dog, let man go free’ (3.6.41), and Dogberry says, ‘Truly, I would not hang a dog by my will’ (ADO 3.3.61). The Fool in LR invents a proverb about punishing dogs: ‘Truth’s a dog that must to kennel; he must be whipped out, when the Lady Brach may stand by the fire and stink’ (1.4.109–11). Since Lear has just threatened to whip the Fool himself, the impromptu use of this proverb might position him (or Cordelia, or Kent) as the cast-out speaker of truth, but the comment may also refer to Lear’s daughters (Cordelia whipped out, Goneril and Regan the brachs, or bitches, stinking by the fire). By far the most common use of the word ‘dog’ or images of dogs in the plays is as an insult and is the reason some critics have decided that Shakespeare must not have liked dogs. To call a human being a dog or cur was to remove him or her from the supposedly elevated status the human enjoys in God’s creation. The plays are so full of dog insults that it is impossible to discuss them all here, and the fact that so many human characters descend to dog-like behaviour or actions works against the assumption that humans are superior to dogs or other animals. Shylock is the most frequent target of such insults, called ‘cut-throat dog’ (MV 1.3.107), ‘the dog Jew’ (2.8.14) and ‘the most impenetrable cur / That ever kept with men’ (3.3.18–19). Naming Shylock a dog dehumanizes him, turning his religious otherness into a species distinction and justifying his inhumane treatment by Venice’s Christians. Samson and Gregory refer to the Montagues as dogs (ROM 1.1.7, 10), and Coriolanus calls the Roman citizens curs (COR 1.1.163, 3.3.119), while for their part the citizens consider Coriolanus ‘a very dog to the commonalty’ (1.1.26). To be a ‘curtal dog’ or curtailed dog (one whose tail has been docked) is to lack a significant part of one’s body, to be crippled and, since the tail is phallic, castrated. Dromio of Syracuse is horrified when the kitchen wench of the Ephesian household mistakes him for her lover, saying, ‘She had transformed me to a curtal dog, and made me turn i’th’wheel’ (ERR 3.2.151); not only is he terrified by her apparently magical knowledge of his physical characteristics, but she threatens to make him her turnspit dog (a curtal dog), i.e., her slave. To call someone a puppy is likewise to diminish them. Aroused by a knock, the Porter in H8 insults the importunate man outside by calling him ‘good master puppy’ (5.3.27). Autolycus expresses his sense of superiority to his marks, the Shepherd and the Clown, who are mere ‘puppies’ (WT 4.4.709). One of the Lords in CYM dismissively calls Cloten and another lord ‘Puppies!’ (1.2.19). The Bastard trivializes the remarks of the Citizen in JN , saying ‘Here’s a large mouth indeed [. . .] Talks as familiarly of roaring lions / As maids of thirteen do of puppy-dogs’ (2.1.457– 60). Trinculo calls Caliban a ‘puppy-headed monster’ (TMP 2.2.151–2), adding yet another lowly and foolish animal to the list of those other characters use to describe him. The fact that unwanted puppies were often drowned crops up in Falstaff’s reference to the callousness of Mistress Ford and her servants who have dumped him in a buck 139

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basket in the river: ‘ ’Sblood the rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse as they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies, fifteen i’the litter’ (WIV 3.5.8–10). On the other side of the coin, Lancelot is the more disappointed in his dog Crab for not mourning his departure because, as he says, the dog is ‘one that I brought up of a puppy; one that I saved from drowning when three or four of his blind brothers and sisters went to it’ (TGV 4.4.2–4). Thersites is listed in the cast of characters in TRO as ‘a deformed and scurrilous Greek’, and immediately upon appearing onstage is called dog, ‘whoreson’ cur (2.1.7, 49, 51, 39) and is beaten by Ajax. But in a play that dismantles the heroism of the whole company of famous warriors responsible for the Trojan War, Thersites is hardly alone – and not without his own sharp tongue. Ajax, Thersites observes, ‘bark’st at’ Achilles (2.1.32–3), as if Ajax were no more than a bully dog. Indeed, Thersites’ primary function in the play is to puncture Homer’s version of the contenders as noble warriors, to make sure the audience sees them instead as brawling animals. Achilles and Ajax, along with all the other heroes of the Trojan War, are, in Thersites’ estimation, mere dogs and mongrel curs (5.4.12–13). Pistol calls Nym ‘Iceland dog, thou prick-eared cur of Iceland’ (H5 2.1.42), referring to lapdogs imported from Iceland. The OED notes that these were of the spitz type (2b), small, short-legged thick-coated dogs. Caius describes the ‘outlandish’ dog of Iceland as having a rough coat and being adored as a pet: they are ‘greatly set by, esteemed, taken up and made of’ (1576: 37). This sets the pointless quarreling of Pistol and Nym against the weightiness of the previous scene, which includes the Cardinal’s image of England as an industrious beehive and King Henry’s towering rage at the Dauphin’s insulting gift of tennis balls. All these insults depend on the idea that a dog – and any human comparable to a dog – cannot belong to human society, cannot participate in political life or have a voice in public affairs. The historical fact that dogs could be hanged for their crimes should already trouble that simple division. It is under further pressure in many of the plays. Lance laments in TGV that his dog Crab fails to behave as a civilized member of Silvia’s household when, given to her in place of a lapdog, he steals food and pisses under a table. For this, Lance calls him a cur. Presumably the lapdog Silvia was supposed to receive as a pet would have resisted the urge to steal food (and probably would have been voluntarily fed treats from the table anyway) or urinate in public. Would the lapdog thus have been a socially acceptable member of the household? Would it have been given a place at the table, making it a more civilized creature than Crab? The play mocks such distinctions by throwing them into stark relief in Lance’s condemnation of his ill-behaved mutt. Lance compares himself explicitly to Crab, addressing the dog as if it were a fellow human being who comprehends language: ‘When didst thou see me heave up my leg and make water against a gentlewoman’s farthingale? Didst thou ever see me do such a trick?’ (4.4.35–8), he asks. What is more, Lance claims he has saved Crab’s hide from punishment, including hanging: ‘I have sat in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen, otherwise he had been executed. I have stood on the pillory for geese he 140

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hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for’t’ (4.4.29–32). Human and dog are here made interchangeable, even if the human is ‘only’ a clown. These scenes with Crab are meant to be broad comedy – the joke relies not only on Lance’s imputation that he and Crab are indistinguishable on the ladder of creation, but also on the dog failing to respond at all to his master’s chiding. This is especially true when Lance is complaining in 2.3 that Crab is failing to weep at his master’s departure. At the same time, however, the dog reflects some of the serious ideological complications built into early modern service, which requires a servant to identify fully and loyally with a master who might dole out whippings and other abuse. As we saw with Lear’s Fool and with Helena’s expectations as Demetrius’s spaniel, beatings tend to make the distinction between human and animal much fuzzier than is always comfortable to Shakespeare’s characters. The scant rewards for a servant’s loyalty and the fact that masters are, in fact, unlikely to assume their servants’ punishments the way that Lance does for Crab highlight the potential shared status of dogs and people. It is also clear from these episodes that the most socially superior humans may be the least instinctually humane. When Coriolanus compares Roman citizens to dogs, he discounts their voices, which he can treat as the snarls and yapping of curs in the street. TIM , however, suggests that dog-like humans might well be capable of full-throated and hyper-critical speech. Apemantus the cynic frames Timon’s story through satire, sarcasm and a cynical version of social commentary. Called a dog by the painter whose work he denigrates, Apemantus responds, ‘Thy mother’s of my generation – what’s she, if I be a dog?’ (1.1.204–5). A Lord tells him, ‘Away, unpeaceable dog, or I’ll spurn thee hence,’ to which Apemantus replies, ‘I will fly like a dog the heels o’th’ass’ (1.1.278–9). Timon calls Apemantus a ‘slave whom fortune’s tender arm / With favour never clasped, but bred a dog’ (4.3.249– 50). The persistent association of Apemantus with dogs stems from his cynical philosophical position, identified with Diogenes’ rejection of man-made social constraints. Cynics embraced poverty and fled what they saw as the false comforts of ‘civilization’. The term ‘cynic’ itself derives from the Greek root kynikos, or dog-like; cynics professed disbelief in human virtues and embraced nature over culture. At the outset of TIM , while Timon still retains his faith in human goodness, Apemantus snaps and snarls at his foolishness. But when Timon himself becomes a cynic, rejecting all human society for a life in the woods, Apemantus does not abandon him, offering him food and remaining by his side longer than others, thus showing the loyalty of a dog in addition to its sharp tooth (see AR3: 57–9). Apemantus’ voice may resemble the constant barking of a dog, just as he himself embodies dog-like qualities, but his speech is nonetheless proved legitimately part of the debate over social mores. Macbeth offers a brief structuring image for human society that takes the world of dogs as its basis. When one of the murderers he hires announces that ‘we are men’, Macbeth replies: Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men: As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,

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Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves are clept All by the name of dogs. The valued file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous nature Hath in him closed, whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike: and so of men. (MAC 3.1.93–102) Shoughs are long-haired pets, water-rugs probably water spaniels, but Macbeth’s point is that all types of dogs, like all types of men, have their special skills and their specific place in the scheme of creation. Calling them all dogs, like calling someone a man, therefore provides little useful information about the individual and the all-important issues of where he fits in a social hierarchy or what his vocation is. Edgar as Poor Tom offers a different way of listing dogs, a list that banishes the currish dogs that Lear believes are barking at him: Be thy mouth or black or white, Tooth that poisons if it bite; Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim, Hound or spaniel, brach or [lym], Or bobtail tyke or trundle-tail, Tom will make him weep and wail; For with throwing thus my head, Dogs leap the hatch and all are fled. (LR 3.6.63–70) Apart from the dog’s tongue that the witches include in their brew in MAC (4.1.15), this is as close as Shakespeare gets to dogs’ devilish Renaissance reputation. Dogs were among the animals appearing as witches’ familiars: indeed, the devil himself appears as a black dog in Ford, Dekker and Rowley’s play The Witch of Edmonton (1621). Edgar’s chant and his list of threatening dogs belongs to the realm of witchcraft, demonic possession and exorcism. Bobtail ‘tykes’ are probably another type of Iceland dog, while a ‘lym’ may be a lyam-hound, or a leashed scent hound like the modern bloodhound (lyam means ‘leash’). The randomness of this list signals Lear’s genuine madness and Edgar’s feigned madness, but it also gathers dogs into a group of threatening animals with ‘poison’ teeth – much like Regan and Goneril themselves – vicious creatures who share human habitation but are imagined capable of turning in an instant on their masters. (C) Spurgeon (1935: 195–9) treats the fawning, candy-licking dogs of JC , ANT and other plays; Jackson (1950) offers an expanded analysis of the links between dog images, sweet treats and flattery. Thomas provides an overview of dogs in early modern

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England (1983: 101–9). Garber (1998) looks at the way Shakespeare and dogs function as registers of humanism in the twentieth century. Kanzer (1979) finds dogs to be key to understanding the violence in JC ; Sadowski (1993) analyses Hamlet’s canine qualities; and Penberthy (2010) contrasts the representation of an English work ethic with that of English idleness in terms of dog references in H5’s account of war. Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 207–12) accounts for the ways ‘dog’ and ‘cur’ were employed as insults in the plays. Laurent (1984) uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the human–animal boundary as it results in Shylock’s conversion. Boehrer (1999, 2002) discusses Shylock’s resistance to becoming a pet as his daughter does in MV ; Shannon (2013: 218–69) considers the practice of hanging dogs in light of MV ’s dog references and current theory. Yachnin (2011) includes dogs among the ‘public animals’ given status as members of the state with a corresponding political voice, focusing on Shylock in MV . Botelho (2015) includes dog references in the many beast comparisons he traces in MV . Kucinski (2014) considers dogs and horses as reflections of English national identity, while MacInnes (2003) contrasts the reputation of spaniels and mastiffs as registers of national identity. Poole (2011) sets dogs in a framework for understanding the ideologies of service in the plays, whether in domestic or in military contexts Brooks (1963, 1996) discusses Crab in TGV ; Beadle (1994) looks at Crab’s role as representing the first scripted part for a dog; and Dobson (2000) discusses Crab in the context of the Elizabethan theatre’s growing use of dogs onstage. Fudge (2008) finds Crab an embodiment of nature which withstands the civilizing process. For Kordecki (2013), Lance’s relationship with Crab is a story of true love that levels distinctions between human and animal. For Alkemeyer (2020), Crab is the animal by which human pretension is satirized and the conventional concept of the human is dislodged. E. Brown (2000) suggests that Caliban may be defined through dog imagery in TMP . Raber (2011; 2013: 144–50) discusses the dogs of ROM . Sanchez (2011) finds Helena’s desire to be a spaniel an example of queer sexuality in MND . Cole (2020) addresses the connection between dogs and disease (105–7). KR dolphin. (A) An aquatic mammal of the order Cetacea, which includes whales and porpoises, dolphins are sleek animals with flippers and a dorsal fin; they can travel at high speeds through water and use sonar to echolocate. The name derives from the Greek word for ‘womb’, indicating that the animal produces live young. Dolphins are cooperative social mammals, living in groups called pods; they engage in playful behaviour, including bubble-blowing and jumping; and they are capable of a range of vocal sounds. Although Aristotle classified dolphins as mammals (1991: 75 [7.2]), they were considered fish through most of the Middle Ages, while their classification was debated in the Renaissance. In classical art, natural history and literature, dolphins are associated with altruistic behaviour, including the rescue of drowning humans. Herodotus records in his Histories the tale of Arion, carried safely to shore by a 143

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dolphin after being left to die at sea (1920–75: 1.26). Taras, Poseidon’s son, was reputed to have been saved by a dolphin sent by his father, and images of Taras often show him riding on a dolphin’s back. Pliny (NH 9.7–8 [1940: 179–83]) states that dolphins are fond of music, and he provides several stories of bonding between humans and dolphins. A version of the word for dolphin in Old French, dauphin, designated the heir to the throne of France after the twelfth-century Guigues IV of Vienne adopted the title from dolphins depicted on his coat of arms. ‘Dauphin’ and ‘dolphin’ are doublets, words that are identical in derivation but which have evolved into different meanings. (B) The dolphin appears in Shakespeare’s works both – and often simultaneously – as the sea mammal and in the history plays as the title of the French heir to the throne. The sea captain in TN reassures Viola that he saw her brother grasp a mast of their sinking ship ‘like Arion on the dolphin’s back’ (1.2.14). Edgar glancingly refers to dolphins when he babbles about what appears to be a horse he imagines riding, calling it ‘Dauphin’. The garbled speech in which this line appears is full of animal references, while the Fool notes that ‘ ’tis a naughty night to swim in’ (LR 3.4.97, 108–9), suggesting that Edgar’s imagination is working on multiple levels and aligning his delusion with a watery or oceanic context. Elsewhere, lamenting Antony’s death, Cleopatra describes his ‘delights’ as ‘dolphin-like: ‘they showed his back above / The element they lived in’ (ANT 5.2.87–9) – in other words, the larger-than-life Antony rose above the waves of whatever pleasures he participated in. The image manages to combine the reputed noble nature of the dolphin, and its physiological difference from all other sea creatures, with its reputation for joyful play. Dolphins-as-dauphins appear in JN and the first and second tetralogy (H5 and 1H6). The list of characters of all three plays in both F and Q versions uses ‘dolphin’, following the title given in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587). Growing familiarity with cetaceans of all kinds during the rise of whaling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries contributed to their increased presence in everything from material goods to political thought: thus, the idea of the state as ‘leviathan’ (a huge whale-like sea serpent) could supplement the old idea of the ‘ship of state’ and make possible more widely accessible resonances between dauphins and dolphins. The French Dauphin sends Henry V a provocative gift of tennis balls in answer to Henry’s claims to possess portions of French territory. The French ambassador calls them a ‘tun of treasure’, alluding to the many casks, or tuns, of wine Henry might have been rumoured to consume while still a denizen of London’s taverns (H5 1.2.256). He thus adds to the insult by implying that the young English king is a drunk as well as a political lightweight. King Henry responds angrily, promising to ‘show my sail of greatness, / When I do rouse me in my throne of France’ (1.2.275–6). This clearly places the Dolphin’s gift in a nautical context. Such a watery exchange is appropriate to King Henry, who moves ‘[a]thwart the sea’ with such ease (5.0.9), travelling from Dover to Calais and back again with ease (the speed at which the setting changes may be a subtle joke on the Chorus’s part; see AR3: 333, n. 7). JN ’s Dolphin is inundated with Salisbury’s tears and 144

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is moved by ‘This shower, blown up by tempest of the soul’ (5.2.50); he balances ‘these waters’ with warmth and ‘mirth’ (5.2.56, 59), demonstrating the noble friendliness of the sea mammal with which he shares a title. Whether deliberate or not, this network of images immerses the historical Dauphins in the same kind of oceanic environment that we find in a play like TN . (C) Tiffany (1995: 74–6) discusses the dolphins in the history plays as figures for the hermaphrodite or androgyne. Brayton (2012a, 2012b) argues that the dolphin’s special relationship to human beings arises not merely from its reputation as a mythic saviour of ocean-tossed humans and gods, but from its possession of specific political characteristics (esp. 2012a). More disconcerting was the indeterminacy of cetacean classification – ‘were they fish or flesh’? (Brayton 2012: 52) – a puzzle that persisted from classical antiquity through the Renaissance. Mentz (2012) argues that Renaissance dolphin tales are Aquaman fantasies about being able to conquer the challenges of life in the ocean, a realm inhospitable to human life. KR dove, turtledove. (A) A bird of the pigeon family Columbidae, doves are generally small, short-necked and widespread across the globe. The European turtledove (Streptopelia turtur) is a smaller and more delicately shaped species than other members of the family. The terms ‘pigeon’ and ‘dove’ are virtually interchangeable in early modern English: wood-pigeons, ring-doves and turtle-doves were usually grouped together, and any light-coloured or very small pigeon might be called a dove. (What we now think of as pigeons are rock doves.) The word ‘dove’ may derive from a Germanic root meaning ‘dive’ and is thus related to the name given the dive-dapper. The dove has long been considered a messenger of peace or deliverance. (B) The mating behaviour of doves involved cooing, bowing, mutual preening and ‘billing’ (gentle nibbling that resembles kissing), and doves were assumed to be monogamous, all of which reinforced the idea that doves represent faithful love. In classical mythology and in art and literature, Venus, the goddess of love, is depicted driving a chariot pulled by doves. LUC (58), PP (9.2), PER (4 ch. 32), VEN (153), MND (1.1.171) and TMP (4.1.94) all reference Venus’s chariot and its doves, often with emphasis on the birds’ snowy plumage, further associating fairness or whiteness with love. Venus calls Adonis a man ‘More white than doves’ (VEN 10), and when she holds his hand the two are entwined like ‘two silver doves that sit a-billing’ (366). Since doves were easily tamed, their cooing, doting behaviours were abundantly present in early modern everyday culture. The turtledove was often linked to the phoenix. In the prefatory verse of Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr (1601), the collection of verse that includes Shakespeare’s PHT , notes the ‘kind acceptance of his [The Phoenix’s] turtledove’. Shakespeare’s loving ‘turtle’ in PHT may allegorically represent either English subjects in general, given the association of the phoenix with Elizabeth I and her many assertions of love toward her people, or Sir John Salusbury in particular (the dedicatee of Chester’s collection). However, the two birds also may metaphorically 145

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simply represent ‘love and constancy’ (22) or reason and passion (‘Love hath reason’, 47). Whatever the metaphors or allegories involved, the poem revolves around the way the two creatures are united by their love but given no place in a corrupt world. The faithfulness of the turtledove inspires Troilus’s (tragically ironic) pledge of constancy to Cressida when he claims he is ‘as turtle to her mate’ (TRO 3.2.173) and Florizell when he takes Perdita’s hand saying ‘so turtles pair / That never meant to part’ (WT 4.4.154– 5). Hermia swears fidelity to Lysander ‘By the simplicity of Venus’ doves’ (MND 1.1.171). Mistresses Page also builds on the turtledove’s reputation for fidelity, making a case for male weakness in contrast, when she scoffs that she’d find ‘twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man’ (WIV 2.1.72). ‘Dove’ as a stock item in love poetry and as a term of endearment is such a commonplace that it earns further comic use in the plays: when Flute as Thisbe mourns Pyramus with the line ‘What, dead, my dove’ (MND 5.1.318), the line’s inappropriateness prepares the audience for the truly dreadful poem that follows. In similar fashion, Mercutio uses the ‘love/dove’ rhyme as a clichéd sign of young love (ROM 2.1.10). Berowne rather grumpily wishes Costard and Jaquenetta would leave the rest of the men, saying ‘Will these turtles be gone?’ (LLL 4.3.209). He is annoyed that he has been exposed for wooing Rosaline, and his sarcasm thus seems self-directed as much as anything. The dove’s colouration undergirds its use in plays where distinguishing its paleness from the blackness of a crow signals the ability to divine the obvious, like the clear superiority of a beloved woman to an ordinary one (ROM 1.5.47; MND 2.2.118). SON 113 uses the bird differently: the poet expresses his blindness to anything but his beloved, with whose image his mind is so filled that ‘crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature’ (12). PP also plays with the tradition, claiming in one poem that his love is ‘mild as a dove’ but ‘neither true nor trusty’ (7.2). The dove’s fragility and vulnerability contrast with Tarquin’s looming, hovering evil: Lucrece, the poem tells us, ‘sleeps fast that this night owl will catch’ (LUC 360). The dove, of course, has broad and deep religious associations. At Gen. 8.11, the Bible recounts Noah’s sending out first a raven and then a dove from the Ark. The raven fails to return, but the dove, after two flights, brings back an olive leaf in its beak, a sign that the Flood has receded. The dove’s olive branch, like the rainbow after the Flood, has come to symbolize peace. Doves are associated also with innocence: indeed, the bird’s innocence and harmlessness led to the belief that it lacked the organ that produced gall, a claim that Thomas Browne refutes in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1981: 1.168–71). The dove’s symbolic role as figure for Christian – or even Muslim – pacifism informs its appearance in some plays. Westmorland in 2H4 rebukes the Archbishop, ‘Whose white investments figure innocence, / The dove and very blessed spirit of peace’ (4.1.45– 6), for warmongering. The French king in 1H6 exclaims in admiration of Joan of Arc’s martial vigour, ‘Was Mohamet inspired with a dove? / Thou with an eagle art inspired then’ (1.2.140–1). Henry and his queen in 2H6 debate Gloucester’s character via biblical and Aesopian allusions: to Henry’s claim that his uncle is ‘as innocent / [. . .] As is the sucking lamb or harmless dove,’ the queen retorts ‘Seems he a dove? His feathers are 146

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but borrowed’ (3.1.69–71, 75). The king’s reference here is to Mt. 10.16, the queen’s to the fable of the crow in borrowed plumage (Perry Index 472). Henry’s error in this instance contributes to his positioning as an innocent among more vicious beasts, one who is vulnerable to predators. Petruccio uses this dimension of the bird, along with its reputation for sexual faithfulness, in teasing Katherina in SHR : their exchange of animal metaphors in Act 2 begins with asses, jades and bees, migrating into buzzing and thence to buzzards when Petruccio asks, ‘O slow-winged turtle, shall a buzzard take thee?’ (2.1.208). He implies that a lesser bird (a buzzard was a type of hawk, proverbially associated with blindness, and thus incompetent as a hunting bird) will ‘have’ her sexually. Katherina snaps back, ‘Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard’ (2.1.209). In this case, the buzzard is the buzzing May fly, and the turtle the credulous fool that swallows it – in other words, anyone who thinks Katherina is a compliant partner is deluded. Gertrude uses a very different image of the faithful dove as guardian of her nest when she advises Claudius to ignore Hamlet’s raving, saying that his ‘silence’, or sanity, waits ‘patient as the female dove / When that her golden couplets are disclosed’ (HAM 5.1. 275–7; couplets are a pair of young). Their size, colour and role as prey of other birds let doves serve as examples of overmatched combatants. Enobarbus recognizes that Cleopatra has aroused Antony’s blood and ire, which will ensure ‘Now he’ll outstare the lightning [. . .] The dove will peck the estridge’ (3.13.200–2). In this instance, Caesar is the estridge, a type of hawk. The warlike Coriolanus is ‘melted’ by his wife Virgilia’s ‘dove eyes’ (COR 5.3.26–7), but rages at the Volscians and Aufidius that ‘like an eagle in a dove-cote’ he ‘fluttered’ them in Corioles when he defeated them (5.6.115–16). The moment is ironic: the doves slaughter the eagle in the next moments. Talbot is shocked by Joan’s success on the battlefield, marvelling that the English have been routed: ‘So bees with smoke and doves with stench / Are from their houses driven away’ (1H6 1.5.22–3). Clifford confronts the weakened York, scorning his verbal threats, ‘So cowards fight when they can fly no further; / So doves do peck the falcon’s piercing talons’ (3H6 1.4.40–1). Doves, like pigeons and other birds, were a commonplace food item. Thus, Gobbo tries to press ‘a dish of doves that [he] would bestow’ upon Bassanio (MV 2.2.126), presenting a gift with Christian connotations to the new, non-Jewish master Launcelot aspires to gain; and Paris tells Helen in TRO that Pandarus eats nothing but doves (3.1.123) so is therefore ‘hot’ (because of the birds’ association with love). A more macabre use of the image of a beheaded dove occurs in TNK when the Second Queen asks that Theseus ‘Lend us a knee; / But touch the ground for us no longer time / Than a dove’s motion when the head’s plucked off’ (1.1.96–8), meaning kneel but only as long as the few seconds a dove would continue to move after being beheaded. The overall bloodthirstiness of the queens is reflected in this image, but so too is the familiar kitchen sight of an animal being butchered for a meal. (C) Harting (1965) distinguishes between pigeons and doves in the plays on the basis that pigeons are only referred to in terms of transporting messages, as food, and in terms of ‘conjugal fidelity or attachment to offspring (180), while the dove is associated with 147

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peace, patience, innocence, modesty – and fidelity and love. That overlap demonstrates the problem of truly distinguishing the two species. Rockas (1973) associates the dish of doves in MV with the play’s true goal of creating harmony in marriage, noting that there are many references to feasting and dining that make Gobbo’s offering more than accidental. Hallett Smith (1976) suggests that Bottom’s absurd reference to the ‘sucking dove’ in MND derives from an actor’s error in speaking the line ‘As is the sucking lamb or harmless dove’ from 2H6 (3.1.71). In PHT ’s imagery of deindividuation, Bishop finds evidence that Shakespeare repurposed the religious metaphysics of the Trinity to express the self as a composite, interpenetrating, ‘a shifting array of comminglings and opennesses’ (2006, 71). KR dragon. (A) A mythical beast, a version of which may be found in almost every culture. The Western dragon is usually imagined as breathing fire and having a reptilian or serpentine body with a lashing (or ‘swingeing’) tail, scales, wings and claws. It is often said to be a guardian of treasure. Dwelling alone, the dragon is associated with caves, fens, springs or other watery places. Classical and other pre-Christian notions of a cosmic, destructive dragon merge easily with the apocalyptic dragon of the Bible in early English literature. By Shakespeare’s day, however, the notion of the dragon was much diminished, and it was popularly depicted as a small beast relatively easily dispatched by St George, England’s patron saint. Yet its ancient potency and its aura of the mystical or supernatural cannot be entirely erased from evocations of the dragon and remain available for rhetorical use. (B) St George’s dragon is mentioned twice in Shakespeare’s works, both times with some irony. Attempting to rouse the courage of his soldiers before the Battle of Bosworth Field, Richard III cries, ‘Advance our standards! Set upon our foes! / Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George, / Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons’ (R3 5.3.348–50). The spleen is the seat of choler or wrath in the body and is associated with fire. The fact that Richard has asked for inspiration from the beast defeated by St George is but one of many signs that he himself will be defeated. When in JN Chatillon arrives to tell King Philip that the English army has landed on French shores, he warns the king that the English soldiers are ‘dauntless spirits’: ‘Rash, inconsiderate, fiery voluntaries / With ladies’ faces and fierce dragons’ spleens’ (JN 2.1.72, 67–8). He means that they are beardless youths, fiery and impetuous, and therefore not to be feared. As French and English forces prepare to do battle for control of Anjou, Philip the Bastard sarcastically cries, ‘Saint George that swinged the dragon, / And e’er since sits on’s horseback at mine hostess’ door, / Teach us some fence!’ (2.1.288–90). He simultaneously invokes the aid of England’s patron saint and acknowledges that the saint and his dragon are now most commonly to be found painted on the signs of taverns and inns. Hotspur shares some of the Bastard’s scepticism and impatience when Glendower cites the dragon among other prophetic signs. ‘Sometime he angers me’, Hotspur says 148

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to Mortimer, ‘With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, / Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, / And of a dragon and a finless fish’ (1H4 3.1.144–7). All of this, declares Hotspur, is ‘a deal of skimble-skamble stuff’ (3.1.150). As Kastan (AR3: 249, n. 145– 50) points out, the language of Glendower’s prophecies is taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles, one of Shakespeare’s primary sources. Edmund in LR scoffs at human beings’ willingness to blame their dispositions, fortunes and misdeeds on natural phenomena. He sneers, ‘My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous’ (LR 1.2.128–31). This dragon is not the mythical beast but either the constellation Draco, or the descending orbit of the moon when it appears to intersect with the orbit of the sun, raising the possibility of an eclipse, regarded in the early modern period as a sinister portent (Bevington 2014: 1213, n. 131–2). The dragon in its powerful atavistic form appears several times in Shakespeare’s works, as when King Lear, in his fury at Cordelia’s refusal to flatter him, warns Kent not to interfere: ‘Come not between the dragon and his wrath’ (LR 1.1.123), he commands. Behind Lear’s words lies the assumption that as a king, he is as powerful and dangerous as a dragon – and perhaps as alone. Henry V is implicitly figured as a dragon in Gloucester’s encomium for the deceased king: His brandished sword did blind men with his beams, His arms spread wider than a dragon’s wings: His sparkling eyes, replete with wrathful fire, More dazzled and drove back his enemies Than midday sun fierce beat against their faces. (1H6 1.1.10–14) It is not only the wings that establish the metaphor. The eyes that blaze like fire evoke the fiery qualities of the dragon. Burns (AR3: 116, n. 11) finds in Gloucester’s words a possible allusion to the Welsh dragon, which would tie Henry to King Arthur, whose grandfather was Uther Pendragon. The title ‘Pendragon’ signifies a ruler with ultimate power, from Welsh pen (‘head’) and dragon (‘warrior’). The image of the winged dragon also anticipates the coming of the Tudors through Henry’s widow, who married Owen Tudor. Later in the play, the grievously ill Duke of Bedford demands that he be carried in his litter to the siege of Rouen, modelling himself on ‘[t]hat stout Pendragon, in his litter sick, / [who] Came to the field, and vanquished his foes’ (3.2.93–4). Like King Lear, Coriolanus compares himself to a dragon, although his emphasis is on the dragon’s solitary life in the fens rather than on its ferocity. Banished from Rome, he declares, ‘I go alone, / Like to a lonely dragon that his fen / Makes feared and talked of more than seen’ (COR 4.1.29–31). His simile conveys an astute perception: although dragons belong to the realm of superstition rather than lived experience, superstition nonetheless produces genuine fear. Aufidius feels diminished in comparison to Coriolanus, whose very popularity with the troops seems the result of witchcraft, but he acknowledges Coriolanus’s almost unassailable strength: he ‘[f]ights dragon-like and 149

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does achieve as soon / As draw his sword’ (COR 4.7.23–4). Determined to destroy Coriolanus, Menenius plays wittily with an implied syllogism: as a caterpillar is to a butterfly, so a man is to a dragon. ‘There is differency between a grub and a butterfly’, he remarks, ‘yet your butterfly was a grub. This Martius is grown from man to dragon. He has wings; he’s more than a creeping thing’ (COR 5.4.11–14). Menenius’s point seems to be that caterpillars do in fact turn into butterflies, whereas Coriolanus merely thinks he has become a dragon; his enemies must remember that he is but a man and is therefore not invincible. Metamorphosis, or more precisely the melting and re-forming of cloud shapes, becomes in ANT a metaphor for Antony’s own dissolving identity. To the possibly puzzled Eros, Antony observes: ‘Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish, / A vapour sometime like a bear or lion, / A towered citadel, a pendant rock, / A forked mountain, or blue promontory / With trees upon’t that nod unto the world / And mock our eyes with air’ (4.14.2–7). No matter how distinct one of these shapes appears, it soon becomes as ‘indistinct / As water is in water’ (4.14.10–11). I am ‘such a body’, admits Antony; ‘I am Antony, / Yet cannot hold this visible shape’ (4.1.13–14). All of the shapes he instances are threatening or inaccessibly distant, emphasizing the pervasive sense of loss and fear. The dragon’s mythic role as a fierce protector is alluded to in PER , when Antiochus describes the perils facing Pericles should he woo Antiochus’s daughter: Before thee stands this fair Hesperides, With golden fruit, but dangerous to be touched, For death-like dragons here affright thee hard. (1.1.28–30) The myth to which Antiochus refers is Hercules’ quest to steal the golden fruit from the garden of Hesperus’s daughters (the Hesperides), a garden protected by dragons. As Gossett observes (AR3: 180, n. 28–9), Antiochus treats Hesperides as if it is a place, although the passage goes on to conflate the place with his daughter’s body. The ‘deathlike dragons’ to which he refers are, according to the stage direction supplied in AR3, the heads of former suitors, but this is to mislead Pericles. The dragons that threaten any suitor of the nameless daughter are in fact Antiochus’s own murderous intentions. Dragons play a role in another ancient myth referred to twice in Shakespeare’s plays. According to Ovid, the moon goddess was drawn across the night sky in a chariot pulled by dragons (1567: 287–8). In response to Oberon’s promise to release Titania from her drug-induced infatuation with Bottom, Robin Goodfellow, or Puck, tells him that it ‘must be done with haste, / For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast / And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger’ (MND 3.2.378–80). The moon is quickly disappearing, that is, and dawn approaches, when ghosts must return ‘to their wormy beds’ (3.2.384). The villainous Iachimo, hiding in a trunk in Innogen’s bedroom, prays that dawn will come quickly: ‘Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning / May bare the raven’s eye. I lodge in fear; / Though this a heavenly angel, hell is here’ (CYM 2.2.48– 50). With his evocation of dragons and raven (thought to nest with its face toward the 150

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east to be awakened by the sun’s rising), Iachimo keeps bad metaphorical company. Wayne (AR3: 203, n. 50) suggests that the trunk may have been placed over and eventually lowered through the trapdoor into what was called the ‘hell’ in early modern staging. Iachimo is at least in a moral purgatory, as he waits for the dawn, entombed in a trunk. He is fully aware of the evil he does, and the awareness seems to torment him. In TRO , as trumpets sound to end the day’s battle, Achilles attributes to the moon goddess’s dragons the darkness that acts as a referee, or ‘stickler’, between the two warring sides: ‘The dragon wing of night o’erspreads the earth / And, stickler-like, the armies separates’ (TRO 5.9.17–18). The dragon’s ferocity against humankind explains its presence in Timon’s bitterly misanthropic supplication to mother earth, that she should no longer ‘bring out ungrateful man’ from her womb but instead ‘tigers, dragons, wolves and bears’ or other ‘new monsters’ never before seen (TIM 4.3.187–9). ‘Scale of dragon’ is among the unsavoury ingredients of the witches’ cauldron in MAC (4.1.22). Juliet, learning that Romeo has killed her beloved cousin Tybalt, expresses her grief through the rhetorical devices usually employed for expressing love, Petrarchan antithesis and paradox: ‘O serpent heart hid with a flowering face! / Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave?’ (ROM 3.2.73–4). The cave, in this instance, is Romeo’s appearance, and the dragon is his heart. (C) Blust (2000) provides an anthropological approach to the origin of dragon myths. The dragon of the Apocalypse appears in Revelation 12 and 19. Ogden’s monograph (2013) analyses dragons in classical literature and myth, but chapter 11 discusses the relationship between classical and biblical dragons. In Jonson’s The Alchemist, ‘dragon’, meaning mercury (as at 1982a: 2.3.189), is one of the alchemical terms used to awe and deceive victims of the fraudsters. For the Renaissance, and especially Spenser’s, reception of centuries of dragon lore, see Humfrey (1990). Berry (1975: 101) points to the apocalyptic associations of the dragon invoked in R3. MacLure (1955) analyses the political implications of Coriolanus as a lonely dragon. Saenger (1997) and E. Brown (2006b: 37–57) discuss the imagery of Coriolanus’s metamorphosis from caterpillar to dragon. Skura (2008) investigates Lear’s selfdefinition as a dragon in a comparison of family dynamics in LR and its source, King Leir. Guilfoyle (1987: 217–18), citing Muir (AR2: 11), explains that when King Lear warns Kent not to come between the dragon and his wrath, he refers to the ‘dragon of Britain’ (represented on Arthur’s helmet). In Lear’s warning to Kent, Linville (1990) sees a reference to the dragon or serpent associated with Chronos, or Time, who devours his children. Stirm (2016) sets AYL in the context of a ‘real’ dragon discovered in England in 1614. KE drone. (A) A stingless male honeybee (Apis mellifera), larger than (female) worker bees, present in the hive only in the summer; drones are killed in the autumn by the worker bees. The sole function of drones is to mate with a new queen, a function not understood in Shakespeare’s day. Drones seemed merely to idle about the entrance of 151

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the hive and so were regarded from classical antiquity to the eighteenth century as lazy wastrels who devoured the honey produced by the worker bees. (B) Most references to drones in Shakespeare’s works reflect the early modern assumption that they are idle loafers. The Archbishop of Canterbury in H5 elaborates upon the beehive as a metaphor for the ordered state, in which every citizen performs an assigned task and contributes to the productive and harmonious functioning of the whole – except for ‘[t]he lazy, yawning drone’ (1.2.204). As a burden on the state, the drone is therefore handed over by the judge ‘to executors pale’, that is, to executioners (1.2.203). The presenter Gower in PER similarly represents the drone as the negative example against which the productivity of other citizens can be measured. Helicane, says Gower, does not deputize for Pericles in order ‘to eat honey like a drone / From others’ labours’, but rather to ‘strive / To killen bad, keep good alive’ (2.0.18–20). Later in the act, the shipwrecked Pericles overhears a conversation among three fishermen, who condemn the miserly rich. The Third Fisherman admits that if their good king, Simonides, agreed with them, ‘We would purge the land of these drones that rob the bee of her honey’ (2.1.45–6). Shylock, complaining in MV that the ‘patch’ or clown, Lancelot, is ‘a huge feeder’ who ‘sleeps by day’, determines to part with him: ‘Drones hive not with me’, he declares (2.5.44–6). Drones’ failure to play their part is often extended to the moral sphere, and they are frequently accused of cowardliness, as when Moffet reports that it is only when the workers leave for the pasture that the drone ‘ransacks the sweet treasury of the Bees’, their honey (Topsell 1658: 918). The Marquess of Suffolk, facing death in 2H6, contemptuously defies the ‘paltry, servile, abject drudges’ who have taken him prisoner, especially the Lieutenant, whom Suffolk calls a ‘villain’, declaring, ‘Drones suck not eagle’s blood but rob beehives’ (4.1.105–6, 109). Suffolk’s sententious statement is not in fact an ancient proverb; as Knowles (AR3: 370, n. 4.1.109) observes, using eagles and drones to measure the difference in courage between nobility and baseness is a Renaissance invention. Similarly, in E3, Prince Edward defies the messenger sent by King John of France, who commands Edward to pay homage to him: ‘I hold thy message but as scurrilous’, declares Edward to the messenger, ‘And him that sent thee like the lazy drone / Crept up by stealth unto the eagle’s nest’ (1.93–5). True nobility scorns cowardly subterfuge and underhandedness. An unconventional drone is evoked in LUC when, after being raped by Tarquin, Lucrece grieves for the loss of her honour: My honey lost, and I, a drone-like bee, Have no perfection of my summer left, But robbed and ransacked by injurious theft. In thy weak hive a wand’ring wasp hath crept, And sucked the honey which thy chaste bee kept. (LUC 836–40) No longer a worker bee – for her role was to guard the honey, and the honey has been stolen – Lucrece believes she has become as ‘imperfect’ as a drone, useless and unable 152

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to contribute to the productivity of the hive. Here, however, the drone is not the thief of popular opinion, nor a male, but a female victim without even a sting with which to defend herself. A new thief with a vicious stinger, the wasp, is introduced to make the metaphor work, the jumbled commonplace registering the tumult in Lucrece’s mind. The noise of the drone, though not the drone itself, may be present in 1H4, when Falstaff declares to Hal that he is as melancholy as ‘the drone of a Lincolnshire bagpipe’ (1.2.73). The OED notes the uncertain etymology of ‘drone’ in the sense of a continual low humming, suggesting that it may well be imitative of the sound it names, a sound associated especially with bagpipes and bees. Kastan (AR3: 155, n. 73) observes that the bagpipe in question may not be an instrument but a metaphor for a windbag. Is Falstaff once again giving Hal an opportunity to exercise his wit? As Falstaff observes at 2H4 1.2.9–11, ‘I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.’ If so, Hal misses the opportunity and goes on to suggest two conventional similes for melancholy, ‘a hare, or the melancholy of Moorditch’ (1.2.74–5). (C) Pliny calls drones ‘imperfect bees’ (1940: 451 [11.11]); Virgil calls them ‘a lazy herd’ (1999: 231), gorging on others’ food. Butler (1609: sig. D5r) observes that although the drone may look like a wealthy burgher ‘with his round velvet cappe, his side gown, his great pau[n]ch, and his lowd voice; yet is he but an idle person living by the sweat of others brows’. Moffet says that drones are called ‘bastard bees’ (Topsell 1658: 890) and in a chapter entitled ‘Drones and Thieves’ condemns them as ‘altogether unprofitable, good for nothing, idle, without sting, fit for no service, no way helpful to the publick’ (919). In Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), the blind and imprisoned Samson calls himself ‘[a] burdensome drone’ (1997: 377 [l. 567]), lacking a sting to torment the enemies he had once harried. For a scientific discussion of class or caste divisions among bees, see Lawrence (1947: 43–4). Hunt (1998: 188) sets the execution of metaphorical drones in H5 in the context of a Protestant justification of the work ethic. Olbricht (2006: 237) discusses the drone in the light of early modern theories about labour as gleaned from silkworm- and bee-keeping manuals. For the possibility that Falstaff’s droning Northumberland bagpipe may be metaphoric for the croaking of frogs and may allude to a now-vanished tradition of English bagpipes, see Cannon (1971: 139–41). KE duck. (A) A medium-sized waterfowl of the family Anatidae, a relative to swans and geese. A male duck is called a drake, a female, a hen. Ducks have a broad bill and webbed feet; many feed by ducking their heads under water to scoop up plants, insects and small amphibians, hence their name. (B) Because of that ducking motion, Gower describes Pericles’ ‘sea-tossed’ ship as pitching up and down as ‘a duck for life that dives’ (PER 3.0.60, 49). Trinculo in TMP claims that he survived the shipwreck that stranded the company on Prospero’s island because he swam ‘like a duck’ – although Stephano quips he is ‘made like a goose’ 153

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(2.2.125–9). Domesticated ducks were an important source of eggs, feathers and meat in the early modern period. Wild ducks were classed as game animals and so hunted. Thus, Pandarus wagers ‘all the ducks i’the river’ that Troilus and Cressida will fight a love match when night falls (TRO 3.2.51); Falstaff boasts that his shabby recruits are more afraid of gunfire than ‘a hurt wild duck’ (1H4 4.2.20). ‘Duck’ is used as a term of endearment among those in Shakespeare’s plays with low social status: Pistol calls his wife ‘duck’ in H5 (2.3.50), and Pyramus cries out for his ‘dainty duck’, his lost Thisbe, in the mechanicals’ play in MND (5.1.274). KR

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E eagle. (A) Either of two huge birds of prey native to Britain: the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) or the even larger white or sea eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla). The latter became extinct in the twentieth century but has now been reintroduced. Both species are present only in Scotland. Just as the lion was regarded as the king of beasts in the early modern period, the eagle was regarded as the king of birds. It was admired for its size and power and its high soaring, which connected it with the sun, with vision (and by extension insight and foresight) and with nobility. An exalted opinion of the eagle was shared by ancient cultures, both classical and biblical. The Romans regarded it as the bird of Jove, and the aquila was the standard of the Roman legions. Biblical writers repeatedly invoke the eagle’s powerful flight as a symbol of salvation and escape from earthly trials. In the New Testament, the eagle is associated with John, author of the fourth Gospel and believed to be the prophetic writer of Revelation. (B) The eagle is particularly prominent in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Although sceptical of omens, Cassius nonetheless admits to Messala that he is unsettled by the uncanny actions of eagles as his soldiers marched from Sardis. Swooping down upon the Roman standard, ‘Two mighty eagles [. . .] perched, / Gorging and feeding from our soldiers’ hands’ (JC 5.1.80–1), he reports. They accompanied us to Philippi (site of the coming battle), but then they left us. Even worse, he says, ‘in their steads do ravens, crows and kites / Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us / As [if] we were sickly prey’ (5.1.84–6). Indeed, the soldiers will become prey to the carrion-eating fowls that replace the noble eagles. The Roman aquila is similarly made literal in CYM , when the Soothsayer has a vision of ‘Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle’ flying westward (to Britain), until it ‘vanished in the sunbeams’ (4.2.347, 349). Jove’s, or Jupiter’s, eagle reappears later in the play, in the masque-like performance enacting the dream vision of Posthumus as he lies in prison. In the dream, Posthumus’s repentance and the intercession of his ghostly parents and brothers evoke Jupiter’s descent ‘in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle’ (5.4.62 s.d.). After the god assures the assembled ghosts that Posthumus will be redeemed, he prepares to ascend: ‘Mount, eagle’, Jupiter commands, ‘to my palace crystalline’ (CYM 5.4.83). As he departs, the ghost of Posthumus’s father, Sicilius, provides a commentary on the theophany, devoting equal attention to the eagle and the god: He came in thunder; his celestial breath Was sulphurous to smell; the holy eagle Stooped, as to foot us. His ascension is

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More sweet than our blest fields. His royal bird Prunes the immortal wing and claws his beak, As when his god is pleased. (5.4.84–9) Sicilius’s description of the eagle looking as if it would seize them with its talons (‘foot us’) recalls Posthumus’s description of the Romans fleeing like chickens down the same path along which they had earlier ‘stooped [like] eagles’ (5.3.42). ‘Stooped’ is a term from falconry, referring to the precipitous dive of a falcon toward its prey. But Sicilius makes it clear that the dream-vision eagle does not seize and tear but rather ‘prunes’ its wings and ‘claws’ its beak, meaning that it preens itself, a sign of its peaceable intentions. In the play’s lengthy concluding scene, Posthumus recounts his vision to the assembled characters – ‘As I slept, methought / Great Jupiter, upon his eagle backed, / Appeared to me’ (5.5.425–7) – and requests that the Soothsayer be called. The Soothsayer thereupon announces that the vision he himself had had at the start of battle between Romans and Britons has now been fulfilled. In his vision, as in Posthumus’s, the eagle has a central role: ‘the Roman eagle / From south to west on wing soaring aloft, / Lessened herself, and in the beams o’th’sun / So vanished’ (5.5.469–72). That is, the eagle flies from south (Rome) to west (Britain), gathering into itself the two warring nations, which can no longer be kept separate as the eagle disappears into the sun. The Soothsayer interprets: the vision ‘foreshadowed our princely eagle, / Th’imperial Caesar, should again unite / His favour with the radiant Cymbeline, / Which shines here in the west’ (5.5.472–5). By means of the symbolic eagle and its relationship with the sun, the play is able to square the circle: the Romans, victorious over their rebellious subjects, nonetheless rescind the tribute they had fought to reimpose and instead grant autonomous dignity to the British. The eagle’s martial role in classical literature colours its representation in the Christian context of 1H6, when Charles, heir to the French throne, reflects on the role that God has given Joan of Arc: ‘Was Mahomet inspired with a dove? / Thou with an eagle art inspired then’ (1.2.140–1). The question introducing Mahomet’s dove may not be entirely rhetorical; Christian countries alleged that a grain of wheat in Mahomet’s ear had attracted the dove’s attention, so that it only appeared to be whispering in his ear (AR3: 140, n. 140). But the main point of Charles’s speech is to contrast the dove, symbol of peace, with the eagle, symbol of war. Before the rebels’ battle with the king in 1H4, Hotspur hears with some displeasure Vernon’s description of the Prince of Wales and his ‘comrades’: ‘All furnished, all in arms, / All plumed like ostriches, that with the wind / Bated like eagles having lately bathed’ (4.1.96–8). Bating, or beating their wings, these metaphoric eagles show that they are impatient for battle. After insulting the ‘pygmy arms’ of the Dauphin and the French army, the Bastard defiantly describes the ‘gallant’ English king, John, as ready for battle, ‘like an eagle o’er his eyrie towers, / To souse annoyance that comes near his nest’ (JN 5.2.135, 148, 149–50). Although ‘[t]o souse annoyance’ means here to strike a blow against, the verb has its roots in the intransitive verb ‘souse’, a term in falconry referring to a hawk’s swooping

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down upon its prey (OED souse, v.3). ‘Souse’ emphasizes the power of the blow rather than the predation, appropriate for an eagle-like king. To emphasize the nobility of the eagle, strategic comparisons with lesser birds and creatures are often employed in Shakespeare’s works, as when Innogen responds to her father’s complaint that she might have married the queen’s son: ‘O blessed that I might not! I chose an eagle / And did avoid a puttock’ (CYM 1.1.140–1). The puttock, a name for either the kite or the buzzard, was regarded as an ignoble bird. Calling prince Cloten a puttock and Posthumus (orphaned son of a general) an eagle inverts the class categories usually associated with the two birds. But Innogen clearly refers to Posthumus’s nobility of character and Cloten’s lack of it. Attempting to persuade Cressida that in manliness and beauty Troilus surpasses all other Trojan warriors, Pandarus insults the ‘Common Soldiers’ who pass before them (TRO 1.2.231, s.d.), calling them ‘[a]sses, fools, dolts; chaff and bran, chaff and bran; porridge after meat’ (1.2.233–4). ‘[T]he eagles are gone’, he continues, leaving ‘crows and daws, crows and daws!’ (1.2.235–6). To call someone a daw or jackdaw is a common early modern insult, implying what today we mean by ‘birdbrain’, and crows were regarded as both debased and ominous because they eat carrion. The ‘eagles’ are the noble warriors who precede the common soldiers: Aeneas, Antenor, Hector, Paris, Helenus and above all, Troilus. Crows appear again in Coriolanus’s diatribe against the intimidatory demands of the common people: if the Senate accedes to everything they demand, warns Coriolanus, they will think we can be controlled by fear of them, ‘which will in time / Break ope the locks o’th’ Senate and bring in / The crows to peck the eagles’ (COR 3.1.138–40). The eagle’s difference from creatures even more insignificant than crows and daws is occasionally used for emphasis, as when Enobarbus seeks to dazzle Maecenas with the lavish scale of Egyptian feasts. Is it true, asks Maecenas, that ‘[e]ight wild boars [were] roasted whole at a breakfast, and but twelve persons there’? (ANT 2.2.189–90). ‘This was but as a fly by an eagle’ (2.2.191), replies Enobarbus, meaning that that is nothing to what else I could tell you. In R3, in a twist to the convention of comparing eagles to lesser creatures, Richard allows the lesser creatures to predominate. Playing the role of offended innocent, he demands why the Queen’s faction has stirred up the King against him. When she replies that it is the King himself who has suspicions about the source of Richard’s ill will, Richard figuratively shrugs: ‘I cannot tell; the world is grown so bad / That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch’ (R3 1.3.69–70). The insult hidden in this off-the-cuff aphorism becomes apparent in the lines that follow: ‘Since every Jack became a gentleman, / There’s many a gentle person made a jack’ (1.3.71–2). Just as the tiny wren has become prouder and more aggressive than the mighty eagle, so the Queen and her family, commoners elevated above their station, have taken to behaving as if they were royal, thereby devaluing the status of royalty. A more chilling instance of the devaluing of the eagle occurs earlier in R3, in a discussion of Clarence’s imprisonment. ‘More pity that the eagles should be mewed, / Whiles kites and buzzards play at liberty’ (1.1.132), remarks Hastings. By ‘eagles’ he refers both to himself (recently released from prison) 157

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and to Clarence. To be ‘mewed’ is to be kept like hawks in specially built structures for purposes of being trained. (In fact, eagles were rarely used in England for hawking.) The kites and buzzards who play at liberty are, in Hastings’s mind, the Queen’s faction. As he finds out to his cost, however, only one character, Richard, assumes the right to say who is an eagle and who is a buzzard. Moreover, the eagle as Richard defines it is the fierce and bloodthirsty raptor rather than the honourable king of birds. Here Shakespeare exploits the tension between the eagle’s symbolic status as a royal bird and its ‘natural’ status as a bird of prey. In VEN , the eagle to which Venus is compared is clearly a raptor, her attempt to excite Adonis’s sexual interest, unmistakably predatory: Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast, Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone, Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste, Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone, Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek, his chin, And where she ends she doth anew begin. (55–60) ‘Tires’ means tearing the flesh and greedily engorging it, and the fact that the eagle is female ties the simile even closer to Venus. Her kisses (with a mouth that has some likeness to a hard, sharp beak) are thus likened to a voracious rending of flesh. The image is scarcely softened by another simile comparing Adonis to a bird who lies ‘tangled in a net’ (67), as Venus fastens him in her arms. The eagle’s ferocity toward smaller birds is repeatedly mentioned in Shakespeare’s works. Tamora, urging Saturninus not to fear Lucius’s popularity among the common people, offers a natural analogy: ‘The eagle suffers little birds to sing, / And is not careful what they mean thereby, / Knowing that with the shadow of his wings / He can at pleasure stint their melody’ (TIT 4.4.82–5). So, too, you can silence the ‘giddy’ population of Rome, she assures him. But her characterization of the eagle turns its lofty status into a position from which it dominates and persecutes. ‘Every fowl of tyrant wing, / Save the eagle, feathered king’ (PHT 10–11) is forbidden to attend the funeral of the phoenix and the dove, announces the speaker of the poem. But the exception simply calls attention to the fact that the eagle, although king of birds, is nonetheless one of the fowls ‘of tyrant wing’, that is, a bird of prey. When at the beginning of MAC , a wounded captain reports that the Norwegian king has mounted a ‘fresh assault’, King Duncan asks if it has dismayed his captains, Macbeth and Banquo (1.2.33). The captain answers, ‘Yes, as sparrows, eagles, or the hare, the lion’ (1.2.35). The comparison, intended to exalt the courage of the two captains, reminds auditors that eagles and lions are predators – although, in the context of battle, lofty nobility and a fierce readiness to kill are positively aligned. Coriolanus similarly compares himself to an eagle against smaller fowl: he was, he tells the Volscian general, Aufidius, ‘like an eagle in a dovecote’ who ‘[f]luttered your Volscians in Corioles’ (COR 5.6.115–16). Coriolanus refers to his slaughter of the Volscians in the battle from which his honorific name was derived. But 158

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the fact that in this instance the smaller fowls are trapped in a confined space diminishes the nobility that he wishes to convey. Today we would speak of shooting fish in a barrel. Richard, Duke of York, warns the Cardinal and Suffolk that Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who has beguiled King Henry, cannot be given a position of power (nor indeed be allowed to live): ‘Were’t not all one an empty eagle were set / To guard the chicken from a hungry kite, / As place Duke Humphrey for the King’s Protector?’ (2H6 3.1.248–50). He might well have asked whether it would be wise to set a hungry wolf to guard the sheep from foxes. By posing the question in terms of the metaphoric eagle, however, he can slyly compare King Henry to a chicken. The Queen’s response leaves no doubt that she has understood York’s implication: ‘So the poor chicken should be sure of death’ (3.1.251). But it is York who is the empty, i.e., hungry, eagle, as the Queen recognizes in 3H6, when Henry is forced to disinherit his own son and cede to York the right to inherit the crown. ‘I here divorce myself’ from your table and bed, the furious Queen announces to Henry (1.1.247). He acknowledges her fury and his own self-inflicted doom. York’s ‘haughty spirit, winged with desire, / Will coast my crown and, like an empty eagle, / Tire on the flesh of me and of my son’ (1.2.267–9), he mourns. That York will ‘coast’ means that he will prevent King Henry from trying to undo the disinheriting of his own son; the term comes from falconry and refers to a hawk’s circling around to cut off the attempt of its prey to double back (OED 10). ‘Tire’, used of Venus as a metaphoric eagle at VEN 56, implies rapacity and greed. When at the play’s end Warwick invokes the noble (as opposed to the rapacious) eagle, King Henry is already dead and Warwick himself is dying. He compares himself to a tree that has been felled by his enemies: ‘Thus yields the cedar to the axe’s edge / Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle’ (5.2.11–12). Warwick mourns not only the loss of his life but also the loss of a world in which the eagle could be the symbol of nobility. The quality above all for which the eagle is celebrated in early modern literature is its keen eyesight, both literal and figurative. Guillim, for instance, extends the eagle’s ‘sharpenesse and strength of sight’ to include its being of ‘sharpe and deepe understanding’ (1638: 222). Pliny reports that the eagle alone can gaze at the sun without being blinded, and that it knows whether its offspring are legitimate by their ability to do the same (1940: 299 [10:3]). Hearing of their father’s death, Edward of York says to his younger brother Richard, ‘His dukedom and his chair with me is left’ (3H6 2.1.90). Richard’s reply alludes to the story reported by Pliny: ‘Nay, if thou be that princely eagle’s bird, / Show thy descent by gazing ’gainst the sun; / For chair and dukedom, throne and kingdom ’ssay, / Either that is thine or else thou wert not his’ (2.1.91–4). Richard interprets ‘gazing ’gainst the sun’ as striving (essaying) to gain the crown. That is, Edward’s success will prove that he is the true offspring (‘bird’, or chick) of their father. Of all the ills that come from their imprisonment, the ‘heaviest’, says Arcite to Palamon in TNK , is that neither of them will marry and have ‘issue’: ‘No figures of ourselves shall we e’er see, / To glad our age, and like young eagles teach ’em / Boldly to gaze against bright arms and say, / “Remember what your fathers were, and conquer!” ’ 159

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(2.2.29, 32, 33–6). In both 3H6 and TNK , the sun has been metaphorized into glittering arms, the eaglets, into youthful warriors. In R2, the brightness at which the eagle traditionally gazes metamorphoses into the brightness of the eagle’s eyes, as York marvels that the defeated Richard still looks like a king when he appears ‘on the walls’ (the upper level of the stage): ‘Yet looks he like a king. Behold, his eye, / As bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth / Controlling majesty’ (3.3.68–70). His authority, his ‘[c]ontrolling majesty’, is confirmed, that is, by the bolts of lightning shooting from his eyes. The beauty of Rosaline is so glorious, declares the lovelorn Berowne in LLL , that it blinds even those with the eyesight of an eagle: ‘What peremptory eagle-sighted eye / Dares look upon the heaven of her brow / That is not blinded by her majesty?’ (4.3.222– 4), he asks, leading the King to ask him if he has been overcome by frenzy. Undaunted by the king’s scepticism, Berowne goes on to praise love for adding ‘a precious seeing to the eye: / A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind’ (4.3.307–8), he declares, reiterating his exalted idea of love’s radiance. Whether he refers to the brilliant eyes of the beloved or to the power of the lover’s gaze is ambiguous. When after Romeo’s banishment she attempts to comfort Juliet, the Nurse urges her to marry Paris, calling him ‘a lovely gentleman’ in comparison to whom Romeo is a ‘dishclout’: ‘An eagle, madam / Hath not so green, so quick, so fair an eye / As Paris hath’ (ROM 3.5.220–2), she asserts. The term ‘green’ (found in F1 and Q2, Q3 and Q4) has sometimes been amended to ‘keen’ (AR3: 286, n. 221), but both ‘green’ and ‘quick’ convey the sense of bursting vitality, appropriate for the brilliant liveliness of an eagle’s eyes. Others’ eyes are attracted to the eagle because of its powerful, soaring flight, another of the characteristics for which it is praised in Shakespeare’s day. Lucrece realizes that Tarquin’s position of authority explains his crime: ‘greatest scandal waits on greatest state’ (LUC 1006), she observes, while the misdeeds of common mortals go unremarked. But the corollary of her realization may imply some hope that Tarquin’s crime will be found out: ‘Gnats are unnoted wheresoe’er they fly, / But eagles gazed upon with every eye’ (1014–15), she says. Belarius turns the beetle’s lowliness (the equivalent here of Lucrece’s gnat) into an image of safety, in contrast to the exposed heights reached by the eagle. He warns Arviragus and Guiderius against the perfidy of the court, urging them to appreciate the true nobility and integrity of their obscure lives in Wales: ‘often to our comfort shall we find / The sharded beetle in a safer hold / Than is the full-winged eagle’ (CYM 3.3.19–21). The Poet in TIM uses the flight of the eagle to represent the truth-telling directness of his poem. Without bias or hope of gain, he says, his poem represents Timon and his followers: ‘no levelled malice / Infects one comma in the course I hold, / But flies an eagle flight, bold and forth on, / Leaving no tract behind’ (1.1.48–51). Even the Painter to whom he speaks does not entirely catch the drift of the Poet’s meaning – ‘How shall I understand you?’ (1.1.52), the Painter asks – but the Poet seems to be saying that even now, without waiting for the event itself, he is predicting Timon’s eventual decline and the falling away of those who now hang upon him. Richard II, who attempts to cover up his own bad faith by giving sonorous reasons for banishing Bolingbroke and Mowbray, warns that their rivalry for high position will lead 160

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to civil war: ‘we think the eagle-winged pride / Of sky-aspiring and ambitious thoughts, / With rival-hating envy, set on you / To wake our peace’ (R2 1.3.129–32). Given that the eagle occupies the top rung of the hierarchy of birds (as the lion occupies that of beasts, and the whale, that of ‘fish’), Richard is surely hinting that Bolingbroke’s lofty ambition aims at the throne, the genuine reason for banishing him. Richard is not mistaken. Several passing allusions to the eagle appear in Shakespeare’s works, two of them involving the eagle’s talons, as in Cleon’s description of his cruel wife, Dionyza: ‘Thou art like the harpy, / Which to betray dost use thine angel’s face / To seize with thine eagle’s talons’ (PER 4.3.45–7). Harpies were believed to have the upper body of a woman and the wings and talons of a raptor, usually a vulture. That the raptor here is an eagle emphasizes Dionyza’s perversion of her place as the governor’s wife, destroying rather than nurturing anything noble and good. Falstaff puts the eagle’s talon to witty metaphoric use. Responding to Hal’s jests about his weight – ‘How long is’t ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?’ (1H4 2.4.318–19), Hal asks – Falstaff replies, ‘When I was about thy years, Hal, I was not an eagle’s talon in the waist’ (2.4.320–1). In 2H6, the eagle is pressed into service to characterize the cowardly drone, as the Marquis of Suffolk rails against his lowly captors. He calls the Lieutenant and his men ‘paltry, servile, abject drudges’, and the Lieutenant himself a ‘villain’, a term of insult implying low class (2H6 4.1.105, 106). ‘Drones suck not eagles’ blood, but rob beehives’ (4.1.109), he fulminates, as if he cannot comprehend how the Lieutenant could have dared to apprehend him. In TIM , the proverbially long life of the eagle is seen as negligible in comparison to that of a tree. The context is Apemantus’s argument that Timon is a fool for being misanthropic and turning to nature (as opposed to human nature) for sustenance and comfort. ‘Will these mossed trees / That have outlived the eagle’, demands Apemantus, ‘page thy heels / And skip when thou point’st out?’ (4.3.222–4). His point is that venerable, ancient nature is indifferent to the life of the individual. The mighty eagle’s vulnerability is touched upon in H5, when the king and his followers discuss the fact that the Scots will seize the opportunity to attack when England goes to war with France. As Westmorland puts it, ‘once the eagle England being in prey, / To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot / Comes sneaking and so sucks her princely eggs’ (1.2.169–71). The contrast here is between the noble eagle, which hunts in the open for all to see, and the ignoble weasel, which resorts to underhanded tactics because it knows it cannot win an outright contest. (C) The eagle, states Pliny, is ‘the most honourable and also the strongest’ of birds, and it alone cannot be killed by a thunderbolt (1940: 298 [10.3]); hence its adoption as the emblem of the Roman legions. For detailed information about the eagle, and specifically the Roman aquila, in classical literature, information which Shakespeare draws upon in CYM and JC , see Mynott (2018: 294–8). Several species of eagle are native to the Middle East (Bodenheimer 1935: 168–9); among many of the Bible’s references to the eagle is that of Isaiah 40.31, a verse which lies behind the early modern use of the eagle as a symbol of strength and resilience: ‘But they that waite upon the 161

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Lord, shal renue their strength: they shal lift up the wings as the egles: they shal runne, & not be wearie, & and they shal walke and not faint’ (GNV). Another verse, Psalm 103.5, ‘and thy youth is renued like the eagles’ (GNV), is the basis for the representation of the eagle in medieval bestiaries as an emblem of baptism: the eagle was said to fly into the sun to remove the mist from its eyes and then to plunge into a well (Baxter 1998: 41). Spenser alludes to this legend in a simile in The Faerie Queene, when the Red Crosse Knight rises from the well and readies himself for battle against the dragon, ‘[a]s Eagle, fresh out of the Ocean wave, / Where he hath left his plumes all hory gray, / And deckt himself with feathers youthly gay’ (2001: 1.11.34). Jonson alludes to the same legend in comic mode, when in The Alchemist, Sir Epicure Mammon promises Surly that the elixir will restore a man’s virility: it will ‘renew him like an eagle, / [. . .] make him get sons and daughters’ (1982a: 2.1.55–6). For Guillim (1638: 222), the eagle on a coat of arms ‘doth signifie a man of action, evermore occupied in high and weighty affaires, and one of a lofty spirit, ingenious, speedy in apprehension, and judicious in matters of ambiguity’. Cocker and Mabey (2005: 119–24) trace the eagle’s rich cultural history in the British Isles, including legends that it has carried off untended infants (legends preserved in the name of at least twenty-five pubs in Britain). Gelling (qtd. in Cocker and Mabey 2001: 120–2) analyses the presence of the Anglo-Saxon word for eagle, ‘erne’ or ‘earn’, in British place names. Harting (1871: 23–40) surveys the use of eagle lore in Shakespeare’s works. Erikson (1979–80: 16–17) discusses the paired image of eagle and weasel in H5. Berger (1980: 10–12) discusses the effect of the hyperbolic metaphors – beginning with ‘as sparrows eagles’ – used by the wounded soldier in his account of Macbeth’s bloody success on the battlefield. Bach (2016) notes the symbolic use of the eagle and its role in establishing social hierarchies (9–13, 49–50). KE eel. (A) Fish of the family Actinopterygii (a group of fish with fins made of webbed skin on a bony ray-shaped structure). In early modern contexts the word can also refer to various unrelated long, slender fish lacking dorsal fins. (B) Shallow ocean or river-dwellers, eels swim with a snake-like motion and are mainly nocturnal predators. Eel was a popular food: once skinned and cooked, it produced a delicate, fatty flesh enjoyed by both high- and low-class consumers. The skin remaining after the eel was eaten had uses for clothing and in other goods, being flexible and soft. The notorious speed and slipperiness of the eel is reflected in Moth’s exchange with Armado when he remarks on praising an eel for being ‘quick’ (LLL 1.2.26–8), and in the Schoolmaster’s proverbial reference in TNK, ‘An eel and a woman [. . .] unless by th’ tail / And with thy teeth thou hold, will either fail’ (3.5.49–51). The appearance of an empty eel-skin is twice mentioned by Falstaff, once to describe Hal’s skinny form in 1H4 (2.4.238) and in 2H4 to describe the shallowness of Shallow (‘you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin; 3.2.323–4). Aristotle noted the eel’s smooth skin as one of its defining features (along with the mystery of its generation; 1970: 6.12, 271). Izaak Walton remarks that they are a ‘most dainty fish’, 162

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called by the Romans the ‘Queen of palate pleasure’ (1653: 187). According to Pliny, eels spontaneously generate from their own skin: ‘Eels rub against rocks and the scrapings come to life; this is their only way of breeding’ (NH) (9:74.161 [1940: 273]), although Walton recounts stories that they are born of dew (188). KR egg. (A) The ovum or developing embryo of an animal, eggs can range from the relatively hard shell of a chicken’s or any bird’s embryo, to the rubbery offspring of a reptile, or the soft egg of a fish. ‘Eggs’ may be used interchangeably with fry. (B) Eggs are, of course, food and so Falstaff uses one as a stand-in for a light meal in 1H4, while Touchstone in AYL compares Corin to an ill-cooked egg (3.2.35–6). But more often, eggs represent human beings, especially children. The murderers in MAC call Macduff’s son ‘[y]oung fry of treachery’ (4.2.86), as well as an ‘egg’ (4.2.85). The murderer’s claim that Macduff’s son is the offspring of a traitor stands in contrast to the child’s tender interaction with his mother in the preceding moment, making his slaughter seem all the more horrifying. When Leontes says he and his son are ‘like as eggs’ (WT 1.2.130), the comment should be equally endearing; however, Leontes’ subsequent equivocation, ‘women say so, / That will say anything’ (1.2.130–1), stands in stark contrast to the domestic harmony and testament to his wife’s fidelity that Mamillius ought to represent. Perhaps the point is that such affecting scenes highlight how easily ruptured are the loving bonds between children and adults. In contrast, a serpent’s egg is truly a source of future poison: Brutus, persuaded of Caesar’s potential tyranny, decides to ‘think him as a serpent’s egg / Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous’. Brutus concludes that he must ‘kill him in the shell’ (JC 2.1.32–4). Eggs also provide a neat set of images of fullness, emptiness or confusion. Thus, Lear’s fool mocks him for having a head like an egg, and one emptied of all value: he says ‘Nuncle, give me an egg and I’ll give thee two crowns,’ since having divided the egg into two, as Lear has done his kingdom, and eating what lies within, he will have emptied the shell or crown of anything worthwhile (LR 1.4.148–54). Lear is, the fool implies, empty-headed to have so ruptured his own kingdom. Similarly, when TRO ’s Pandarus claims that he loves Helen no more than he loves an addled egg, Cressida replies, wittily, that indeed Pandarus loves an addled egg so much that she suspects he ‘would eat chickens i’th’shell’ (1.2.126–9). An addled egg is one that is either rotten or shaken so that no chick can form, the same meaning that Mercutio invokes when he observes that Benvolio’s egg-like head has been ‘beaten as addle as an egg’ (ROM 3.1.23). (C) Such analogical and synecdochic interconnections of crowns, heads, skulls, shells, yolks and brains confuse animal and human in Raber’s analysis of how TRO ’s egg references encapsulate the effects of animal metaphors in the plays (2016). KR elephant. (A) The largest land mammal belonging to the family Elephantidae, the elephant referenced in Shakespeare’s plays could have been either the African or 163

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the Asian elephant. The animal was reputed to be the most intelligent of creatures; according to Pliny, ‘it is the nearest to man in intelligence: it understands the language of its country and obeys orders, remembers duties that it has been taught, is pleased by affection and by marks of honour, nay more, it possesses virtues rare even in man, honesty, wisdom, justice, and also respect for the stars and reverence for the sun and moon’ (Pliny NH : 8.1.2–3 [1940: 3]. As a result of this reputation, elephants were believed to have a version of a culture: they could dance, combat, play, demonstrate shame, exhibit affection and even have religious faith. Topsell judges them both ‘serviceable and tractable’ (1658: 149), and discusses the influence of elephants on war, where they acted as both transport and fighting mounts (156–7). (B) The hostelry Sebastian recommends for himself and Antonio in TN is The Elephant (3.3.39, 3.3.48, 4.3.5), a possible reference to a tavern-cum-brothel in Shakespeare’s London, The Elephant and Castle. The castle in this case possibly represented the howdah, or travel carriage, on an elephant’s back (see Fox-Davies 1909: 214). The animal’s size and apparent slowness of motion is referenced in TRO where Ajax is repeatedly compared to one. Alexander includes it in the list of Ajax’s animal avatars: ‘He is as valiant as the lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant’ (1.2.20–1) – not a flattering reflection on Ajax, since in this same speech Alexander describes Ajax as embodying folly and all the vices as well as virtues of other men. Thersites grumbles, ‘Shall the elephant Ajax carry it thus?’ after his angry sparring with Ajax in 2.3, referencing the hero’s thick skin and lumbering wit (2.3.2–3). Because of his dispute with Ajax, Achilles is likewise branded by Ulysses an elephant, one that has ‘joints, but none for courtesy; / His legs are for necessity, not for flexure’ (2.3.103–4). In other words, Achilles will not bend his will (or flex his legs to kneel) to Agamemnon’s and Ulysses’ efforts to draw him back into battle. (C) About the TN tavern name, Anson (1996) speculates that there is a joking allusion to the reputation elephants had for never forgetting in Sebastian’s rejoinder ‘I do remember,’ when Antonio tells him ‘To th’Elephant’ (3.3.48). More generally, Alkemeyer (2017) and L. Brown and Alkemeyer (2013) confirm the elephant’s superior reputation for reason in comparison to apes and other creatures in premodern lore. KR ewe. (A) A female sheep, the ewe tends to be invoked in the plays for its role in reproduction or maternal care. (B) Most uses in the plays link human and animal nature, as when Antonio uses the image of the ewe bleating for its lost lamb, stolen by a wolf, to cast Shylock as a wild beast in MV (4.1.72–3), or when Iago warns Brabantio that an ‘old black ram is tupping your white ewe’ in OTH (1.1.87–8) – that is, Desdemona and Othello have eloped and are presumably consummating their marriage. Iago’s choice of two animals, rather than an image of one animal in liaison with a human, levels the distinction otherwise present in Desdemona’s and Othello’s race and origin, although it retains the idea of Desdemona’s 164

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white skin. In MV , Shylock recounts the tale of Laban’s sheep, the biblical account of how Jacob tricked Laban by using his knowledge of sheep breeding to make his flocks produce more pied lambs for him to keep: ‘the ewes, being rank, / In end of autumn turned to the rams; / And when the work of generation was’ Jacob placed peeled tree branches ‘before the fulsome ewes’ to inspire conception (1.3.76–82). A crucial English economic product, ewes like all sheep were valued mainly for their wool, but also for the flesh of their lambs. They also signified the pastoral life, with its religious and class implications. In AYL , the poor shepherd Corin defends himself against Touchstone’s clever indictments of the country life by asserting, ‘I am a true labourer [. . .] the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck’ (3.2.70–4). But Touchstone turns the statement around on Corin by pointing out that ‘to bring the ewes and the rams together’ is to ‘get your living by the copulation of cattle; to be bawd to a bell-wether’ (3.2.75–8). One poem in PP , although not clearly attributable to Shakespeare, uses disruptions of the pastoral world to express the devastation involved in lacking human (and divine) love: ‘My flocks feed not, my ewes breed not, / My rams speed not, all is amiss’ (17.1–2). In a much more brutally mundane but comic way, Justice Shallow turns to the market for ewes in 2H4: interspersing shallowly trite comments on death with questions about the price of bullocks and other cattle, he asks Justice Silence, ‘How a score of ewes now?’ and is told they are ‘worth ten pounds’ (3.2.49–51). Rather more humanely comical is Dogberry’s instruction to his Watch in ADO to leave be the nurse who doesn’t respond to the cries of her infant charge: ‘Why then, depart in peace, and let the child wake her with crying; for the ewe that will not hear her lamb when it baas will never answer a calf when he bleats’ (3.3.67–9). Since a calf can refer to a fool, Dogberry effectively suggests that if the nurse won’t comfort the presumably aristocratic child in her care, she certainly won’t listen to the lowly men of the watch. (C) Shell (1979) examines the homophonic effect of ‘ewes’ and ‘use’ in MV , finding a network of animal imagery that is linked to the various dimensions and types of exchange in the play. KR eyas, nyas. (A) A term from falconry meaning an unfledged hawk or falcon that is removed from its nest or eyrie for purposes of training. The word ultimately derives from L. nīdis, ‘nest’. Its two forms are a result of metanalysis, by which ‘an eyas’ can become ‘a nyas’. (B) When Mistress Ford fondly greets ‘little Robin’, Falstaff’s page, ‘How now, my eyas-musket, what news with you?’ (WIV 3.3.18–20), her epithet plays on his name and his youth. She calls him, in effect, a sparrow-hawk (musket) chick, implying that she is training him to help her bring down Falstaff. Romeo and Juliet play with the language of falconry in the balcony scene, when Juliet wishes she had a falconer’s voice and could lure Romeo, a tassel-gentle, back to her. When she calls him, he answers, ‘My nyas?’ (ROM 2.2.167), alluding both to her youth and her nest (i.e., bedroom). The 165

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spelling ‘nyas’ is conjectural; but Weis (AR3: 198, n. 167) argues that ‘neece’ in Q2 (the edition’s copy-text) does not make sense, while ‘nyas’ is appropriate, given Juliet’s falconry metaphor. In HAM , Rosencranz uses ‘eyases’ figuratively in a passage omitted from Q2 (1604) but present in F. The context is an exchange between Rosencranz and Hamlet about why ‘the tragedians of the city’, Hamlet’s favourite company of players, are currently travelling about the country (2.2.292). Rosencranz hazards a guess as to why their performances in the city have been curtailed: ‘I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation’ (2.2.295–6), he says. The statement has been interpreted as referring either to events in HAM itself (e.g., the death of Hamlet senior) or to developments in professional drama in Shakespeare’s lifetime, specifically to the rise of children’s companies at the very end of the sixteenth century. The latter theory is supported by the passage found only in F, in which Rosencranz explains why the tragedians of the city are not as popular as they once were: there is, sir, an eyrie of children, little eyases that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t. These are now the fashion, and so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills and dare scarce come thither. (AR3: App.1, 468) Rosencrantz means by ‘common stages’ large outdoor theatres like the Globe. The two children’s companies, the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel (renamed Children of the Queen’s Revels), performed in the smaller indoor, or ‘private’, theatres (see Sanders 2014: 175–8). Fashionable young men (those wearing rapiers) have deserted the Globe and other public theatres for fear of being satirized or criticized by the pens (goose-quills) of writers, laments Rosencranz. Hamlet professes astonishment: ‘What, are they children? Who maintains ’em? How are they escotted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing?’ (AR3: App.1, 468–9). Hamlet’s questions attest to the fierce rivalry between adult and children’s companies. Calling the child-players ‘eyases’ makes the point that they have not yet been trained, that indeed they must still be given childcare (‘escotted’), with the implication that they will not be accomplished players worth an audience’s time or money. (In fact, some of the actors in the children’s companies were in their twenties; see Munro 2005: 39.) But the use of ‘eyases’ also makes the uncomfortable point that although they are mere nestlings now, they will grow into rapaciously predatory birds of prey. (C) Turberville (1575: 200–1) explains how ‘[t]o trayne a Nyasse Sparrowhawke’. In the penultimate canto of Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, success in battle against the dragon is predicted by a simile comparing the renewed and revivified Redcrosse Knight to an ‘Eyas hawke’ that ‘mounts unto the skies’ (Spenser 2001: 1.11.34). Scholarly work 166

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on the children’s companies has flourished in recent years; see Sanders (2014: 175–8) for a concise introduction to the subject. Munro (2005) provides a book-length study of the Children of the Queen’s Revels. W. Miller (1977) quotes a passage from John Fletcher’s play, The Tamer Tamed, to show that metaphorical eyases, like actual ones, were believed to ‘cry like Kites’. In a dense and closely argued essay, Knutson (1995) takes issue with the standard view that the ‘little eyases’ passage refers to the so-called War of the Theatres (1599–1601) and proposes instead that the passage criticizes the children’s companies for their staging of politically dangerous plays in 1606–8, behaviour threatening to the entire industry. KE

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F falcon. (A) A raptor belonging to the genus Falco, probably in Shakespeare’s day referring to the native peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) rather than to the larger, imported gyrfalcon (Falco rusticus) preferred in the Middle Ages for the sport of hawking. It is not always possible, however, to determine in the early modern period whether a species of Falco is actually meant. Moreover, the terms ‘falcon’ and ‘hawk’ are used almost, but not quite, interchangeably, so a degree of flexibility is necessary when dealing with Shakespeare’s allusions to falcons. Nonetheless, the falcon proper was regarded as gentle or noble by participants in the sport, who themselves tended to be noble. Taming and training falcons was a lengthy and elaborate process, for which a specialized vocabulary evolved. The falcon is always referred to as female, because the female, being larger than the male, or tercel, is preferred for the sport. In the course of the training, the falcon was said to develop a relationship with the trainer that in manuals of hawking is called ‘loving’. Birds taken from the nest, or eyases, were kept in mews and were dependent on their trainers for food. They were therefore more easily trained. Haggards, or mature wild falcons, were harder to train but remained more aggressive and therefore better hunters. After capture, a young falcon was seeled (i.e., her eyes were sewn shut) for a certain time, to protect her from the shock of external stimuli, and jesses, or leather straps, were attached to her feet, along with a bell. After some time, the falcon would be ready for ‘manning’, being handled by the trainer, all the time being kept hungry (or ‘empty’) so that she could be rewarded with food when she obeyed her trainer. When a falcon could be relied upon to ‘take the lure’, she was allowed to ‘fly at hack’, that is, to begin flying freely for short distances, and to return to the trainer for feeding. Finally, when she had been trained in the killing of different kinds of prey (typically, waterfowl such as ducks and herons), the falcon was allowed to fly in search of prey. A falcon kills its prey by ‘stooping’: after circling high in the air, or ‘towering’, it dives with huge speed (up to 200 mph), hitting the prey with great force and instantly killing it. (B) Familiarity with its practical details and specialized language marks the many allusions to falconry in Shakespeare’s works; Pope (1992: 131) reckons there are over fifty such allusions. Petruccio justifies keeping Katherina hungry by analogy with training a haggard: ‘My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, / And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged, / For then she never looks upon her lure’ (SHR 4.1.179–81), he explains. ‘Stoop’ in this context is ambiguous. Although the usual meaning of the term in relation to falconry signifies the dive that a falcon makes as it prepares to kill its prey, it may also mean, as it appears to mean here, to return to the lure (OED 6a). But in a more general 168

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sense ‘stoop’ also means taking a posture of humility or submission before authority. The fact that the falcon’s lure, as its name suggests, is simultaneously attractive and deceptive is recognized in a simile in VEN , when a ‘merry’ hunting horn sends Venus joyfully hurrying to find Adonis: ‘As falcons to the lure, away she flies’ (1025, 1027). Her joy gives way to anguish as she finds Adonis lying dead. Twice in Shakespearean plays the falcon’s bell is mentioned. When Jaques asks if Touchstone is determined to marry, the clown replies, ‘As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires’ (AYL 3.3.73–4). ‘Bells for trained hawks are of the greatest possible use’, notes Michell (1900: 41). Not only do they allow the trainer to keep tabs on the falcon’s whereabouts; they also show that the falcon belongs to someone. The sound of the bell, moreover, inspires terror and confusion in the prey. Touchstone is not saying, as one might assume, that wedlock is like a device that limits man’s freedom; rather, he seems to be saying that it is man’s (sexual) desires that set bounds on his freedom – and which then cause him to impose upon himself the further bonds of wedlock. In LUC , Tarquin’s desires lead him to sunder the bonds of decency as he raises his scythe-like sword, which has the same effect on Lucrece as a falcon’s shadow has on smaller birds below: This said, he shakes aloft his Roman blade, Which like a falcon tow’ring in the skies Coucheth the fowl below with his wings’ shade, Whose crooked beak threats if he mount he dies: So under his insulting falchion lies Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcons’ bells. (505–11) There is a play here, as Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen note (AR3: 254, n. 176), on the homophones ‘falcon’ and ‘falchion’. A falchion is a sword with a curved blade, like the ‘crooked’ beak of a falcon, so that the passage above means that Lucrece is as helpless against Tarquin’s phallic sword as other fowls are helpless against the beak of a falcon. In fact, a falcon uses its beak only to pick up prey that it has already killed, reinforcing the hopelessness of Lucrece’s situation. It is thus cruelty here that is most notable. Tarquin’s words reveal to Lucrece what the falcon’s bell reveals to the trembling fowl: their unavoidable and imminent destruction. In MM , Isabella, who compares Angelo to a falcon, finds cruelty to be a facet of his character: This outward-sainted deputy, Whose settled visage and deliberate word Nips youth i’th’head and follies doth enew As falcon doth the fowl, is yet a devil; His filth within being cast, he would appear A pond as deep as hell. (MM 3.1.90–5)

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‘Enew’ means to drive into hiding, because the presence of a bird of prey sends smaller birds to seek cover. Angelo ruthlessly hunts down those guilty of youthful offences, Isabella says, but filters out his own darker desires so that he seems pure. The fullest discussion of falconry, as a sport, occurs in 2H6, although it moves quickly into metaphor. The stage direction at the opening of 2.1. calls for ‘Falconers hallooing’. Queen Margaret’s praise for the day’s hawking indicates that the falconers’ halloos are aimed at the dogs, commanding them to drive the waterfowl into the air. ‘Believe me, lords’, the queen says, ‘for flying at the brook / I saw not better sport these seven years’ day’ (2.1.1–2). She commends especially the action of one falcon: ‘Yet, by your leave, the wind was very high / And, ten to one, old Joan had not gone out’ (2.1.3–4). That is, the wind was so strong that the queen is surprised old Joan was even willing to fly. King Henry, turning to Gloucester, the Lord Protector, continues the praise of individual falcons: ‘But what a point, my lord, your falcon made / And what a pitch she flew above the rest!’ (2.1.5–6). Here, ‘pitch’, now obsolete in this sense, means the highest point of a falcon’s towering (OED 21a), from which it stoops on its prey. The term leads King Henry into the realm of metaphor: ‘To see how God in all his creatures works! / Yea, man and birds are fain [i.e., fond] of climbing high’ (2.1.7–8). Suffolk seizes upon the metaphor as the excuse for a snide comment on Gloucester’s towering ambition: No marvel, an it like your majesty, My Lord Protector’s hawks do tower so well, They know their master loves to be aloft, And bears his thoughts above his falcon’s pitch. (2.1.9–12) The falcon to which Suffolk refers may be depicted on Gloucester’s armorial bearings, but Knowles warns against attaching too much significance to this possibility, since ‘the falcon [. . .] is the most frequently found bird in heraldry’ (Fox-Davies 1909: 243; qtd. in AR3: 196, n. 10). In his defence of himself, Gloucester tries to escape the figural implications of the dialogue, dismissing his falcon as a mere ‘bird’: ‘My lord, ’tis but a base ignoble mind / That mounts no higher than a bird can soar’ (2.1.13–14). To this remark, Cardinal Beaufort replies, ‘I thought as much: he [i.e., Gloucester] would be above the clouds’ (2.1.15). This ill-natured repartee, in which falconry serves as a political metaphor, is possible only because falconry, with its specialized language, customs and equipment, was a sport deeply embedded in the cultural life of early modern Britain. The ‘falcon’s tow’ring in the skies’, the high flight that enables its deadly stoop, implies Tarquin’s proud loftiness, if not his tyrannical readiness to make lesser creatures cower (‘couch’) in fear. Bolingbroke’s self-identification in R2 with a towering falcon expresses his certainty of victory over his enemy, whom he compares to the lesser bird, even perhaps a chick, that is the falcon’s prey: ‘As confident as is the falcon’s flight / Against a bird do I with Mowbray fight’ (1.3.61–2), he boasts. So, too, Lord Clifford invokes the invincible falcon to point to the desperate plight of the Duke of York. The 170

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latter, outnumbered by his enemies and knowing he must die, has issued a challenge to all comers. Clifford scoffs, ‘So cowards fight when they can fly no further, / So doves do peck the falcon’s piercing talons’ (3H6 1.4.40–1). He means that desperation rather than courage motivates York’s challenge. In terms of natural history, Clifford may be using ‘falcon’ as a synonym for ‘hawk’, since a hawk (but not a falcon) uses its talons to kill its prey. So firmly is the falcon associated with high status that toppling it from its place can be used as an emblem of turmoil in the body politic. The Old Man in MAC reports that before Duncan’s murder he saw a strange and dreadful sight: ‘A falcon towering in her pride of place / Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed’ (2.4.12–13). The sight represents a perversion of the natural order, for an owl hunting the mice that scurry on the ground has no business flying so high that it can attack and kill a mighty falcon. Twice in Shakespeare’s plays the sport of falconry is associated not with pride but with love, although in ways appropriate to the different kinds of love being depicted. In a gentle twist to the metaphor of love as a hunt, Florizel gives his falcon credit for leading him to Perdita: ‘I bless the time / When my good falcon made her flight across / Thy father’s ground’ (WT 4.4.14–16), he says. In contrast, Pandarus emphasizes predation when he represents the imminent sexual liaison of Troilus and Cressida as the union of falcons: ‘Nay, you shall fight your hearts out ere I part you. The falcon as the tercel, for all the ducks i’the river’ (TRO 3.2.50–1). Although the latter phrase may simply indicate that Pandarus is willing to bet that the two will ‘fight’, that is, engage sexually, there is an undertone here of predatory killing, since ducks are among the birds typically killed by falcons. (C) The principal early modern hawking manuals are those of Turberville (1575) and Latham (1614). Guillim provides a summary of the specialized vocabulary of falconry (1638: 228) and observes that the first man to bear a falcon on his coat of arms ‘was such an one as did eagerly pursue, vexe and molest poore and silly creatures’ (229). See Michell (1900) for a thorough exposition of the sport of falconry; his comment, ‘in falconer’s phraseology, every falcon is a hawk, although every hawk may not properly be called a falcon’ (11), is relevant to the early modern period. Pope (1992) offers the most thorough study of Shakespeare’s knowledge of and references to falconry, providing a general overview and close reading of several relevant passages in the plays. Benson (2006) considers the application of hawking metaphors to the representation of marriage in several plays. Berry (2001b: 95–132) focuses on Petruccio’s use of falcon-training techniques in his treatment of Katherina. Cocker and Mabey trace the peregrine falcon’s long, complicated cultural history in Britain (2005: 145–51); Rowland adds to its British cultural history the falcon’s symbolic and material role in ancient civilizations (1978: 58–63). KE falconer. The term principally denotes one who cares for and trains the fowls involved in hawking and who knows the unique character and name of each bird, although the term may more generally refer to anyone who participates in hawking. The stage 171

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direction at the beginning of 2H6 2.1, ‘Falconers hallooing’, indicates that falconers are commanding their dogs to flush waterfowl into the air so that the birds become prey for the falcons. The fact that the relationship between falconer and falcon was conventionally described as ‘loving’ helps explain why Juliet, in the balcony scene of ROM , longs for a ‘a falconer’s voice’ to lure her ‘tassle-gentle’ (the tercel or male falcon, i.e., Romeo) back to her (2.2.158–9). In a comment about the French that has puzzled scholars, Hamlet says in his greeting to the Players, ‘Masters, you are all welcome. We’ll e’en to’t like French falconers – fly at anything we see. We’ll have a speech straight’ (HAM 2.2.366–8). Thompson and Taylor (AR3: 265, n. 367) suggest that Hamlet is simply pointing to the great enthusiasm of the French for the sport of hawking. The phrase ‘fly at anything we see’ suggests lack of discipline, so that mockery of the French becomes gentle self-mockery. The behaviour hinted at here is close to that which Viola observes in Feste, who must ‘check at every feather / That comes before his eye’ (TN 3.1.62–3). That is, just as Feste must be constantly on the lookout for anything that he can seize upon for a jest, so French falconers do not restrain their falcons from going after even small and insignificant prey – and just so Hamlet cannot wait for a full performance but jumps at the opportunity to hear a player recite a speech detached from the play. KE fawn. (A) Juvenile deer. Like the doe, the fawn is a symbol of innocence and vulnerability. Once born, a fawn is left to hide in long grass, under a bush, or in any other protected space while the mother feeds, since the infant would be exhausted by the amount of exertion involved in a deer’s normal ranging. (B) VEN refers to this fact when the poet describes Venus running through underbrush to discover Adonis ‘Like a milch-doe, whose swelling dugs do ache, / Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake’ (875–6). The implicit effeminization of Adonis by the nurturing (as well as sexually dominant) Venus is echoed in AYL , when Orlando leaves old Adam behind while he searches for food. Finding the Duke and his party, Orlando proposes to leave and find the old man again: ‘Then but forbear your food a little while, / Whiles like a doe I go to find my fawn, / And give it food’ (2.7.128–30). Yet in this instance, Orlando’s actions reveal his nurturing concern for a faithful servant, so different from his brother’s treatment of those who depend on him: the inversions – male Orlando behaving like a female deer, old Adam treated as a baby fawn – thus suggest a rebuke to systems of masculine patronage and primogeniture. The moment clearly contrasts with the hunting in which even the exiled Duke and his men engage. Erickson (1982) notes this distinction along with its gendered implications. KR ferret. A small mammal of the family Mustidae, which includes carnivores like weasels, badgers, otters, martens and minks. Since the only two references to ferrets in the plays are to the creature’s vigorous digging in the earth after its prey (H5 4.4.28–9) 172

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and its red eyes (JC 1.2.185), it is difficult to know whether the animal in question is the domesticated version of the polecat, essentially a weasel, or whether the ferret concerned is a related but different animal known for rooting in the earth for its prey. Topsell deals with this ambiguity, noting that domesticated weasels, wild weasels and otters could be confused in classical sources, as could martens and badgers (1658 170– 1). The animals were used for hunting small subterranean game; Topsell describes the ferret’s eyes as ‘small, but fiery, like red hot iron’ (171) that give it excellent vision in the dark. KR finch. A small, colourful bird of the family Fringillidae that includes the chaffinch and the bullfinch; what is called a ‘finch’ in Shakespeare’s day may also be a bunting (family Emberizidae), since both kinds of birds are small, similar in appearance and were kept as caged pets for their trilling song. Bottom mentions the finch when he sings a song to prove he is not afraid though his companions run from him after he is transformed (MND 3.1.126). Thersites calls Patroclus ‘[f]inch egg’ (TRO 5.1.35), that is, a mere nothing. KR fish, fisherman. (A) Fish is the general description of all cold-blooded, limbless waterdwelling vertebrates. Early modern taxonomies included cetaceans like dolphins and whales (air-breathing mammals), as well as turtles, and crustaceans in the category of fish because they were all aquatic fauna. Although Aristotle distinguished cetaceans from fish, Pliny’s categorization in the NH was considerably more confused (see 9.6.16–19 [1940: 174–6]). The lack of distinction between sea mammals, amphibians, shellfish and other fish continued into the seventeenth century. Both freshwater and saltwater fish were an important source of protein in Renaissance Europe, and the European fishing industry was relatively advanced: ships used both stationary and moving (or drift) gillnets (vertically oriented nets) to capture large numbers of fish, although the English came late to hunting whales, engaging in it only from the early seventeenth century on. Discouraging the eating of meat during the religious holiday of Lent (forty days from Ash Wednesday through Maundy Thursday before Easter) was one tool the government instituted to support the fishing industry, which employed more people than any other sector of the economy except agriculture. Salted and preserved fish like cod, herring or stockfish were particularly important commodities, supplying an enormous range of needs and forming the basis for extensive shipping, exploration and trade. Individual fishermen and anglers supplemented their diets with fish drawn from both salt and fresh water. Angling as a sport was associated with upper class leisure, while eels, species of which lived in every body of water possible, were a common dish on the tables of all classes. (B) Fishing as a trade provides a vehicle for social commentary in PER where three fishermen encounter the shipwrecked Pericles. As the fishermen empathize with the 173

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drowned men aboard the vessel, one raises the question of ‘how the fishes live in the sea’, to which the response is ‘Why, as men do-a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones’ (2.1.27–9). The first fisherman goes on to compare rich ‘misers’ to whales that devour all the ‘poor fry’, while the third fisherman later opines, ‘We would purge the land of these drones that rob the bee of her honey’ (2.1.29, 31, 45–6), leading Pericles to marvel, ‘How from the finny subject of the sea / These fishers tell the infirmities of men’ (2.1.47–8). Actual fishermen, however, are rare in the plays. Rather, as is true of the use of most animals, images of fish and fishing are used to reflect human behaviour. Luciana in ERR , for instance, offers the antithesis of the fishermen’s social criticism in PER when she advises Adriana to accept her fate and be more patient with her husband: The beasts, the fishes and the winged fowls Are their mates’ subjects and at their controls. Man, more divine, the master of all these, Lord of the wide world and wild water seas, Indued with intellectual sense and souls, Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls, Are masters to their females, and their lords. (2.1.18–24) This ringing endorsement of a Great Chain of Being that requires female submission to male authority in marriage, however, is not entirely confirmed by the play itself, in which ‘man’ turns out to be not quite master of the seas or even master of his own household and identity. The various fishermen in ERR rescue and divide up the two sets of twins, along with Egeon and his wife at the play’s outset (1.1.110–16; 5.1.355–61), but all are subject to the ‘wild water seas’ that give or take either randomly or providentially, depending on your perspective on the play’s events. Caliban in TMP might be considered a ‘fisher-man’ – he functions as both fish and man not only because he physically resembles something fish-like (‘What have we here, a man or a fish?’ asks Trinculo; 2.2.24–5), but because he knows where to find crabs and scamels to eat. ‘I’ll fish for thee,’ he promises the two clowns, but for his former master Prospero he rejoices, ‘No more dams I’ll make for fish’ (2.2.158, 176). The fact that Caliban smells like a fish to the clowns hints at the way occupations associated with catching and selling fish were perceived as the proper domain of the lower, and less cleanly, classes. This association migrated into other uses of fishy language and representation. When Leontes indulges in misogynistic rambling about his wife’s potential for infidelity, he mobilizes the idea of the fishpond, a stagnant, sometimes putrid body of water associated with farming fish (probably carp). Hermione becomes in his imagination a ‘pond fished by his next neighbour, by / Sir Smile, his neighbour’ (WT 1.2.194–5). In Leontes’ mind he and Polixenes are anglers competing for Hermione (1.2.179–80), and the fishpond with its sluices and gates is the common pool of her genitalia where sexual fluids of multiple men mingle (AR3: 167, n. 194). Sexual innuendo 174

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also lies behind the Old Lady’s complaint to Anne Bullen (Boleyn) in H8, ‘A very fresh fish here [. . . you] have your mouth filled up / Before you open it’ (2.3.86–8). The Old Lady has been quizzing Anne on her willingness to be elevated in status from maid to Queen Katherine; when the Lord Chamberlain seems more responsive to Anne, the Old Lady registers her attractions and predicts she’ll be quickly hooked (with a possible allusion to oral sex). In AWW the Clown and Paroles exchange jabs over Paroles’ dishevelled condition, and many of their comments involve fishiness. Paroles claims it is Fortune that has ‘muddied’ him so, to which the Clown responds, ‘Truly, Fortune’s displeasure is but sluttish, if it smell so strongly as thou speak’st of. I will henceforth eat no fish of Fortune’s buttering’ (5.2.4–8). Like Leontes, the Clown associates Paroles’s putative smelliness (which he derives from the idea of being in the ‘sluttish’ goddess Fortune’s grip) with sexual promiscuity and the fishpond – he tells Lafew, ‘Here is a purr of Fortune’s, sir, or of Fortune’s cat – but not a musk cat – that has fallen into the unclean fishpond of her displeasure’ (5.2.18–20). Both Romeo and Samson in ROM are targets of teasing for being more fish than men: when Samson says he is known as a ‘pretty piece of flesh’, Gregory retorts ‘ ’Tis well thou art not fish; if thou hadst, thou hadst been poor john’ (a salted and dried fish; AR3: 126, n. 30 [1.1.28–30]). Mercutio later calls Romeo ‘fishified’, a herring that lacks roe (2.4.38), or a limp, effeminate, sexually ‘dry’ man. Lucio imagines that the cold-blooded ‘crabbed’ Angelo in MM must have been ‘begot between two stockfishes’ (3.1.363, 372), or in other words, spawned by a couple of dried fish. Eels and ‘lings’ (ling are salt cod: see AWW 3.2.13–14) were, respectively, slang for penis and female genitalia, while many kinds of fish references could be coded allusions to prostitutes. In short, fish served up a wealth of sexually suggestive language and images. Because fish were such a ubiquitous commodity, and because London was a river city, its streets, docks and riverside estates were impregnated with the odours of fish that were transported, sold or rotted away on the river banks and barges. Fish, whether circulating in the economy as food or especially when putrefying in the markets, could thus act as a reminder of shared human and animal mortality. Shylock dismisses the pound of flesh he demands as part of his contract with Antonio in MV as only good to ‘bait fish withal’ (3.1.48), making explicit the connection between human and non-human flesh (to a fish, rotted human flesh is indistinguishable from any other offal). Hamlet likewise turns the relationship between fish, bait and human flesh into a moral lesson: ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm’, demonstrating that ‘a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar’ (HAM 4.3.26–30). (C) On fish and the fishmarket, see Brayton (2020); on cetaceans, see Tiffany (1995), Brayton (2012a and 2012b) and Mentz (2012); on angling, see Brayton (2003), Shea (2015) and Wright (2019). On fish and sexuality, see Wakeman (2020). KR flea. (A) Biting insects of the order siphonoptera, fleas are parasites of nearly all mammals including humans. Known for both their prodigious ability to jump and for 175

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their diet of blood, fleas are usually named as pests, and can serve as signifiers of tiny size and unsavoury character. Given how annoying fleas are and how difficult to catch and destroy, it is no surprise that early modern household texts were full of advice and remedies to eliminate them: Tusser writes, ‘Where chamber is sweeped, and wormwood is strown,/ No flea, for his life, dare abide to be known.’ Pliny notes the use of pennyroyal, a species of mint, to repel fleas (20: 54.156 [1969: 91]). (B) Either Tusser’s or Pliny’s remedies would have helped make the tavern at Gads Hill a more salubrious place – the carriers in 1H4 complain ‘this be the most villainous house in all London road for fleas,’ repeating the common belief that the inn’s lack of chamberpots increased the insect’s numbers since urine was believed to encourage fleas to breed (2.1.14–15, 20–1). Fleas’ tiny size explains Berowne’s mockery of Armado at the Pageant of the Nine Worthies in LLL : Hector (Armado) will challenge Pompey, Berowne claims, ‘if a’ have no more man’s blood in his belly than will sup a flea’ (5.2.687–8). Sir Toby similarly shows his contempt for Sir Andrew Aguecheek, claiming ‘if he were opened and you find so much blood in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I’ll eat the rest of th’anatomy (TN 3.2.58–60). In both cases, having a stomach or liver full of blood would indicate courage, something the Constable and Orleans are sure the English lack in H5: they disparage the reputation of the English for breeding brave mastiffs, calling them ‘[f]oolish curs’ that run into a fight without thinking. ‘You might as well,’ says Orleans, ‘say that’s a valiant flea that dare eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion’ (3.7.142, 144–5). Petruccio insults the tailor in SHR by calling him ‘Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket’ (4.3.111), all epithets about size possibly related to the saying ‘Nine tailors make a man’ (see AR3: 267, n. 111). When Ford insists that Page and Evans help him empty the laundry basket because he is certain Falstaff is hiding in it, his wife states, ‘If you find a man there, he shall die a flea’s death’ (WIV 4.2.142–3). Her remark is deeply ironic, given Falstaff’s size – she means she’d kill him by pinching him between her fingernails like a flea. (C) Despite the flea’s poor showing in the plays, Shakespeare’s contemporaries were fascinated by the tiny creatures: Topsell recounts the tale, found also in Holinshed and Stow, of Mark Scaliot, a London blacksmith, who forged a miniature lock, key and gold chain, which he attached to a flea so he could pull them along (Topsell 1658: 1101; Holinshed 1299; Stow 1592: 1164). Vienne-Guerrin treats the flea as an insult (2016: 254–5). Borlik (2017) compares the fairies of MND to fleas, arguing that they represent early modern fascination with the near-invisible world of insects, while Wolfe (2017) argues that fleas were perceived as tiny machines. KR flock. (A) An assemblage of animals gathered together, most commonly birds or sheep, but sometimes applied to other species. Flocks of sheep or geese may be led by a shepherd or other guide or guardian. When used in reference to human beings, the idea of the flock expresses communal values, identity and habits. Flocks of birds, however, tend to express either mindless conformity or a tendency to share negative qualities with 176

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those one chooses as companions, reflected in the saying ‘birds of a feather flock together’ (Wilson, 60; Tilley 1950: B393) The idea of humans as a spiritual flock also has a long history in the Christian tradition and is associated with the role of the priest as pastor, aspiring to work in the paradigm set by Christ the divine shepherd. In religious and political contexts, the use of the term flock can thus either express the nourishment of the soul guaranteed by the Church or can be used to condemn those who allow predation on the innocent souls of fellow believers. (B) Even references to ‘actual’ flocks in the plays can carry the overtones of pastoral care and spiritual health. Thus, when the Shepherd in WT urges Perdita to be more forward in welcoming guests to the sheepshearing, he says ‘Come on, / and bid us welcome to your sheepshearing, / As your good flock shall prosper’ (4.4.68–70). The flock here is made up of both sheep and – metaphorically – of guests. In contrast, the flocks in AYL that Rosalind and Celia intend to buy from Corin are neglected because they are owned by an absentee landlord who ‘is of churlish disposition / And little recks to find the way to heaven / By doing deeds of hospitality’ (2.4.79–81). Again, the link between tending the flock and welcoming strangers underlies this criticism from the tenant shepherd. Titania in MND mentions one of the most feared destroyers of flocks of sheep, the disease called murrain that afflicts animals, as a result of the disagreement between herself and Oberon over the changeling child: ‘The fold stands empty in the drowned field, / And crows are fatted with the murrain flock’ (2.1.96–7). Murrain was actually the term applied to a number of different diseases, among them foot-and-mouth disease and anthrax, all of which were deadly to sheep. These sheep plagues swept through England and Europe periodically, sometimes associated by those suffering through them with wet weather (hence the drowned field in Titania’s speech); they threatened livelihoods and starvation. When Antonio calls himself ‘a tainted wether of the flock’ in MV (4.1.113), he refers to himself as a weakened and possibly diseased animal, as well as a suitable sacrifice, ‘[m]eetest for death’ (4.1.114). As AR3 points out (341, n. 113), Antonio conflates Old and New Testament references to Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Gen. 22.13) and Christ’s sacrifice for humanity (Jn 1.29). He also invokes the fear of an infectious plague like sheep murrain. MND, WT and AYL indirectly demonstrate the link between flocks of sheep and tales of love and desire. The pastoral tradition in poetry grew out of the fiction that shepherds tending their flocks had the leisure not only to indulge in longing for recalcitrant shepherdesses but to create lengthy poems about their plight. This tradition is everywhere in Renaissance literature, from the works of Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, to the self-portrayals of a queen like Elizabeth I. Shakespeare offers his version of pastoral poems in PP , where the speaker laments that his flocks ‘feed not’, his ewes do not breed and his rams are not well because he has lost his ‘lady’s love’ (17.1–2, 6). Flocks serve different purposes in the history plays. They can signal the divided nation during civil conflict, or they can suggest the moral compromise required in pursuing politics. When masquers ‘habited like shepherds’ appear before Cardinal 177

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Wolsey in H8 (1.4.163, s.d.), they perform a popular courtly entertainment that was usually intended to reinforce the governing authority of the monarch by making him the arbiter of its action. The Lord Chamberlain tells Wolsey the shepherds have left their flocks to view the court’s ladies (1.4.70), a typical polite masquing fiction. However, King Henry is himself a disguised performer in this masque, and persistently seeks contact with Anne Bullen (Boleyn). Henry undermines his own monarchical power by involving himself in the play, but also undoes the Cardinal’s ability to contain him. McMullan points out the ways in which this scene emasculates the king (AR3: 83–4) by revealing him as intemperate in his lust. In 2H4, Prince John rebukes the Archbishop of York for joining the rebels against King Henry: My Lord of York, it better showed with you When that your flock, assembled by the bell, Encircled you to hear with reverence Your exposition on the holy text Than now to see you here, an iron man, Cheering a rout of rebels with your drum, Turning the word to sword and life to death. (4.1.232–8) John’s play on word/sword and his reference to the Archbishop as an ‘iron man’ emphasize the rebels’ violation of ‘natural’ order in which a priest should be softly compassionate, not iron, and should be incapable of twisting the Word (of God) into a sword. A very different York (Richard, Duke of York) elsewhere describes the warring factions of the Houses of York and Lancaster as flocks, saying that the plots of the Duke of Somerset, Suffolk and their companions might well ‘snare’ Humphrey, the king’s uncle whom York calls ‘the shepherd of the flock’ (2H6 2.2.73–4). Later in the same play, Suffolk indeed makes good on his nefarious plan, likening Humphrey, who has been accused of treason, to a fox who is ‘By nature proved an enemy to the flock’ and should therefore be killed out of hand (3.1.258). These moments remind everyone of Humphrey’s essential but vulnerable goodness in contrast with the plotters’ evil intent. In 3H6, Warwick describes ‘the proud insulting Queen, / With Clifford and the haught Northumberland, / And of their feather many moe proud birds’ who have badgered the ‘easy-melting King’ (2.1.167–70). These references in the histories characterize groups as flocks in ways that remind audiences of the manipulative, distorting desires propelling those who challenge the order of monarchical rule. The pastoral associations of flocks enhance this implication, making bad worldly leaders bad spiritual leaders as well. Dividing the flock, misleading it or enlisting it in an unjust war are all assaults on God as well as on the system of government. As if to mark a change from deep seriousness to comic frivolity, Falstaff’s reference to flocks in 1H4 is the only one in the plays that clearly pertains to geese. Irritated with Prince Hal, Falstaff threatens him: ‘If I do not beat thee out of thy kingdom with a dagger of lath and drive all thy subjects afore thee like a flock of wild geese, I’ll never 178

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wear hair on my face more’ (2.4.130–3). No longer a group of innocent sheep, the citizens of England have become in Falstaff’s image a gaggle of silly wild birds that the knight pursues with a Vice figure’s customary wooden dagger. Iago’s use of the flock in OTH is not all that different: he registers Cassio’s foolishness, along with that of others who are susceptible to the effects of alcohol, when he plans to find ‘Three else of Cyprus’ who will drink to excess: ‘Now ’mongst this flock of drunkards / Am I to put our Cassio in some action / that may offend the isle’ (2.3.52, 56–8). Like Falstaff’s geese, this flock is defined by its incapacity, its lack of full humanity. (C) Astington (2015) discusses the religious context for Antonio’s self-description as a tainted wether in MV , noting that the wether is the flock’s leader, its defence against wolves (as Shylock is called). KR fly. (A) A general name in the early modern period for almost any insect that flies; hence the name. In addition to two-winged insects (order Diptera), for which we reserve the name today, bees, dragonflies, moths, butterflies and locusts could all be called flies in Shakespeare’s day. (B) The assumption that it is insignificant lies behind the proverb recorded in Tilley: ‘Not worth a fly’ (1950: F396). When Orlando declares that Rosalind’s frown might kill him, Rosalind (as Ganymede) swears, ‘By this hand, it will not kill a fly’ (AYL 4.1.102). Marina protests that she ‘never killed a mouse nor hurt a fly’ (PER 4.1.74) as she struggles to understand why Dionyza has ordered Leonine to kill her. The worthless fly is invoked in two representations of divine power, most notably in the blinded Gloucester’s despairing claim, ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, / They kill us for their sport’ (LR 4.1.38–9). In a similar vein, Sicilius Leonatus, who appears to his son Posthumus in a dream vision, invokes Zeus’ mercy: ‘No more, thou thunder-master, show thy spite on mortal flies’, he pleads (CYM 5.4.30), a plea that admits how paltry and negligible human beings are in the face of the gods. With bitter humour, Lady Macduff comments on her son’s plan to live ‘[a]s birds do’, now that his father is dead. ‘What’, she asks, ‘with worms and flies?’ (MAC 4.2.33–4). Even the child can see that worms and flies are worthless as human food, and he answers, ‘With what I get, I mean; and so do they’ (4.2.35). That flies do not matter is an assumption so ingrained that contradicting it gives pathetic force to a scene in TIT found in F though not in Q1 (the usual copy-text for the play). There Titus asks, ‘What dost thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife?’ (3.2.52), and Marcus replies, ‘At that that I have killed, my lord – a fly’ (3.2.53). Titus calls Marcus a murderer and a tyrant, declaring, ‘A deed of death done on the innocent / Becomes not Titus’ brother’ (3.2.56–7). Marcus defends himself: ‘Alas, my lord, I have but killed a fly’ (3.2.59). Titus immediately counters the assumptions contained in ‘but’: ‘But’? How if that fly had a father and a mother? How would he hang his slender gilded wings

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And buzz lamenting doings in the air. Poor harmless fly, That with his pretty buzzing melody Came here to make us merry, and thou hast killed him. (3.2.60–6) Bate (AR3: 250, n. 66–7) notes that ‘the broken metre’ of Titus’s speech is fitting for ‘his broken mind’. His association of this lost fly with beauty and merriment also fits the logic of his grief for his lost children. Marcus quickly recalls Titus to the circumstance of their loss: ‘Pardon me, sir, it was a black ill-favoured fly, / Like to the empress’ Moor. Therefore I killed him’ (3.2.67–8). Marcus, that is, attempts to move Titus from dwelling on his grief to thinking about revenge. The ploy is successful, as Titus calls killing the fly ‘a charitable deed’ and asks for Marcus’s knife so that he might ‘insult on’ the fly, ‘as if it were the Moor / Come hither purposely to poison me’ (3.2.71, 72–4). Titus proceeds to strike the dead fly, with one blow ‘for thyself’ (i.e., Aaron) and another ‘for Tamora’ (3.2.75), observing finally, ‘Yet I think we are not brought so low / But that between us we can kill a fly / That comes in likeness of a coal-black Moor’ (3.2.77–9). His remark suggests that striking the dead fly as if it were his enemies has yielded to the delusion that his enemies have come to him in the form of a fly. The remark causes Marcus to observe sadly, ‘Alas, poor man! Grief has so wrought on him / He takes false shadows for true substances’ (3.2.80–1). The fact that audiences in the theatre will not be able to see what the actors strike at with their knife adds another layer of significance to Marcus’s observation. By the play’s end, the fly that had been freighted with symbolic meanings in this scene resumes its conventional association with triviality and worthlessness. Listing some of his evil deeds, Aaron claims that he has ‘done a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly’ (5.1.141–2). Bate (AR3: 292, n. 142) suggests that this line may have ‘sowed the seed of the added fly scene’ in F. Flies’ attraction to light, warmth and food, in addition to their assumed triviality and worthlessness, makes them useful figures for flatterers and parasites and for anyone who changes direction, allegiance or fashion for purposes of self-promotion or advancement. Flavius warns Timon that his popularity with the mob will disappear as soon as he loses the means to feast and reward them: ‘one cloud of winter showers, / These flies are couched’ (TIM 2.2.171–2), that is, when the political weather changes, they will seek comfort and protection elsewhere. Flies are represented in an equally derogatory way in Nestor’s exhortation to the Greek army to remember that valour shows itself in response to the greatness of the challenge. In a gnomic pronouncement, he declares that on a fair day (that is, when fortune is shining on the army), a gadfly is more to be feared than a tiger. But when a storm rages, ‘when the splitting wind / Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks / And flies flee under shade’, then only those who are truly valorous respond with defiance to outrageous fortune (TRO 1.3.49–51). Serving them lukewarm water to show that they mean nothing to him, just as they care nothing for him, Timon comprehensively denounces his flatterers as ‘[m]ost smiling, smooth, detested parasites, / Courteous

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destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears – / You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies, / Cap-and-knee slaves, vapours and minute jacks!’ (TIM 3.7.93–6). Like flies, that is, Timon’s are fair-weather friends. In 3H6 the dying Clifford sets out in a soliloquy what he sees as the inevitable downfall of Henry VI: ‘The common people swarm like summer flies, / And whither fly the gnats but to the sun? / And who shines now but Henry’s enemies?’ (2.6.8–10). The use of ‘swarm’ and ‘flies’ makes clear Clifford’s contempt for the fickle common people, who, he implies, fly towards whoever seems most likely to succeed in gaining power. If, Henry, you had ruled as your father and grandfather did, Clifford laments, ‘[g]iving no ground unto the house of York, / They never then had sprung like summer flies’ (2.6.16–17). The repetition of ‘summer flies’ obscures the fact that Clifford is no longer talking about the common people but about sworn enemies to the house of Lancaster. Here what matters is not triviality or fickleness, but proliferation. Flies’ ability to multiply, Moffet implies, results from their shameless promiscuity: ‘they couple in publick, and know no end of their Venery almost’ (Topsell 1658: 931). King Lear in his madness imagines that he can pardon a man condemned to death for adultery. Should he die for adultery? asks the king and answers his own question: ‘No! The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly / Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive’ (LR 4.6.110–12). The adjective ‘summer’ often ushers in a sinister aspect of flies, their egg-laying and its association with maggots. Cominius says of Coriolanus that the people ‘follow him / Against us brats with no less confidence / Than boys pursuing summer butterflies / Or butchers killing flies’ (COR 4.6.93–6). ‘Summer’ spills over from modifying ‘butterflies’ to suggesting the flies that haunt the meat markets in the heat of the summer. Their menacing presence causes the butchers, writes Moffet, to ‘turn fencers, continually killing and beating them away with their Fly-flaps, lest with their fly-blows [. . .] their flesh should be tainted’ (Topsell 1658: 934). In response to Desdemona’s anguished protestation that she is honest, i.e., chaste, Othello replies, ‘O, ay, as summer flies are in the shambles, / That quicken even with blowing’ (OTH 4.2.67–8). ‘To blow’, when used of insects, means to deposit eggs in meat, which is to render it putrid. Othello’s cruel answer implies that Desdemona has as much care on whom she bestows sexual favours as the flies who eagerly lay eggs in the carcasses of an abattoir, eggs that immediately hatch into maggots. When Sir William Lucy arrives at the French camp to ask about English prisoners in 1H6, he inquires particularly about Sir John Talbot, whose multiple titles he formally intones. Joan of Arc scoffs at Lucy’s ‘silly stately style’ and quickly brings Talbot’s status down to earth: ‘Him that thou magnifies with all these titles / Stinking and fly-blown lies here at our feet’ (4.4.184, 187–8). Innogen, who thinks the headless corpse beside her is the body of her husband, determines to bury him to prevent his becoming ‘stinking and fly-blown’: ‘I’ll hide my master from the flies as deep / As these poor pickaxes can dig’ (CYM 4.2.387–8). Cleopatra swears that if she is coldhearted toward Antony, then let heaven send a hail storm to dissolve her, and let her children and her people ‘[l]ie graveless, till the flies and gnats of Nile / Have buried [eaten] them for prey’ (ANT 3.13.171–2). Later, Cleopatra vows that she will not be 181

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taken prisoner by Caesar: ‘Rather on Nilus’ mud / Lay me stark naked, and let the waterflies / Blow me into abhorring!’ (5.2.57–9), a vow with the sexual overtones that are also present in Othello’s description of Desdemona’s fly-blown chastity. When he learns that he has been banished from Verona, Romeo rails against the ‘unworthy’ creatures that ‘may look on’ Juliet, when he may not (ROM 3.3.31, 32). In a dark version of poems that envy the ability of a flea to jump on and explore the body of the beloved, Romeo imagines flies having the access to Juliet’s body that he is denied: More validity, More honourable state, more courtship lives In carrion flies than Romeo. They may seize On the white wonder of dear Juliet’s hand And steal immortal blessing from her lips, Who even in pure and vestal modesty Still blush, as thinking their own kisses sin. But Romeo may not, he is banished. Flies may do this, but I from this must fly; They are free men, but I am banished. (3.3.33–42) The extent of Romeo’s anguish is revealed by his sense that even carrion flies have the status of free men compared to him in his exile from Juliet – even as the name, ‘carrion flies’, points ominously to the play’s end. Comic potential may be found even in a fly-blown corpse, however, as when the Shepherd in WT hears what might happen to his son if he does not hand over the box found with the infant Perdita. Autolycus offers a picture of what might be called torture by insects. Your son, he warns the old shepherd, will be flayed alive, covered with honey, stung with wasps, and then, ‘in the hottest day prognostication proclaims, shall he be set against a brick wall, the sun looking with a southward eye upon him, where he is to behold him with flies blown to death’ (4.4.792–6). Berowne admits that under the influence of love he has been guilty of perpetrating ‘[t]affeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical’ (LLL 5.2.406–8). ‘[T]hese summer flies / Have blown me full of maggot ostentation’ (5.2.408– 9), he declares, and the image evokes a rhetorical style characterized by gaseous bloating, i.e., hot air. While Prospero looks on with delight, Ferdinand explains why he continues to act as Miranda’s ‘patient log-man’ (TMP 3.1.67). He admits that he is a prince (if not already a king) and, if it were not for love of her, he ‘would no more endure / This wooden slavery than to suffer / The flesh-fly blow my mouth!’ (3.1.61–3), the repulsive image measuring just how much he will tolerate for love of Miranda. In the last scene of the play, Trinculo admits that he is so pickled with drink that he ‘shall not fear fly-blowing’, meaning both that the vinegar will keep the flies away and that he is too tipsy to fear death (5.1.283–4). When the Hostess claims that Falstaff has eaten 182

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her ‘out of house and home’ on the promise to marry her, and that to survive she has had ‘to pawn both my plate and the tapestry of my dining chambers’ (2H4 2.1.72, 140–1), Falstaff counters that even one mass-produced painting on cloth ‘is worth a thousand of these bed-hangers and these fly-bitten tapestries’ (2.1.144–6). ‘Fly-bitten’ implies that Mistress Quickly’s wall-hangings are speckled with fly droppings or moth-eaten, or both, and are certainly worthless for pawning. Yet, just as ‘fly-bitten’ signifies that which is old and soiled, the fly itself may be a metaphor for someone clothed in bright colours – either because ‘fly’ signifies a butterfly, or perhaps because the wings of some flies are iridescent. In ROM , Mercutio rails against ‘fantasticoes’ such as Tybalt who adopt whatever slang or speech affectation is currently in fashion. ‘Why, is not this a lamentable thing’, he asks Benvolio, ‘that we should be thus afflicted with these strange flies, these fashion-mongers’? (ROM 2.4.29, 31–3). Hamlet calls the courtier Osric a ‘water-fly’ (HAM 5.2.69), a term indicating that he is affected but also, note Thompson and Taylor (AR3: 439, n. 69), that he is gaudily dressed. The diminutive size of flies makes them useful for figures of disparity and disproportion. Emilia refuses to watch the contest between the two knights who love her, declaring, ‘I had rather see a wren hawk at a fly / Than this decision’ (TNK 5.3. 2–3). The ‘preference’ may be intended to imply what is certainly not the case, that she would find the contest boring or commonplace. But if so, her lie inadvertently reveals the truth: a mismatched contest, with its quick and inevitable outcome, would be less distressing than witnessing the drawn out and possibly brutal contest between the perfectly matched Palamon and Arcite. When Maecenas asks if it is true that at Cleopatra’s court ‘[e]ight wild boars [were] roasted whole at breakfast, and but twelve persons there’ (ANT 2.2.189–90), Enobarbus scoffs, ‘This was but as a fly by an eagle. We had much more monstrous matter of feast’ (2.2.191–2). The eight boars, he means, are nothing compared to other feasts I could tell you about. Railing at the stupidity of Ajax and Achilles, Thersites declares that their military strategies are so witless that they cannot ‘deliver a fly from a spider without drawing their massy irons and cutting the web’ (TRO 2.3.15–16). In a metaphor that both reduces and enlarges the fly, Iago declares, as he watches Cassio take Desdemona’s hand, ‘With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio’ (OTH 2.1.168–9). Iago’s slur is worthy of his rhetorical skill: to call Cassio a great fly is to turn him simultaneously into a dupe and a monster. Frustrated, the powerful steed in VEN vents his rage on tiny creatures: he ‘stamps, and bites the poor flies in his fume’ (316), yet the unequal contest impresses the ‘breeding jennet’ (260) he desires, and she grows ‘kinder’ (318). Their ability to irritate beasts and humans, attributable to flies’ tiny size and persistence, is the point of Thersites’s mockery of Patroclus’s martial prowess and possibly of his masculinity: ‘Ah, how the poor world is pestered with such waterflies, diminutives of nature!’ (TRO 5.1.32–3), he jeers. In the opening scene of OTH , the low-level disturbance of Brabantio, for which the pestering of flies serves as an apt metaphor, marks the starting point of the gradual destruction of Othello. Thus, Iago urges Roderigo, ‘Rouse him, make after him, poison his delight, / Proclaim him in the streets, incense her kinsmen, / And, though he in a fertile climate 183

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dwell, / Plague him with flies!’ (1.1.67–70). It seems likely that there is pronoun slippage here, and that the ‘he’ who dwells in a fertile climate is Othello, who (as Iago would know) has hitherto passed his life in hostile and non-fertile climates. The point at which Othello thinks he has achieved all he desires, Iago means, is the point at which he will begin to lose it. Flies’ ability to pester is represented as a benevolent activity in CYM , when Arviragus, asked to say how the ‘dead’ Fidele (Innogen) looked, answers that ‘he’ was ‘Stark, as you see, / Thus smiling, as some fly had tickled slumber, / Not as death’s dart being laughed at’ (4.2.208–10). The tickling that might have made the sleeping Fidele smile is one of two benevolent activities attributed to a fly in Shakespeare’s works. The other occurs in 2H4, when the sleepless king paints their buzzing as a kind of lullaby. Those who lie in ‘perfumed chambers’ under ‘canopies of costly state’ cannot sleep, he muses, while those who lie in hovels on straw pallets are ‘hushed with buzzing night-flies’ (3.1.11–13). Their fragility and their vulnerability to the forces of wind and weather are the basis for several further references to flies in Shakespeare’s works. On the eve of his elopement with Perdita, Florizel admits to Camillo that he does not know where they will go; they are now ‘the slaves of chance, and flies / Of every wind that blows’ (WT 4.4.545–6). When Henry V seeks advice from the Duke of Burgundy for his wooing of Katherine, the duke uses a simile to explain: ‘maids well summered and warm kept’, declares Burgundy, ‘are like flies at Bartholomew-tide, blind, though they have their eyes; and then they will endure handling, which before would not abide looking on’ (H5 5.2.304– 8). Henry understands him to mean that when flies are drowsy and stupefied (‘blind’) in the late summer sun, they can more easily be caught, and thus he will have to wait: ‘This moral ties me over to time and a hot summer’, he replies; ‘and so I shall catch the fly, your cousin, in the latter end’ (5.2.309–11), the last phrase referring both to the summer and to her body. Cleon, ordered by Dionyza to kill Marina, likens his mistress to a harpy with an angel’s face and an eagle’s talons; she in turn likens him to ‘one that superstitiously / Do swear to th’ gods that winter kills the flies, / But yet I know you’ll do as I advise’ (PER 4.3.48–50). Dionyza’s taunt seems to mean that Cleon will end up falsely claiming (after murdering Marina) that she died a natural death. (C) In the Bible, swarms of flies are the fourth of the ten plagues inflicted on Egypt (Exod. 8.21). For classical antiquity’s attitude toward flies, which were an especial nuisance when meat was sacrificed to the gods, see McDonough (1999: 468–72). Moffet devotes twenty pages to flies (Topsell 1658: 931–51), noting, ‘There is a great deal of difference amongst Flies, whether you respect the matter or form of them’ (Topsell 1658: 934). For the depiction of flies in sixteenth-century nature painting and still life, see Neri (2011: 13–15). A precise and exhaustive classification of flies could only begin with the availability of microscopic examination. Hooke includes a drawing of a magnified ‘blue fly’ in Micrographia (1665: fig. 26), calling it ‘a very beautiful creature’ (182). In Jonson’s Volpone, Mosca (L. ‘musca’, fly) is described in the dramatis personae as the ‘Parasite’ of Volpone (199b: 80), that is, a flatterer or hanger-on, while the lawyer Voltore (i.e., vulture) calls Mosca a ‘flesh-fly’ (5.9.1). H. Harris (2002: 9–26) 184

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discusses seventeenth-century experiments demonstrating that flies were not created by spontaneous generation. Several scholars have focused on the ‘fly-killing’ incident in TIT : see Kramer (1969), Taylor and Duhaime (2016) and Scott (2008). KE fox (A) A member of the canine family belonging to the genus Vulpes, which, along with human beings and wolves, has the widest global distribution of any mammal. After wolves were hunted to extinction in the British Isles, foxes remained as the largest predators, known particularly for their depredation of henhouses and their occasional killing of lambs. Hunted as vermin in the early modern period, foxes did not have the high status required for royal hunts. Their literary representation as crafty, clever and resourceful (a representation undoubtedly based on experiential knowledge of their behaviour) is consistent through the centuries, from Aesop’s fables and medieval stories about Reynard the Fox to religious polemic in the post-Reformation period. (B) Its subtlety or cleverness, regarded sometimes in a positive but more usually in a negative light, is the most dominant feature of the fox in Shakespeare’s works. Venus implores Adonis to hunt ‘the fox which lives by subtlety’, one of the ‘fearful creatures’ that will flee Adonis, unlike the boar, which will turn and attack (VEN 675, 677). Arviragus observes that he and his brother have no other life to compare to their present one: ‘We have seen nothing. / We are beastly: subtle as the fox for prey, / Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat’ (CYM 3.3.39–41). His complaint includes a hint of pride, evident in his claim to hunt with fox-like subtlety and wolf-like valour. After killing Polonius, Hamlet implicitly calls himself a fox. He orders Guildenstern to bring him to the king (HAM 4.2.28) and immediately adds – the line appearing only in F – ‘hide Fox, and all after’ (AR3: 361, t.n.). By so doing, Hamlet manages simultaneously to assert his own craftiness and to sound as mad as King Lear, who ends a scene, as Thompson and Taylor note, in similar fashion (LR , AR3: 361, n. 28): ‘Come, an you get it, / You shall get it by running’ (LR 4.6.198–9). In one of the characteristically barbed exchanges between them, Feste says to Malvolio, ‘Sir Toby will be sworn that I am no fox, but he will not pass his word for twopence that you are no fool’ (TN 1.5.75–7). I may not be clever, Feste means, but you, Malvolio, are downright foolish. Claudio and Don Pedro imply by calling him a ‘kid-fox’ (ADO 2.3.40), or a fox cub, that Benedick thinks he is clever but that he is still young in the ways of craftiness. They are, after all, just about to persuade him that Beatrice is in love with him. Usually, however, the fox’s cleverness is aligned to a capacity for treachery, deceit and hypocrisy. Thus, when in a vituperative soliloquy Thersites refers to Ulysses as a ‘dog-fox’ (TRO 5.4.10), that is, a male fox, his slur reduces Ulysses’ famed intelligence to something more akin to low and self-interested cunning. Worcester alludes to the treacherous cunning of the fox in 1H4 when he explains to Vernon why the king will always have doubts about their loyalty: ‘For treason is but trusted like the fox, / Who, never so tame, so cherished and locked up, / Will have a wild trick of his ancestors’ (5.2.9–11). Just as a fox can never be fully domesticated, so we can never be fully 185

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rehabilitated in the king’s eyes, Worcester means. Falstaff’s variation on the theme of the treacherous fox occurs in his argument with the Hostess in an earlier scene of 1H4. Falstaff said he would cudgel you, claims Mistress Quickly to Hal; if I am not telling the truth, she adds, ‘[t]here’s neither faith, truth nor womanhood in me else’ (1H4 3.3.110– 11). Falstaff refutes her claim: ‘There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune, nor no more truth in thee than in a drawn fox’ (3.3.112–13). ‘Drawn fox’ most likely means a fox that has been lured out of its den and so must depend upon its wiliness for selfdefence. Kastan (AR3: 274, n. 113) notes, however, that ‘drawn fox’ may also refer to the lure itself. Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom, voices the commonplace view of vulpine craftiness when he describes himself as ‘fox in stealth’ (LR 3.4.91). When Lear arraigns Goneril and Regan in the mock-trial scene (found in Q but not in F), he calls his daughters ‘she-foxes’ (3.6.22). As examples of its compound use demonstrate (OED she, C1), the addition of ‘she’ before an animal name generally makes the name even more derogatory. Yet, as Vienne-Guerrin points out (2016: 200), when at MND 3.2.324 Helena calls Hermia a ‘vixen’ (derived from Old English fyxen, ‘she-fox’), Hermia is much more offended at being called ‘little’ (3.2.325). In the scene of the pseudo-trial that follows the scene of the mock-trial in LR , Gloucester is apprehended and brought before Regan, who calls him ‘Ingrateful fox’ (3.7.28). His alleged ingratitude refers to his lack of loyalty to Cornwall, his foxiness, to his secret correspondence with Cordelia. King Edward calls the Scots who are besieging the Countess of Salisbury ‘stealing foxes’ (E3 2.90–1), that is, stealthy foxes, who flee before the English can ‘uncouple’ their dogs to hunt them down. Timon returns three times to the fox’s reputation for treachery when he jeers at Apemantus’s wish to turn the world over to the beasts and ‘be rid of the men’ (TIM 4.3.322). Your wish is ‘beastly’, puns Timon: ‘If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass’ (4.3.326, 327– 30). Timon wants Apemantus to admit that the world of beasts is as predatory, deceitful and self-interested as the world of people. Paradoxically, however, his examples are fully anthropomorphized and so hardly recognizable as beasts. In H8, the Duke of Buckingham calls Cardinal Wolsey a fox, then a wolf, then both. The notion that the Cardinal combines the traits of both beasts seems to spark the Duke’s imagination. His descriptive phrases accumulate rapidly as, apparently thinking aloud, he explains that it is the Cardinal, [t]his holy fox, Or wolf, or both – for he is equal ravenous As he is subtle, and as prone to mischief As able to perform’t – his mind and place Infecting one another – yea, reciprocally – Only to show his pomp as well in France As here at home, [who] suggests the King our master To this last costly treaty [. . .] (1.1.158–65)

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In Buckingham’s bestiary, the fox’s crafty intellect directs the wolf’s ferocity, which in turn further corrupts the fox’s subtlety. In her scathing criticism of Sicinius for his treatment of her son Coriolanus, Volumnia merges the fox and its dominant quality into an abstract noun: ‘Hadst thou foxship / To banish him that struck more blows for Rome / Than thou hast spoken words?’ (COR 4.2.18–20), she sarcastically demands. Was your low cunning responsible for your decision to banish Coriolanus? ‘[I]f thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee’ (TIM 4.3.328): Timon’s bitter remark captures an assumption evident in many of the plays: that the fox uses its guile to prey on lambs. Suffolk improvises a proverb – ‘The fox barks not when he would steal the lamb’ (2H6 3.1.55) – as he seeks to persuade Queen Margaret, Cardinal Beaufort and the Duke of York that Gloucester is treacherous. Suffolk expands his argument-bynatural-analogy later in the scene, claiming that Gloucester, like a fox, has an inherent drive to kill, even though he has not yet murdered anyone. were’t not madness then To make the fox surveyor of the fold, Who being accused a crafty murderer, His guilt should be but idly posted over Because his purpose is not executed? No – let him die in that he is a fox, By nature proved an enemy to the flock, Before his chaps be stained with crimson blood [. . .] (2H6 3.1.252–9) Therefore, Suffolk reasons, assassinating Gloucester in anticipation of what he will inevitably do is justified. When Proteus commands her to take his ring to Sylvia, Julia (who loves him) muses unhappily, ‘thou hast entertained / A fox to be the shepherd of thy lambs’ (TGV 4.4.89–90), and she resolves to woo but ‘coldly’ for her master (4.4.104). If I am untrue to Troilus, avers Cressida, then let ‘ “As false as Cressid” ’ become interchangeable with ‘ “As false [. . .] / As fox to lamb” ’ (TRO 3.2.191, 186, 188). Her wish is granted, as she becomes a by-word for falseness. The disguised Duke in MM warns Mariana and Isabella that the villain whom they have ‘come to accuse’, i.e., Angelo, will be the judge who tries them: ‘O, poor souls, / Come you to seek the lamb here of the fox?’ (5.1.301, 295–6). The Duke is in fact citing a familiar proverb (Tilley 1950: W602) in anticipation of revealing Angelo’s deceitfulness and hypocrisy. Even when fox fur and lambskin are alluded to, rather than the animals themselves, the fox continues to represent craftiness, the lamb, innocence. In a complicated personification of usury, Pompey claims that he (usury), has ‘a furred gown to keep him warm; and furred with fox- and lamb-skins too, to signify that craft, being richer than innocency, stands for the facing’ (MM 3.1.278–80), that is, usury’s gown is lined with lambskin, but the truth of usury is announced by the outer covering of fox fur. Several plays pair the fox and goose as traditional opposites, the fox being sly and predatory, the goose, gullible and foolish, as when the lovers watching Pyramus and 187

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Thisbe in MND have great fun at the expense of Snug, who plays Lion. After Theseus describes Lion as ‘[a] very gentle beast, and of a good conscience’ (5.1.225), Lysander proclaims him ‘a very fox for his valour’ (2.2.227), alluding to the saying that discretion (discernment or judgement) is the better part of valour. Theseus builds on Lysander’s jest: ‘True, and [Lion is] a goose for his discretion’ (2.2.228), meaning he has little or no discretion. Demetrius quibbles: ‘Not so, my lord. For his valour cannot carry his discretion, and the fox carries the goose’ (2.2.229–30), that is, his valour does not surpass his discretion. Theseus then caps Demetrius’s witticism and ends the exchange: ‘His discretion, I am sure, cannot carry his valour, for the goose carries not the fox’ (2.2.231–2), meaning that his discretion is not greater than his valour. Coriolanus insults the citizens of Rome when he announces, ‘He that trusts to you, / Where he should find you lions finds you hares, / Where foxes, geese you are’ (COR 1.1.165–7). To put this in terms of the exchange in MND , he means that Roman citizens have neither valour nor discretion. In LLL , Moth and Armado recite a four-line poem consisting of a ‘moral’ and a ‘l’envoy’. The brief verse seems to gesture toward Aesopian fable but is in fact a play on notions of odd and even. Armado begins with the moral, or lesson: ‘The fox, the ape and the humble-bee / Were still at odds, being but three’ (3.1.82–3). Moth asks him to repeat the moral and then adds the l’envoy: ‘Until the goose came out of door, / And stayed the odds by adding four’ (3.1.88–9). Moth then repeats the moral himself (‘The fox, the ape and the humble-bee / Were still at odds, being but three’ [3.1.92–3]), and Armado adds the l’envoy: ‘Until the goose came out of door, / Staying the odds by adding four’ (3.1.94–5). Moth’s comment, ‘A good l’envoy, ending in the goose’ (3.1.96), simultaneously identifies Armado as the goose and puns on the ending of ‘envoy’ – ‘oy’ or ‘oie’, the French word for goose (AR3: 167, n. 96, 101). A more recognizable Aesopian fable is evoked in AWW . When the King says ‘No’ in answer to Lafeu’s question, ‘will you be cured / Of your infirmity?’ (2.1.66–7), the old courtier teases him: ‘O, will you eat / No grapes, my royal fox? Yes, but you will / My noble grapes, an if my royal fox / Could reach them’ (2.1.68–70). Lafeu means that the King, like the fox in the fable, pretends he does not want to eat grapes (i.e., to be cured) because he thinks that the grapes, like the cure, are beyond his reach. In their rivalry for Bianca’s love, Gremio and Tranio boast of their fortunes, the elderly Gremio’s based on his possessions, the young Tranio’s based on what he has inherited from his still-living father. Gremio observes that Tranio’s father has been foolish to put himself, in effect, at the mercy of his son. ‘An old Italian fox is not so kind, my boy’ (SHR 2.1.406), he jeers, alluding to the old fox of the proverb that cannot be taken with a snare (Tilley 1950: F647). Terminology associated with fox hunting emerges in the discussion between Lord E and Lord G in AWW as they prepare to expose Paroles. ‘[W]e have almost embossed him’ (3.6.96–7), remarks Lord E, implying that Paroles is an animal hunted to the limit of its endurance. Lord G embroiders the metaphor: ‘We’ll make you some sport with the fox ere we case him. He was first smoked by the old Lord Lafeu’ (3.6.99–100). To case a fox is to slit its carcass in order to pull away its fur – an extreme form of exposure. As 188

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for the smoking of Paroles, Lord G means that Paroles’s lack of substance was first recognized by Lafeu; the term glances at the practice of smoking foxes from their dens. When Lear vows that only divine force can separate him from Cordelia – ‘He that parts us shall bring a brand from heaven, / And fire us hence like foxes’ (LR 5.3.22–3) – he combines the idea of smoking foxes from their dens with the biblical story of Samson, who ties 300 foxes together by their tails, puts a fire brand in the knotted tails, and so burns down the fields and vineyards of his enemies, the Philistines (Judg. 15.4–5). In an earlier scene, the Fool observes in one of his particularly dark ditties that cruel daughters and foxes deserve the same fate: ‘A fox when one has caught her, / And such a daughter, / Should sure to the slaughter’ (1.4.310–12). Frank Ford, afraid that he is being cuckolded, orders his servants to ‘search, seek, [and] find out’ Falstaff; ‘I’ll warrant we’ll unkennel the fox’ (WIV 3.3.149–50), Ford declares, meaning that they will force him from his hiding place. Fabian and Sir Toby employ hunting metaphors as they watch Malvolio struggle to find the meaning of ‘M.O.A.I’. ‘He is now at a cold scent’ (TN 2.5.120), remarks Toby, likening Malvolio’s puzzlement to a hound’s losing the scent of the prey. Fabian, however, assures Toby that even if the scent (or interpretation) is indiscernible, the hound Malvolio will bay at it, as if what he has found is grossly palpable: ‘Sowter will cry upon’t for all this, though it be as rank as a fox’ (2.5.121–2). Fabian is quoting a proverb, ‘rank as a fox’ (Tilley 1950: F628). The rank fox appears by implication in Falstaff’s impudent response to Justice Shallow, who has warned Falstaff about his narrow escape from the law. Because Falstaff has seen military action at Shrewsbury, the Justice says he is willing, just this once, to overlook the highway robbery at Gad’s Hill. Falstaff starts to respond, and the Justice hushes him: ‘since all is well, keep it so: wake not a sleeping wolf’ (2H4 1.2.154–5). But Falstaff cannot keep quiet: ‘To wake a wolf is as bad as smell a fox’ (1.2.156), he says, a quip that implies the Justice is being overly suspicious of him. A fox proverb in 3H6 depicts the fox as a skilled and clever hunter that needs only the smallest opening to take advantage of a situation and seize its prey (see Tilley 1950: F655). Richard of Gloucester finds it instructive as he watches Edward, soon to be king, declare that he is solely interested in securing his dukedom, ‘[a]s being well content with that alone’ (4.7.24). Richard, knowing that for Edward the dukedom is only a first step toward achieving the throne, quotes the proverb: ‘But when the fox hath once got in his nose, / He’ll soon find means to make the body follow’ (4.7.25–6). A symbolic fox appears in the context of slaughter in H5, when Pistol captures a French soldier and attempts to frighten him into paying for his release: ‘O Signieur Dew, thou diest on point of fox, / Except, O Signieur, thou do give to me / Egregious ransom’ (4.4.9–11). Craik (AR3: 298, n. 9) explains that ‘fox’ here refers to the image of a wolf (frequently mistaken for a fox) stamped on swordblades; hence, metonymically, ‘fox’ is the sword with which Pistol threatens his captive. (C) Several species of fox are native to the (ancient) Middle East (Bodenheimer 1935: 111), and there are many allusions to the fox in the Bible. One of the best-known biblical foxes appears in Jesus’ condemnation of Herod at Luke 13.32: ‘Go ye & tell that foxe, Beholde, I cast out devils, and wil heale stil today, and tomorowe’ (GNV). The 189

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verse may have helped justify the Reformation practice of calling one’s religious enemy a fox (see Brennan 1986). Pliny attributes ‘sollertia’, cleverness or ingenuity, to the fox (1940: 74–5 [8.42]), citing as an example the story that it presses its ear against the ice of a frozen lake to figure out whether walking across it can be done safely. The clever fox is a favourite character of Aesopian fables; for an accessible version of the Reynard the Fox tales, which were influenced by Aesop’s fables and in turn influenced medieval and early modern conceptions of the fox, see Owen (1994). In the bestiaries, the fox is called ‘a fraudulent and ingenious animal’ who pretends he is dead, and when birds sit on him, he springs up and devours them, just as the Devil pretends he is harmless until foolish, unwary people fall into his clutches (White 1954: 53–4; see Morrison 2019: 22 for a splendid manuscript illustration of the fox playing dead). In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaunticleer the cock is outwitted and devoured by a fox with blacktipped ears and tail, a ‘col-fox’, said to be ‘ful of sly iniquitee’ (Chaucer 1987: 258). The titular character of Jonson’s Volpone, or The Fox (It. volpe, ‘fox’) is a crafty charlatan, whose name reveals his nature. Berry (2001b: 15) briefly discusses the hunting of foxes in the early modern period. King (2018) examines the depiction of Falstaff’s cleverness in the context of beast fables, and specifically of tales of Reynard the Fox. Stelzer (2016) considers AWW ’s treatment of fox fables in relation to Jonson’s Volpone. For discussions of the fox, the ape and the humble-bee in LLL , see Petti (1960) and Breuer (2012). KE frog, paddock, tadpole. (A) A tailless amphibian (Rana temporaria, the Common Frog) native to Britain; the tadpole is its larval, aquatic stage. Both of its English names, ‘frog’ and ‘paddock’, were in regular use in Shakespeare’s day, although ‘paddock’ could also mean toad, the other tailless amphibian native to Britain and which was not usually distinguished from the frog. Today, ‘paddock’ is a regional (mostly Northern) term. The frog’s scientific name, bestowed long before the creation of a modern system of classification, means ‘temporary frog’ and refers to its habit of apparently disappearing, i.e., hibernating, in the winter. Its ‘disappearance’, its nocturnal habits and its preference for dark, dank habitats contribute to its sinister reputation in the early modern period, as does its role in the Bible as a plague animal and a demonic feature of apocalypse. (B) ‘Paddock calls’, observes the Second Witch in MAC , probably referring to the frog as her familiar (1.1.8). Later in the play, ‘toe of frog’ is one of the ingredients in the witches’ cauldron (4.1.14). Paddock appears again in a list of repulsive animals when Hamlet asks his mother, with grim sarcasm, if any but a ‘fair, sober, wise’ queen would hide the secret matters they have been discussing ‘from a paddock, from a bat, a gib’ (HAM 3.4.187–8) – by which he means Claudius. To demonstrate that he is mad, Edgar in LR speaks of himself in the third person and claims to eat creatures ordinarily taboo for human consumption, including frogs: ‘Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the tadpole, the wall-newt’ (3.4.125–6). The madness of the Jailer’s Daughter in TNK is 190

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also signalled by a preoccupation with frogs: ‘I am very hungry. / Would I could find a fine frog; he would tell me / News from all parts o’ th’ world’ (3.4.11–13). Here, the frog may be a source of food or (in fairy-tale mode) a source of news. In TIT , Demetrius offers to kill Aaron’s new-born son, said by the Nurse to be ‘as loathsome as a toad’ because he is black (TIT 4.2.69). ‘I’ll broach the tadpole on my rapier’s point’, declares Demetrius, an epithet recalling the nurse’s ‘toad’ and perhaps a belated attempt at wit (4.2.87). In H5, Henry claims, ‘If I could win a lady at leapfrog [. . .] I should quickly leap into a wife’ (5.2.137, 140). It is possible that the children’s game receives its name from the squatting posture necessary for one child to leap over another. However, the main sense of the ‘leap’ in Henry’s reference to ‘leapfrog’, as Craik observes (AR3: 355, n. 140), is a sexual one. (C) Pliny declares that frogs melt into the mud in the autumn and are reborn in the spring (NH 1940: 271–3 [9.73]). An infestation of frogs is one of the Egyptian plagues recounted in the Bible (Exod. 8.2–7), and the perception of frogs’ loathsomeness is reinforced by a verse in Revelation: ‘And I sawe thre unclean spirits like frogges come out of the mouth of the dragon, & out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet’ (16.13, GNV). The mock-epic attributed to Homer, Bactrachomyomachia, was translated anonymously and published in 1603 as The Strange, Wonderfull, and Bloudy Battell betweene Frogs and Mise. Aristophanes’ comedy, The Frogs, with its famous frog chorus, was available (mostly in Latin translations) in the sixteenth century and served as a model for Jonson’s and others’ satirical comedy (Miola 2013: 479–502). The monster Error in The Faerie Queene, fatally wounded by the Red Crosse Knight, vomits up ‘bookes and papers’ and ‘loathly frogs and toades, which eyes did lack’ (2001: 1.1.21), alluding to Rev. 16.13 and signifying the blind superstition that threatens true religion. Crump (2015: passim) gathers folklore and legends about frogs and toads, including their role as witches’ familiars. KE fry. (A) The young of any fish after hatching. Fry is used for both actual fish and for human children. For that reason, and because fry are usually seen in swarms, the term is often linked to sexual reproduction, especially the more rampant and illicit form of sex. (B) Thus Paroles, tricked into betraying his fellows, describes Bertram as a ‘dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds’ (AWW 4.3.216–17) – that is, Bertram feeds on all the opportunities naïve virgins present him by having sex with many. Likewise, a sexual meaning informs the term’s use by the Porter in H8, who refers to the ‘fry of fornication’ who is knocking at the door, perhaps created by the ‘great tool’ of the ‘strange Indian’ he imagines must have arrived to inspire the tumult outside (5.3.32–4). Fry can be used interchangeably with egg, although fry are already hatched and capable of swimming and feeding themselves. The murderers in MAC call Macduff’s son ‘young fry of treachery’ (4.2.86) as well as ‘egg’. Adonis defends himself from Venus’ sexual advances by arguing that ‘No fisher by the 191

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ungrown fry forbears’ (VEN 526). He is, he claims, too young and too unformed to even know his own desires, so should not be pressed to give her what she wants. In PER , however, the fry are part of the first Fisherman’s meditation on social hierarchy and exploitation when he notes that great men ‘eat up the little ones’ and compares rich misers to a whale ‘driving the poor fry before him’ who in the end swallows them up (2.1.28–31). The Fisherman echoes a proverb (Tilley 1950: F311) about big fish cannibalizing smaller ones. KR fur. (A) The protective outer hairs growing from the skins of some animals. Fur was used as clothing for warmth and comfort. Sumptuary laws governed the wearing of furs, which were considered a luxury; specific animals’ pelts like that of the ermine were associated with royalty, while furs from fox or otters were options for the lesser nobility. Thus, for example, a 1574 Elizabethan statute regarding apparel dictated that the fur of civet cats, leopards or lynx could only be worn by nobles, Knights of the Garter or members of the Privy Council (Tudor Royal Proclamations 1964–9: 2: 386). (B) LR uses fur as a marker of human vulnerability, a kind of negative human exceptionalism, when one of the king’s knights tells Kent that Lear runs ‘unbonneted’ in the storm, ‘This night wherein the cub-drawn bear would couch, / The lion and the belly-pinched wolf / Keep their fur dry’ (3.1.12–14). The knight is horrified that driven to madness by his daughters’ betrayal and his disillusionment about his inherent status, Lear rages at the elements without the sense of self-preservation that creatures far more well-endowed with natural defences would show at such a time. In keeping with his own obsession with the trappings of power (which fail to attach reliably to actual power), Lear remarks that ‘Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; / Robes and furred gowns hide all’ (4.6.160–1). According to Pompey in MM , the problem in Venice is that only one kind of usury has been targeted by the law, the ‘merrier’ (i.e., his own crime of pimping), while financial usurers are given ‘a furred gown to keep him warm; and furred with fox- and lamb-skins too’ (3.1.276–9). Lining a gown with lamb surrounded by fox furs mixes the pelts of animals associated with innocence and deceit, trapping the former within the sphere of the latter. Troilus accuses his brother Helenus, ‘You fur your gloves with reason’ (TRO 2.2.38), an accusation that metaphorically depicts Helenus as overly cautious because cowardly in the face of the Greeks’ threat, a ‘brother priest’ who has become soft through pampering (with a possible glance at the use of fur to trim priestly robes: Bevington: 192, n. 38). Some furs had specific associations, including sable, the dark fur that Hamlet angrily jests he’ll exchange for his mourning clothing (HAM 3.2.122–3) – sable was an especially luxurious, soft and silky fur, taken from the marten. Hamlet’s rage is provoked by his sense that his family and the court have rushed to forget his father to quickly indulge themselves in the ordinary pleasures of life. In commenting on the baldness that men suffer as they age, Dromio of Syracuse observes in ERR that hair or fur ‘is a blessing that [Father Time] bestows on beasts; and 192

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what he hath scanted men in hair he hath given them in wit’ (2.2.82–4). Dromio refers to the ‘Happy Beast’ tradition that holds that human beings are less endowed with resources by Nature than are animals – and at the same time, he includes the usual counter to the tradition, namely that humans have been compensated with other, more important qualities. (C) Borlik (2020) discusses the Skinners guild pageants, the furs and skins (especially those of bears) used as play props, and the theoretical consequences of treating fur as mere material object. KR

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G game. (A) Wild animals that are caught for sport during the hunt. The term derives from the idea of the hunt or chase as entertainment, thus a ‘game’ (match or contest) the object of which is by extension named with the same word (OED 3.115–16a). (B) The Princess in LLL talks of ‘mocking intended game’ when the King and his men come masked to revel with her ladies: she means to have fun with them, saying that her objective will be to make them ‘depart away with shame’ (5.2.155–6). While she does not explicitly say the women will hunt the men or turn them into prey animals, her words carry the flavour of dehumanization often associated with hunting, and they necessarily resonate with the actual hunt undertaken by the characters earlier in the play, creating a case where the word ‘game’ is fully ambiguous. More direct is Titus’s use of the word to refer to the animals he expects to hunt with Saturninus and Tamora: ‘I have horse will follow where the game / Makes way and runs like swallows o’er the plain’ (TIT 2.1.23–4). His tone is light and playful, appropriate to the celebration of the emperor’s marriage, but the moment signals how utterly Titus misses the context and targets of this hunt. Demetrius makes that clear when he comments in an aside, ‘Chiron, we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound, / But hope to pluck a dainty doe to the ground’ (2.1.25–6), indicating that their anticipated quarry is Lavinia. In King Henry V’s memorable speech in H5 to encourage his troops outside Harfleur, he suggests they behave like tigers, ‘set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide’ and ‘show us here / The mettle of your pasture’ (3.1.6, 15, 26–7); he concludes, ‘I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, / Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot. / Follow your spirit, and upon this charge / Cry “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” ’ (3.1.31–4). The speech reflects the King’s skill at motivating his men: it is inspiring, even cheerful, translating battle-lust into eagerness for prey appropriate to a hunt (which was itself often considered good martial training); but its beastly comparisons hint at the brutalizing effects of war. Rousing a company to the hunt, Belarius shouts, ‘Hark, the game is roused’ (CYM 3.3.98), and ‘[t]he game is up’ (3.3.107). Northumberland uses the idea metaphorically when he cautions the loose-tongued conspirator Hotspur in 1H4, ‘ Before the game is afoot thou still let’st slip’ (1.3.273). KR geld, gelding. (A) To geld an animal is to castrate it; this verb, and the noun gelded, can refer generally to all creatures, while a gelding is specifically a castrated male horse. (B) While there are equine geldings referenced in the plays, as when Gadshill asks the carrier to give him ‘thy lantern to see my gelding in the stable’ and later has the ostler 194

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bring him the same animal (1H4 2.1. 33–4, 95), most uses of gelding are metaphorical instances of castration. Ross sympathizes with Bolingbroke, who has been exiled by King Richard, and is ‘[b]ereft and gelded of his patrimony’ (R2 2.1.237). In both LLL and 2H6, it is the nation that is so emasculated: the King of Navarre refers to Aquitaine as ‘gelded’ because of the enormous debts it owes France (LLL 2.1.148), while Cade accuses Lord Saye of having ‘gelded the commonwealth and made it an eunuch’ (2H6 4.2.154–5). Of course, he also accuses Saye of speaking French and so being a traitor, an equally absurd claim. However, the convergence of the figurative and animalhusbandry connotations of the term emerges when Escalus quizzes Pompey about his ‘trade’ as a bawd. Pompey responds that the job would be lawful if the law would just allow it, and asks whether Escalus means ‘to geld and splay all the youth of the city’ (MM 2.1.220–1). Pompey’s position seems an implicit critique of attempts to naturalize human laws, revealing his assumption that such laws are in conflict with natural behaviours, and are easily changed back and forth (indeed, Angelo enforces laws long ignored). But in his imagery of gelding and spaying, interventions associated with breeding animals rather than with human self-restraint, Pompey also subtly affirms the need for law given his view that human beings are essentially beasts driven by fleshly desires. Of course, the Duke’s and Angelo’s specific focus on sexual error in Vienna is inspired by their tendency to think of human beings in terms of population control, which can have an equally bestializing effect. Bolt, another bawd in PER , likewise raises the spectre of animal gelding when he grumbles ‘let me be gelded like a spaniel’ (4.5.129) because Marina’s ‘peevish chastity’ is likely to bankrupt the brothel in which she is kept (4.5.127). He compares a reduction in business to suffering castration like a pet dog. Since Bolt is threatening to have Marina sexually violated, his self-characterization is ironic by early modern standards, which would see his occupation as already a sign of his animal-like degradation and brutality. Antigonus is so outraged at the accusations against Hermione that he defends her chastity to Leontes by threatening to have his three daughters gelded if she is proven false: I’ll geld ’em all. Fourteen they shall not see, To bring false generations. They are co-heirs, And I had rather glib myself than they Should not produce fair issue. (WT 2.1.147–50) The idea of castrating – actually killing – three girls should their queen have been shown to stray sexually emphasizes the absurdity of Leontes’ suspicion. But it also hints at the brutality of a system that cannot credit women with bodily self-control or trust their word when they face such unsubstantiated fantasies, but leaves them at the mercy of men’s profound sexual anxiety. It is not only the women who suffer, given that Antigonus imagines gelding (glibbing) himself as well. (C) Iyengar discusses the medical aspects of gelding (2011: 206). KR 195

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glow-worm. (A) The female of a species of beetle (Lampyris noctiluca) that emits a greenish light from her underside to attract males. The wingless, soft-bodied female looks more like a larva than a beetle, hence the name ‘glow-worm’. (B) Two Shakespearean references allude to the feebleness of the glow-worm’s light. It is overcome by the rising sun, the Ghost in HAM remarks, as he bids Hamlet farewell: ‘The glow-worm shows the matin to be near / And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire’ (1.5.89–90). Unlike his father’s, Pericles modestly says, his own light is too feeble to be seen in the day: I am ‘like a glow-worm in the night, / The which hath fire in darkness, none in light’ (PER 2.3.42–3). In Shakespeare’s comedies, glow-worms, as almost magical creatures of the night, are associated with fairies or the uncanny. Titania orders her fairies to collect wax from bees’ thighs to make ‘night-tapers’ for Bottom, ‘[a]nd light them at the fiery glowworms’ eyes’ (MND 3.1.163, 164). The joke may be that audiences would expect the fairies to light their tapers at a glow-worm’s bottom. Pretending to be fairies in WIV , Evans and his cohorts endeavour to teach Falstaff a lesson. Evans enjoins the others, ‘lock hand in hand, yourselves in order set; / And twenty glow-worms shall our lanterns be / To guide our measure round about the tree’ (5.5.77–9). In her lengthy, metaphor-rich description of the boar – designed to dissuade Adonis from hunting it – Venus provides a supernatural touch when she warns that its ‘eyes like glow-worms shine when he doth fret’ (VEN 621). (C) Pliny identifies the glow-worm as a kind of beetle, shining at night due to the colour of its ‘sides and loins’ (1940: 493 [11.34]). Moffet’s entry makes it clear that he has closely observed glow-worms, which inspire him to eloquence: ‘Those parts that are white do glitter in the dark with a wonderful splendor, representing terrestrial stars: insomuch that they may seem to contend with candle or moon light’ (Topsell 1658: 976). Their light expires with their lives, he adds. In The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe manages to compare the artificial eyes of the ostrich-trappings of Lord Henry Howard’s horse to ‘a glow-worm in a bush by night, glistering through the leaves and briars’ (1985: 317). Bosola in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi confirms the Ghost’s and Pericles’ description of the glow-worm’s ‘uneffectual fire’. Torturing the Duchess before he kills her, Bosola declares, ‘Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright, / But looked to near have neither heat nor light’ (2009: 4.2.139–40), a rhyme that Webster also uses in The White Devil (2021: 5.1.39–40). ‘Wondrous things are promised from the Glow-worme’, observes Browne in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), but ‘when they are dead they shine not’ (1981: 1.283). Scoular (1965: 103–8) discusses the representation of glow-worms in several early modern writers. E. Brown (2006b: 36) considers the effect of staging actual glowworms in MND and WIV . KE gnat. (A) A general name for any of several species of small biting or stinging flies belonging to the suborder Nematocera, which also includes the family Culicidae, which contains mosquitoes. (B) In Shakespeare’s works the gnat is a byword for that which is tiny and insignificant. In her anguish, Lucrece seems to predict that Tarquin’s crime will be discovered: ‘Gnats 196

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are unnoted wheresoe’er they fly, / But eagles gazed upon with every eye’ (LUC 1014– 15). Her point is that while the actions of lesser mortals are disregarded, those of great ones attract universal attention. King Simonides in PER utters a related sentiment about hospitality: ‘Princes in this should live like gods above, / Who freely give to everyone that come to honour them, / And princes not doing so are like to gnats, / Which make a sound, but killed are wondered at’ (2.3.58–61). Pretending to offer hospitality, rather than genuinely offering it, will be found out, an aphorism startlingly demonstrated by Simonides’s subsequent attempt to murder Pericles. In CYM , Innogen reproaches Pisanio for not watching Posthumus’s ship sail away until it has completely disappeared from sight. If I had been at the shore, she declares, I would have ‘followed him till he had melted from / The smallness of a gnat to air’ (1.3.20–1). In this case, the tiny gnat, freighted with Innogen’s love for her husband, signifies something of inestimable value. In several of the plays, gnats are figured as trivial and superficial, demonstrated by their love of fair weather. When he angrily accuses Dromio of being merry, Antipholus of Syracuse warns his servant to pay better attention to his master’s moods: ‘When the sun shines let foolish gnats make sport, / But creep in crannies when he hides his beams’ (ERR 2.2.30–1). Gnats are metaphors for the fickle common people in 3H6, when the dying Clifford foresees that they will now desert King Henry and embrace his Yorkist enemies: ‘The common people swarm like summer flies, / And whither fly the gnats but to the sun? And who shines now but Henry’s enemies?’ (2.6.8–10). Tamora also disparages the common people as gnats to be ignored, when she chides Saturninus for fearing that the citizens will reject him in favour of Lucius. ‘King’, she says to him, ‘be thy thoughts imperious like thy name. / Is the sun dimmed, that gnats do fly in it?’ (TIT 4.4.80–1). In LLL , the King of Navarre, who has reproached his courtiers for being foolish enough to fall in love, has himself fallen in love, and Berowne taunts him for thus surrendering to passion: ‘O me, with what strict patience have I sat, / To see a king transformed to a gnat! / To see great Hercules whipping a gig, / And profound Solomon to tune a jig’ (4.3.162–5). Monarchs and gnats – lying at the farthest extremes of creation – are juxtaposed again in ANT when Cleopatra protests her love for Antony. If my heart is really cold toward you, she says, then let it engender a hail storm that will kill me so that I and my people, unremembered, will ‘[l]ie graveless, till the flies and gnats of Nile / Have buried them for prey,’ that is, until devouring flies and gnats have completely covered the corpses (3.13.171–2). Her protestation gains its power in the context of the Egyptian cult of the dead, embodied in the tombs of the pharaohs. As is often the case with tiny creatures in Shakespeare’s works, the gnat’s insignificance is poetically useful. In JN , the imprisoned Arthur begs Hubert not to put out his eyes. He prays for Hubert to feel but a tiny ‘annoyance’ in his own eyes, whether from ‘a mote [. . .] / A grain, a dust, a gnat, a wandering hair’ (4.1.93, 91–2), to make him understand the full horror of the torture he intends. The gnat plays a surprising part in a declaration of love in MV , when Bassanio, having chosen the lead casket, 197

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opens it to find Portia’s portrait inside. Her hair, he says, has been depicted by a painter who has played ‘the spider and hath woven / A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men / Faster than gnats in cobwebs’ (MV 3.2.121–3). Mercutio elevates the ‘small greycoated gnat’ to a position of eminence as Queen Mab’s ‘wagoner’, transforming the gnat’s dull, undistinguished colour into livery fit for a fairy queen’s service (ROM 1.4.67). (C) The gnat’s reputation for insignificance is due in part to a familiar verse in the Bible, when Jesus reproves the Pharisees for mistaking what does not matter for what does, calling them ‘blinde guides, which strain out a gnatte, and swallow a camel’ (Mt. 23.24, GNV). Culex, a mock-heroic poem attributed to Virgil in Shakespeare’s day, was adapted and translated by Edmund Spenser and published in 1591 as ‘Virgil’s Gnat’ (1960: 172–94). The idea of the poem is to put on display the full panoply of epic resources for its trivial subject. Moffet speaks with great respect of the midge, calling it a kind of gnat. He notes in particular the aerial formations of gnats: ‘like expert and well trained souldiers, [they] always march in an exact pyramidal Figure [. . .] the which if you rout with a fly-flap [. . .] they will instantly rally again’ (Topsell 1628: 953). Just as he admires their collective formations, so he admires ‘[t]he structure or make of the [individual] Gnat’ (952). Hooke reveals this complex ‘structure’ in his illustration ‘[o]f the tuft’d or Brush-horn’d Gnat’ as viewed under a microscope (1665: fig. 28, facing 193). The Renaissance fascination with ‘Hercules distaff’ – the hero during the period in which he was punished by having to perform women’s work – is the context in which several scholars discuss the King of Navarre’s transformation into a metaphorical gnat in LLL . See Westlund (1967), Montrose (1977), Shulman (1983) and E. Brown (2003: 30–1). KE goat. (A) The domestic goat (Capra aegagrus hircus) is a member of the family Bovidae, which includes cattle and sheep. Females are does or nannies; males are bucks, and castrated males are wethers. Goats have provided milk, meat and skins since ancient times. The most salient quality of the goat in early modern lore is its lustfulness: Topsell says, ‘There is no beast that is more prone and given to lust then [sic] is a Goat, for he joyneth in copulation before all other beasts’ (meaning goats are fertile and can copulate at an early age; 1658: 181). Indeed, Topsell marvels that goats are unlike other animals in that they will mate with those closely related to themselves and even with human women (181–2). Goats have a loud braying voice; the male sports long horns, and both sexes have a pungent odour and have beards or wattles. They are thus often deployed in insults that reflect sexual promiscuity, age (because of the beard) and offensive odours. (B) Falstaff calls Evans, the Welsh parson, a ‘Welsh goat’ (WIV 5.5.136), associating the mountainous landscape of Wales with goats, and goats in turn with Evans’ costume – he is dressed as a satyr, a drunken, lustful god of the woodland usually depicted with goats’ ears, horns and hooves. Falstaff’s comment is part of a general disparagement of 198

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the Welsh as backward and crude. Likewise, when Pistol finds a French soldier on the battlefield in H5, he calls the man a ‘damned and luxurious mountain goat’ (4.4.19), branding the foreigner an animal, but one that represents English beliefs about the French as lascivious and, as a consequence, most likely suffering from venereal disease. Pistol engages in another slanging match with Fluellen, also a Welshman, that involves foul breath, leeks and goats: Pistol complains at the ‘smell of leek’, to which Fluellen responds he should ‘eat it’ (5.1.21, 27). Pistol retorts, ‘Not for Cadwallader and all his goats’ (5.1.28), referring to an ancient Welsh king, but implying he was merely a goatherder. In return, Fluellen gives him a ‘goat’ or strikes him for the insult (5.1.30). The association of Wales with goats also turns up in 1H4, where Glendower happily embraces the image of his country as a place identified with mountains and goats. Trying to impress on his co-conspirators his mystical origins, he claims that when he was born ‘The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, / The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds / Were strangely clamorous’ (3.1.37–9). Goats’ sexual behaviour can also be a sign of virility: in 1H4, Vernon compares the English forces to the animal, calling them ‘Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls’ (4.1.102). In general, however, goats are repugnant, fulfilling Topsell’s description of their behaviour. Coriolanus spurns Sicinius, saying, ‘Hence, old goat’ and threatens him as a ‘rotten thing’ whose bones Coriolanus will shake out of his clothing (COR 3.1.177–9). Stench and age coincide here, suggesting that an old person will be ‘rotten’ or decayed. In OTH the much older Moor and the young Venetian Desdemona are described with references to goats in ways that knit together issues of age, lust and race. Othello at first denies he will be jealous when Iago begins to vex him, saying instead he will immediately act if he suspects his wife: ‘No: to be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved. Exchange me for a goat / When I shall turn the business of my soul / To such exsufflicate and blown surmises’ (3.3.182–5). At first, Othello resists the creeping poison of Iago’s insinuations, maintaining his status as a mature, confident general. But having married a younger, white noblewoman, Othello cannot be unaware of his difference from her in both age and race. Iago calls Othello a ‘black ram’ in Act 1 (1.1.87), articulating that difference in terms of both animality and bestial sexuality; when Othello borrows the same language, in this instance the idea that he might be a goat, he hints at how much Iago has succeeded in warping his sense of self – the goat reference is a stock early modern image for the fear of sexual betrayal, given its horns, but it also hints at Othello’s sense of how easy slippage is that would shift him from human to animal status. Iago capitalizes on the moment later when he refers to women who stray sexually as being ‘prime as goats, as hot as monkeys’ (3.3.406). After he strikes Desdemona in front of Venice’s horrified emissary Lodovico, Othello mutters, ‘Goats and monkeys!’ before leaving the scene (4.1.263). Iago’s venom has done its work: Othello is made an abject brute, a sacrificial goat in Iago’s plot, while Desdemona is in his mind transformed into a killable non-human. Edmund condemns his father for blaming the stars for the chaos of Lear’s actions regarding his daughters, saying ‘whoremaster man’ should not ‘lay his goatish disposition 199

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on the charge of a star’ (LR 1.2.127–8), while Arviragus blames himself for naïvete when he says he ‘scarce ever looked on blood / But that of coward hares, hot goats, and venison’ (CYM 4.4.36–7). And it is not an accident that Audrey in AYL is a simple goatherder: while AR3 notes her invention by Shakespeare as ‘establish[ing] an authentic working environment’ in Arden (148), Audrey’s role as the target of Touchstone’s humour is wrapped up in the question of her foulness and sluttishness (3.3.30–8). This makes her goats, which Touchstone promises to fetch for her (3.3.1–2), the material incarnation of Audrey’s main purpose (in Touchstone’s mind, anyway) as an easy sexual target. (C) Outland (2011) analyses Falstaff’s goat insult as part of the plays’ use of dialect to explore the place of cultural outsiders and their contribution to strengthening community ties. Kolin (2007) discusses the biblical context for Othello’s outburst in OTH Act 3 and other goat and ram references in the play, linking them to religious references to the scapegoat, animal sacrifice, goatish folly and deviltry. Vienne-Guerrin (2016) covers the use of goat as an insult (284–5). KR goose, geese; barnacle. (A) Any bird of the water fowl family Anatidae. Geese may be wild or domesticated; male geese are called ganders, infants are goslings. Wild geese were a common target of the hunt, but geese were also raised for domestic use – common species descend from the Asian greylag goose (Anser anser) and were first tamed several thousand years ago. Because of their aggressive defence and loud calls when their territory is invaded, geese traditionally served as property alarms and guards; ‘The goose keeps careful watch,’ remarks Pliny (10: 16.51 [1940: 325]). Over time, selective breeding created the all-white goose commonly imagined as the primary domesticated variety. Goose feathers were considered a luxury commodity in the pre-modern world (as now to some extent), especially useful in filling items of bedding, while goose fat, flesh and eggs were staples of English diets. The barnacle goose (Branta leucopsis) was believed to hatch either from trees, or from the barnacles (stalked or ‘gooseneck’ barnacles) on ships’ hulls. Barnacle geese were sometimes classified as fish, not fowl. (B) The only glancing reference in the plays to the barnacle goose is Caliban’s equivocal comment in TMP that he fears ‘We shall lose our time, / And all be turned to barnacles’ (4.1.247–8). The connection to barnacle geese in this instance seems derived from Trinculo’s advice that Caliban ‘put some lime upon your fingers’ (4.1.245–6), or in other words make his fingers sticky with birdlime to help the clowns steal the clothing Ariel has left to tempt them. Birdlime was often used to catch birds, albeit those much smaller than geese. Vaughan and Vaughan also note that barnacle geese were considered ‘strange or stupid’ creatures (282, n. 248), probably because of the birds’ practice of nesting high on cliff faces to avoid predators: since geese do not carry food to their young like some avian species, barnacle goslings have to be encouraged to plummet from their nests in order to get to food in ponds or on land at the cliff base; this leads to goslings ending up injured or easy prey and must have ensured that the species struck early moderns as foolhardy. Elsewhere in the play, Stephano notes that Trinculo (who 200

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has survived the shipwreck) ‘canst swim like a duck, [but . . .] art made like a goose’ (2.2.128–9), which makes Trinculo something of a hybrid figure not unlike Caliban. In MND , geese and fox serve as metaphors for Snug’s Lion, which is clearly lacking in valour and judgement given his ‘gentle’ self-revelation to his audience, ‘know that I, as Snug the joiner, am / No lion fell’ (5.1.217–22): Lysander: Theseus: Demetrius:

Theseus:

This Lion is a very fox for his valour. True, and a goose for his discretion. Not so, my lord. For his valour cannot carry his discretion, and the fox carries the goose. His discretion, I am sure, cannot carry his valour, for the goose carries not the fox. (5.1.227–32)

This exchange, while marking the easy camaraderie of the noble characters at the mechanicals’ play, also carries serious overtones, given its echoes of Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), which advises the good ruler to combine the qualities of the fox and the lion (2009: 69–70). For Machiavelli, a great prince should be as willing to wage war as a lion, but strategically clever and even deceptive like the fox. Theseus suggests that Snug has supplanted the fox’s wiliness with ‘discretion’, that is fear of offending, while announcing that neither does he have the courage of the lion. On the one hand, Theseus appears to restore a kind of natural order in his comments by clarifying which animal can physically carry another. He shows a degree of tolerance for the very bad play he watches, and affirms that Snug is indeed a foolish goose. At the same time, Snug’s antiMachiavellian lack of skill at deception might have appealed to audiences for whom the ideas of the Italian political philosopher were repellent. In a similar exchange in LLL , Moth and Armado create a kind of fable between them revolving around a fox, an ape and a humble-bee who require a goose to make them an even number (and so not quarrelsome). Moth turns Armado into a goose by making him embrace Moth’s own ‘l’envoy’ (the concluding couplet, a play on Armado’s pedantic language) to the fable by repeating it – ‘A good l’envoy, ending in the goose’ gloats Moth (3.1.96). Costard notes Moth’s trick: ‘The boy hath sold him a bargain, a goose, that’s flat’ (3.1.98), remarking on Armado’s stupidity. Woodhuysen suggests (AR3: 166, n. 86–9) that this scene also plays with the idea that a goose is a prostitute. Yet another comic exchange involving a goose occurs in ROM between Romeo and Mercutio. It begins with Mercutio’s claim that Romeo has more wit to run ‘the wild goose chase’ because he has more of the wild goose in him (2.4.70). A wild goose chase would have been a fool’s errand, or possibly an actual horse race in which one rider leads another on the path of his choice. However, since women were traditionally depicted as geese, Mercutio hints that Romeo is too tempted by feminine charms. Their dialogue soon devolves entirely into sexual innuendo, with Romeo saying Mercutio ‘wast never with me for anything, when thou wast not there for the goose’ (2.4.74–5), or 201

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in other words, Mercutio himself is only ever interested in pursuing women. The remaining jokes shift to the idea of the goose as a sweetly-sauced meat, and thus a metaphor for the biting/bitter nature of wit: Romeo: Mercutio: Romeo: Meructio: Romeo:

Nay, good goose, bite not. Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting, it is a most sharp sauce. And is it not then well served in to a sweet goose? O here’s a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad. I stretch it out for that word ‘broad’ which, added to the goose, proves thee far and wide – a broad goose. (2.4.77–84)

Mercutio is trying to distract Romeo from his love-lorn demeanour and restore him to male fellowship instead – as he says, isn’t it better to be ‘sociable’ than to be ‘groaning’ for love (2.4.86, 85)? For Mercutio that means treating women like silly geese and resisting a wild goose chase after their favours; Romeo in turn affectionately ends up calling Mercutio a silly (‘broad’) goose. The result is not only that Romeo satisfies Mercutio by joining him in wordplay: he also allows Mercutio to substitute for the imagined goose that Mercutio says Romeo chases, adding to the scene’s homosocial and even homoerotic tone. The two touch on a number of proverbs referencing geese, including ‘good goose, bite not’ (Tilley 1950: G349) and ‘sweet meat must have sour sauce’ (Tilley 1950: M839). The sexual connotations of ‘goose’ derive from women’s general association with geese; more specifically, however, prostitutes who haunted the neighbourhood of the Bishop of Winchester’s palace were called Winchester geese (see ROM AR3: 215, n. 73). The venereal disease those prostitutes passed along to their clients could also be called the Winchester goose (see 1H6 AR3: 146, n. 53; Tilley 1950: G366). It is this last usage that undergirds Gloucester’s allusion in 1H6 to the Bishop of Winchester as a ‘Winchester goose’ (1.3.53) and Pandarus’s final words in TRO that he fears ‘some galled goose of Winchester’ among the audience who will ‘hiss’ at him, leaving him in the meantime to ‘sweat and seek about for eases / And at that time bequeath you my diseases’ (5.11.54–6). A goose’s connection to sexual license intersects with the image of a baby goose’s youth and fragility when the Bawd in PER exclaims to Marina, who is trapped in a brothel and about to be sold as a prostitute, ‘Marry, whip the gosling!’ (4.2.78). Coriolanus continues the pattern of using geese to reflect stupidity, cowardice and triviality, calling the plebeians of Rome ‘[y]ou souls of geese’ (COR 1.4.35); yet by the play’s conclusion, it is he who becomes a foolish gosling, despite his assertion to Aufidius that he would never do so – ‘I’ll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct’ (5.3.34–5). Mere moments later, in fact, the very instinct that moves him emotionally as 202

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a son, father and husband causes him to capitulate to the women and betray the Volsces, thereby guaranteeing his own destruction. In MAC , the triviality of geese is what is at stake when the raging Macbeth asks the servant who has come to tell him the English army has arrived ‘Where got’st thou that goose-look?’ (5.3.12). Either the servant appears white as a goose, or he is shocked by the terrible sight of the approaching forces into an expression of stupidity, or both. Macbeth then pretends to misunderstand the boy’s announcement, ‘There is ten thousand’, replying ‘Geese, villain?’ (5.3.13). Macbeth seems to reassure himself that he will surely triumph over an insignificant enemy, one no more frightening than a gaggle of geese, despite the growing weight of evidence that he is doomed. Geese were easily kept at home by small householders or maintained on a common by even the more impoverished, as is registered in an anonymous seventeenth-century folk poem that waxes critical of enclosure’s ‘theft’ of land: ‘The law locks up the man or woman / Who steals the goose off the common /But leaves the greater villain loose / Who steals the common from the goose’ (see Boyle 2003: 33). Stealing geese ranked among the more common crimes referenced in the plays: Lance complains that to save the animal from being killed he has ‘stood on the pillory’ for geese that his dog Crab has stolen (TGV 4.4.31), and Slender exposes rather more of his family background than is judicious when he urges Shallow to tell the story of his father stealing geese from a pen (WIV 3.4.40–1). While not quite on a level with Falstaff’s poaching, Slender’s story has just the whiff of corruption about it – would Justice Shallow, after all, have actually prosecuted the father or would he have engineered his release? The capacity of geese to fly in formation is again associated with Shallow when Falstaff describes him and his followers flocking together ‘in consent like so many wild geese’ (2H4 5.1.68–9). And the group of mechanicals in MND are likewise compared to wild geese that flee the transformed Bottom with his ass’s head as they would a ‘creeping fowler’ (3.2.20). Portia in MV refers to the goose’s cackling when she returns from the trial in Venice to her home in Belmont: she notes that the pleasures of music are dependent upon circumstance, since The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended; and, I think, The nightingale, if she should sing by day When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by season seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection. (5.1.102–8) Portia’s witty play on the goose’s presence here (the joking repetition of season/seasoned invokes both the idea of a season for all things and the fate of a bird usually destined for the dinner table) lets the bird disrupt her serious meditation on musical harmony in much the same way a goose’s cackling would disrupt the song of a nightingale. 203

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(C) Harting (1965) gives the source of the ‘wild goose chase’ as a ‘reckless horse race’ in which the leader compelled the other to follow his path (200); he deals with the Barnacle Goose at length (246–52). Petit (1960) traces the possible allegorical associations in Moth’s fable from LLL . Bonheim (1972) addresses the sexual connotations of the ‘Winchester Goose’; Dent (1972) also largely meditates on the origins of the ‘Winchester goose’ as a reference to syphilis, particularly in 1H6 and TRO . Walker (2003: 167–70) associates goose-stealing with women’s involvement in domestic crime. Mason (2009) deals extensively with the mythic dimensions of the barnacle goose’s origins. Iyengar (2011) notes that a goose of Winchester was another name for a plague bubo (206). Vienne-Guerrin discusses goose as an insult (281–3). KR Gorgon. (A) One of three mythical sisters – Stheno, Euryale and Medusa – endowed with tusks, wings, large, staring eyes and serpents around their waists; the serpents’ role as hair was added in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book IV. The Gorgons (the name comes from the Greek word for terrifying) turned anyone who gazed on them to stone. They were omnipresent in classical literature, especially in versions of the story of Perseus, who successfully killed Medusa, the only mortal Gorgon, by cutting off her head while looking at her in a mirror (or via a polished shield in some versions of the tale). (B) Macduff invokes the monsters when he discovers the murdered King Duncan: he is nearly paralyzed by the sight: ‘Oh horror, horror, horror. / Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee,’ and tells Lennox, ‘Approach the chamber, and destroy your sight / With a new Gorgon’ (MAC 2.3.63–4, 71–2). Since Macduff will ultimately slaughter Macbeth, his choice of imagery is significant, hinting that he is Perseus to Macbeth’s Medusa. The gender inversion that makes Macbeth a female Gorgon resonates with Lady Macbeth’s early worry that her husband is too ‘full o’th’ milk of human kindness’ (with the attendant implication that he is not man enough) to commit the crime (1.5.17), but replaces that hint of feminization with full-bore monstrosity. Cleopatra also seizes on the Gorgon to articulate her confusion at the news of Antony’s marriage to Octavia: ‘Though he be painted one way like a Gorgon, / The other way’s a Mars’ (ANT 2.5.116–17). Cleopatra’s chaotic feelings result in a rush of conflicting instructions and comments, or in other words a kind of paralysis compatible with the effect of a Gorgon; and, as in MAC , Antony’s masculinity is here called into question as it is elsewhere in the play because of his indulgent, doting love for the Egyptian queen, which makes him less of a Mars or warlike man. (C) Tassi (2013) details the traces of the Medusa myth, with its conjunction of eros and violence, in MAC . Wigginton (1980) examines the likely sources for the Gorgon referred to in ANT that imply gender confusion and the dehumanizing effects of rage and wrath. KR 204

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grasshopper, locust. (A) Insects of the order Orthoptera. Locusts (from the Latin locusta, or grasshopper) are actually grasshoppers that are normally inoffensive and solitary, but given certain environmental conditions that stimulate the production of serotonin in their nervous systems, swarm and migrate. They even change physically to a yellow or brown colouration, becoming stronger and more mobile – and thus more destructive. Locusts are thus seen as significant pests: locusts’ swarms are described as a plague well before – and long after – their appearance in Exodus where they feature in the punishment of Pharaoh for refusing to allow Moses and his people to leave (10.4–6). (B) In ROM , Mercutio imagines Mab’s chariot made of the parts of insects, including ‘grasshoppers’ wings’ that fashion the ‘cover’ of her carriage (1.4.63). The reference to ‘locusts’ in OTH is to the carob, the bean of the locust tree: chiding Rodrigo for being depressed at not being able to have Desdemona, Iago tells him that Othello will fall quickly out of love with her – ‘The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as acerb as cologuintida’ (1.3.348–50). The insect and the carob bean, however, have a shared history: the tree’s name derives from the belief that the locusts on which John the Baptist subsisted (Mk 1.6; Mt. 3.4) were actually carob pods. Locusts and grasshoppers, however, are good sources of protein, so John may well have simply eaten the insect. A Frenchman in E3 defends his concern over the English forces by alluding to the fable of the grasshopper and the ant (Perry Index 373): ‘so the grasshopper doth spend the time / In mirthful jollity till winter come, / And then too late he would redeem his time / When frozen cold hath nipped his careless head’ (5.16–19). KR greyhound. (A) A type of dog bred for speed primarily to hunt the hare, although they are also used in chasing other fast prey. Greyhounds are slender dogs associated often with wealth and nobility because of their specialized utility and physical refinement. Caius (1576) tells the tale of King Richard II’s greyhound who fawned on the Duke of Lancaster as much as his master, which Caius attributes to the animal’s possible foreknowledge of the Duke’s ascension to the throne (10), crediting the breed with intuitions about royal character. Topsell (1658) recounts the story of a greyhound presented to Alexander that attacked a lion and held on so determinedly that his body had to be cut from his head to end the bout (115), and otherwise emphasizes the breed’s ferocity, claiming they will not ‘run after every trifling Beast’ (117) but require worthier game to chase. (B) Greyhounds serve as a marker of Sly’s apparent newfound noble status in SHR , where one of the Lord’s servants tell him ‘thy greyhounds are as swift / As breathed stags – ay, fleeter than the roe’ (Ind. 2.45–6), and they serve as a noble gift in TIM from a lord hoping to garner Timon’s favour (1.2.191–2). Shallow mentions Master Page’s ‘fallow greyhound’ (a fawn-coloured dog) that was outrun at a hunting competition, illustrating the animal’s use in sport (WIV 1.1.82). Greyhounds’ remarkable speed provides Benedick with an image to flatter Margaret in ADO : ‘Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound’s mouth, it catches’ (5.2.11–12). The idea of a quick tongue being comparable 205

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to a swift greyhound appears again in LLL at the Pageant of the Nine Worthies when Armado asks Longaville to ‘rein in thy tongue’, provoking Longaville and Dumaine to joke that Longaville would rather ‘give it the rein’ because it runs against Hector (one of the heroes in Armado’s performance) who is ‘a greyhound’ (5.2.653–6). In other words, Longaville and Dumaine think that mocking Armado’s Hector is just fine, since Hector was supposed to be a very fast runner – and of course, because in continuing to joke freely they liven up the awful pageant. In his famous speech at Harfleur, King Henry V compares his troops to ‘greyhounds in the slips, / Straining upon the start’ (H5 3.1.31–2). References to the greyhound’s ‘fawning’ manner align the breed with other cooperative and gentler dogs, as when Hotspur scornfully recalls Bolingbroke’s treatment of him at ‘Berkeley’ Castle (pronounced ‘Barkly’, fostering a resonance between place and animal): ‘Why, what a candy deal of courtesy / This fawning greyhound then did proffer me!’ (1.3.248–9). For Tranio in SHR , the greyhound provides an opportunity to comment on the nature of service when he tells Petruccio, ‘O sir, Lucentio slipped me like his greyhound, / Which runs himself and catches for his master’ (5.2.53–4). Coriolanus credits his fellow Roman Titus Lartius with the kind of mastery he himself admires after the city of Coriolus is won, telling Cominius that Lartius ‘Hold[s] Corioles in the name of Rome, / Even like a fawning greyhound in the leash, / To let him slip at will’ (COR 1.6.37–9). The image not only sets up Coriolanus’s subsequent characterization of the common soldiers as mice fleeing a cat (1.6.421–44), but also the transitoriness of Rome’s military successes in general. Coriolanus’s own status is not more permanent, since he is made a hero only to be rejected as a tyrant and eventually inspired to betray Rome. Finally, the greyhound appears in Macbeth’s list of dogs who have specific duties when he chides the murderers he employs for claiming simply that they are ‘men’ (MAC 3.1.93–6). For Macbeth, ‘man’ like ‘dog’ is too broad a designation to be useful in determining a man’s nature. KR griffin, gripe. (A) A mythical beast with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle, often depicted hoarding gold or treasure. The griffin is described in classical sources like Herodotus and Pliny, and in subsequent literature was belligerent, prideful, sometimes noble but always fearsome. By the Middle Ages, however, it could also be associated with Christian faith – the treasure it guarded was translated into a divine one, or, as in Dante’s Purgatorio, its dual nature was used to express the conjunction of human and divine in Christ (29: 108; 1970: 225). Griffins are used frequently in heraldry, expressing both physical and moral ferocity. (B) Tarquin is described as a ‘gripe’ (from the Latin gryphus or ‘curved’, describing the eagle’s beak) with a ‘foul appetite’ when he assaults Lucrece, ‘the picture of pure piety, / Like a white hind under the gripe’s sharp claws’ (LUC 542–6); in this case, Tarquin’s greed and violence align with the griffin’s negative associations, while Lucrece is identified with purity and innocence. When Helena wants to emphasize the unnatural topsy-turviness of her pursuit of Demetrius, she turns to the image of a dove 206

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pursuing a griffin (MND 2.1.232). Hotspur mentions the mythic griffin among the creatures that populate Owen Glendower’s conversations, ‘a dragon and a finless fish, / A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven’ (1H4 3.1.147–8). Hotspur’s scepticism would have put him in good company: while many writers in Shakespeare’s time accepted the existence of griffins for ideological or literary purposes, by the midseventeenth century Thomas Browne (1646) could confidently dismiss the griffin as an impossible hybrid (1: 199), not to be found in nature. KR Grimalkin. (Grimmalkin, graymalkin). A term probably derived from the colour grey and ‘malkin’ meaning ‘mop’ or poor woman (OED ). The term can be used as the general name for a cat or as the proper name of a specific (female) cat, or for a crone. Women, especially old women or those suspected of witchcraft, were associated with cats as companions or familiars – thus cats and women could be given the same name. Baldwin’s protagonist in his 1570 novel Beware the Cat takes a potion to understand the speech of cats and hears the tale of how Grimalkin, the head of all Irish cats, was killed by a soldier’s spear; the soldier was in turn killed by his own kitten in revenge (1988: 20) giving the name another dimension associated with violence and subversion. Shakespeare uses the name only once, when one of the witches of MAC invokes Grimalkin as her familiar, ‘I come, Gray-Malkin’ (1.1.8). KR grub. (A) A term that technically denotes the larva of a beetle or other insect but may also refer more generally to a maggot, a caterpillar or even a worm. (B) Mercutio describes Queen Mab’s chariot as ‘an empty hazelnut / Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, / Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers’ (ROM 1.4.5– 61). Both joiners (i.e., carpenters) and grubs pierce hard material with holes, an activity represented here as productive. In the last act of the play, however, grubs are associated with decay. When Friar Laurence arrives at the Capulets’ tomb, he asks Balthasar, ‘What torch is yond that vainly lends his light / To grubs and eyeless skulls?’ (5.3.125–6). His point is that neither grubs nor skulls need light; grubs do their work in the darkness of the grave, and skulls cannot see. In COR , horrified at Coriolanus’s apparent determination to attack Rome with the Volcian army, Sicinius asks, ‘Is’t possible that so short a time can alter the condition of a man?’ (5.4.9–10). Menenius offers a natural analogy in reply: ‘There is a differency between a grub and a butterfly; yet your butterfly was a grub. This Martius is grown from man to dragon. He has wings; he’s more than a creeping thing’ (5.4.11–14). Even a creature confined to the dirt may metamorphose into something altogether more powerful, dangerous and high-flying. The earthbound status of the grub suggests that its name is related to the verb, ‘to grub’, to dig in the ground in order to uproot. The verb is represented only once, albeit memorably, in Shakespeare’s plays. In H8, when he hears that Anne Bullen (Boleyn) is in labour, Lord Gardiner hopes that the child will survive and that Henry will now discard the mother. His opinion is 207

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expressed in a brutal metaphor befitting his name: ‘The fruit she goes with / I pray for heartily, that it may find / Good time, and live. But, for the stock, [. . .] / I wish it grubbed up now’ (5.1.20–3). (C) Like maggots, grubs were thought to be produced by spontaneous generation. A passage in The Iliad, Book 7, in which the mother of Achilles worries that flies will settle on the body of Patroclus and breed grubs, led Francesco Redi (1626–98) to perform experiments that eventually disproved the theory of spontaneous generation (H. Harris 2002: 10–17). McDowell (2013: 52–3), writing about London’s Grub Street, home of hack writers in the eighteenth century, makes a connection between literary ‘ephemera’ and the indefinite, demeaning term ‘grub’, arguing in favour of historicizing the classifications we have inherited from the past. KE gudgeon. The common name for any small freshwater fish used as bait. The fish is referenced only once, in MV , when Gratiano replies to Antonio’s criticism of his demeanour. Gratiano advises Antonio, who is usually sad and serious, that he should not use his inclination to melancholy as a means for gaining a reputation for wisdom: ‘But fish not with this melancholy bait / For this fool gudgeon, this opinion’ (1.1.101–2). The structure of the sentence here is a bit obscure: if ‘melancholy bait’ and ‘gudgeon’ are appositive (they describe the same thing), then the thought is clear – Antonio should not fish for a reputation with his solemn behaviour. But if, as is possible to infer, Antonio’s melancholy is the bait, then what he fishes for with it is merely a ‘gudgeon’, another kind of bait, meaning that the world’s ‘opinion’ is a trivial thing, and perhaps only a means, not an end in its own right (which would resonate interestingly with the play’s themes of perception, judgement and resistance to the appeal of the external). KR guinea-hen, barbary hen. (A) The female of the guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), sometimes also called the turkey-hen. It is native to Africa (Barbary) and was domesticated in classical antiquity. The guinea fowl was probably known in Britain by the fifteenth century and was valued both for the beauty of its subtly speckled feathers and for its meat. It is now reared almost solely for human consumption. (B) Iago mentions the guinea-hen in a passage that typically mingles animals and sexuality. To Roderigo’s announcement that he will drown himself, now that Desdemona is lost to him, Iago contemptuously replies, ‘I never found a man that knew how to love himself. Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen I would change my humanity with a baboon’ (OTH 1.3.314–17). Baboons were reputed to be lecherous, and in this context, ‘guinea-hen’ is a misogynistic term for a woman, most likely a cunning, seductive woman, and possibly a prostitute (AR3: 159, n. 316). In 2H4, Falstaff assures the Hostess that Pistol is timorous by claiming that ‘[h]e’ll not swagger [i.e., argue] with a barbary hen if her feathers turn back in any show of resistance’ (2.4.99–100). Here the guinea-hen is almost certainly a prostitute. 208

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(C) In his translation of Pliny, Holland uses the name ‘turkey-hen’ for the guinea-hen (1601: 1.296). The Romans called it the ‘bird of Africa’ (‘gallina africana’; see Mynott 2018: 280). Because it was regarded as both beautiful and exotic, the guinea fowl could be found in the menageries of Renaissance monarchs and nobles (Lloyd 1971: 47). KE gurnet. The gurnet or gurnard is a spiny-headed salt water bottom-feeding fish of the family Triglidae. They are a common and cheap food source, often added to soups or stews. Falstaff calls himself a ‘soused gurnet’ (1H4 4.2.12) when he admits in soliloquy that he has indulged in corruption while recruiting soldiers for the English forces – soused, meaning pickled, refers both to his drinking and to the sour taste of his behaviour.

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H haggard. (A) A wild adult female hawk or falcon caught in order to be tamed and trained for hunting, a significantly more arduous process than taming and training birds taken when they are eyases, or nestlings. Hence, used figuratively, ‘haggard’ can mean a wild, intractable person, usually a woman, who resists submitting to a man, a sense of the word now obsolete. Taming a haggard, or ‘manning’ her, involves watching her constantly, preventing her from ‘bating’, or escaping, and keeping her ‘empty’, or hungry. Reducing her food allotment is part of training her to return to the lure (a feathered decoy to which meat is attached), which makes her more agile and eager to hunt. Her desire for food, in other words, ultimately leads to her subjection. (B) Petruccio’s treatment of Katherina blends aspects of both taming and training, as he acknowledges in a soliloquy: My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged, For then she never looks upon her lure. Another way I have to man my haggard, To make her come and know her keeper’s call: That is, to watch her, as we watch these kites That bate, and beat, and will not be obedient. She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat [. . .] (SHR 4.1.179–86) This passage constitutes the play’s fullest rationale for Petruccio’s treatment of Katherina: he models his handling of her on the advice found in falconry manuals about the training of haggards. In the language of falconry, ‘stooping’ usually refers to the falcon’s characteristic way of hunting. The bird dives through the air at great speed, hitting its prey and killing it with the force of the blow. ‘Stooping’ may also, however, refer to a falcon’s descent to the lure, the sense in which Petruccio uses it here, although his vow that Katherina will not be fully fed until she stoops seems also to evoke the verb’s more general meaning of bowing or crouching in obeisance. In contrast to Petruccio, Hortensio applies ‘haggard’ to Katherina’s sister Bianca without reference to the term’s origins in falconry. When he ends his unsuccessful wooing of Bianca, he announces, ‘I will be married to a wealthy widow / Ere three days pass, which hath as long loved me / As I have loved this proud disdainful haggard’ (4.2.37–9). A trace of the 210

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metaphor’s origins can be detected in Ursula and Hero’s plot to lay their ‘false sweet bait’ to persuade Beatrice that Benedick is in love with her (ADO 3.1.33). They allow Beatrice to overhear their assertion that ‘she is too disdainful’ to look at Benedick (3.1.34). ‘I know her spirits are as coy and wild / As haggards of the rock’, Hero assures Ursula (3.1.35), ‘rock’ emphasizing Beatrice’s supposed hardness of heart. In a usage that ignores the usual gender connotations of the term, Viola likens Feste’s alertness to that of the haggard: This fellow is wise enough to play the fool, And to do that well craves a kind of wit. He must observe their mood on whom he jests, The quality of persons and the time, And, like the haggard, check at every feather That comes before his eye. [. . .] (TN 3.1.58–63) ‘Checking at’, another term from falconry, refers to the hawk’s tendency to veer away from pursuing the primary target in order to fly at a lesser target encountered on the way (OED ). ‘Feather’ is often glossed here as a bird, but it may simply mean anything trivial. The sinister, indeed tragic, consequences of figuring a woman as a haggard are demonstrated in OTH , when Othello, deceived and in agony, reflects on Desdemona’s unfaithfulness: ‘If I do prove her haggard, / Though that her jesses were my dear heartstrings, / I’d whistle her off and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune’ (3.3.264–7). Othello seems to mean that if he demonstrates to himself that he cannot tame and train this captured wild hawk, he will let her go. Hawks that are hunting fly into the wind after being sent off with a whistle, whereas Othello proposes to let her fly down, i.e., with the wind, meaning to let her fly free. ‘To prey at fortune’, an extension of the hawking metaphor, imputes predation to Desdemona, hardly a loving characterization. But it is Othello’s use of ‘haggard’ that most surely betrays the impossibility of his letting Desdemona go. ‘Haggard’ merges the metaphorical hawk that can be trained with the woman who cannot be trained, who remains intractably wild, i.e., unfaithful. The fact that Othello uses the conditional rather than the future tense – ‘I’d whistle her off’ rather than ‘I’ll whistle her off’ – means that he has already decided that he cannot let her fly down the wind, because (in his mind) he has already ‘prove[d] her haggard’. (C) Oggins provides a detailed account of training a haggard, including accustoming her to the lure (2004: 27–8). Hodgdon quotes Latham on the importance of keeping a haggard hungry during her training (Latham 1614: 1.9–11; qtd. in SHR , AR3: 251, n. 177–200). Ranald (1987: 117–32) argues that modelling his treatment of Katherina on a falconer’s ‘loving’ training of the falcon makes Shakespeare’s version of the wife-taming genre more humane. So, too, in a sustained close reading of SHR , Berry (2001b: 95–132) proposes that the problems with Katherina’s final speech are resolved in the light of this loving relationship. Benson (2006) argues that the employment 211

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of hawking metaphors in OTH means that Shakespeare finally rejects what he had drawn upon in SHR , the treatment of a wife as if she were a wild bird. Pope (1992: 138–40) discusses the possible meanings in TN of the haggard’s ‘check[ing] at every feather’. KE halcyon. (A) The name refers to the kingfisher (family Alcedinidae), but the kingfisher with mythic accretions. The actual bird is tiny, with brilliant blue and orange feathers. It nests in tunnels on the banks of rivers or lakes and hunts fish and aquatic insects, waiting on branches overhanging the water until its prey appears. The halcyon, as opposed to the kingfisher, is said by Pliny to build its floating nest at the winter solstice, when the sea is smooth and calm. Ovid explains the origin of such pleasant ‘halcyon days’: the gods rewarded the devotion of Alcyone (daughter of Aeolus) to her drowned husband, Ceyx, by transforming them both to birds, and Aeolus is said to calm the water during their nesting period. Medieval Christian writers associate halcyon days with the benevolence of the Creator and the birth of Christ at the winter solstice. In a further extension of halcyon lore, the dead bird, hung by a thread, was believed to turn its bill in the direction from which the wind blew, so acting as a weathervane. (B) In an unusually negative application of its legendary status as a forecaster of weather, the halcyon in LR is a figure for a sycophant, that is, someone who knows which way the wind blows. Kent describes Goneril’s steward Oswald as among those ‘smiling rogues’ who encourage their lords to indulge in rather than to moderate their passions, moods or desires. ‘Such smiling rogues as these’, Kent charges, Bring oil to fire, snow to the colder moods, Renege, affirm and turn their halcyon beaks With every gale and vary of their masters, Knowing naught, like dogs, but following. (2.2.71, 75–8) Kent’s is an astute description of what today we would call ‘yes men’. The halcyon appears in a more conventional role in 1H6. Joan of Arc declares that her presence will revitalize the French cause, and urging her countrymen to fight on, she assures them that she will drive the English from Orléans: ‘Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyons’ days, / Since I have entered into these wars’ (1.2.131–2), she declares. Just as a spell of warmer weather sometimes follows St Martin’s Day (11 November), Joan prophesies, her presence will bring about a figurative summer in their fortunes of war. (C) Pliny claims that the halcyon breeds at midwinter, when the sea around Sicily is calm (1940: 349 [10.47]). Ovid tells the story of Alcyone and Ceyx in Book 11 of Metamorphoses. For the medieval association of the halcyon with Christmas, see Rowland (1978: 89–92). Tilley (1950: D115) notes that ‘halcyon days’ appears in Baret’s dictionary (published in 1580), in which the phrase is said to apply to those who ‘do passe their life with great pleasure, and much quietnesse, having (as we saie) Fortune at a becke’ and call. 212

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The legend of the halcyon’s weather-predicting beak is alluded to in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, as Barabas waits to hear news of his merchant ships and asks, ‘But now how stands the wind? / Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?’ (1994: 1.1.38–9). The legend attracted the attention of Thomas Browne in the early days of the revolution in natural philosophy. He demonstrates in an experiment recorded in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) that there is no truth to the legend (1981: 1.196). Several scholars focus on Kent’s denunciation of Oswald for imitating the halcyon’s beak. Barish and Waingow (1958) observe that although Oswald’s compliance with his master’s wishes may seem to preserve order, it encourages personal vice, which ultimately promotes disorder. Graham (1991: 456) argues that Kent objects to Oswald’s use of flattery to gain personal advancement; for Kent, service means above all service to the truth. Hadfield (2003: 577–86) finds relevance in the passage to conflicts in Jacobean England between court and Parliament. Brustein (2009: 92–135) argues that the passage is intended to highlight Kent’s role as ‘plain speaker’ versus Oswald’s role as flattering courtier. Munson (2011) puts counselling royalty in the context of humoral pathology: the counsellor’s role is not to flatter but to provide a balance to the king’s personal proclivities. KE handsaw. (A) Handsaw is probably derived from the word hernsahw or heronshaw (OED ph), meaning heron, a large wading bird of the family Ardeidae, with a long bill and long legs. (B) The one instance in which a handsaw appears in the plays has been the subject of much debate. In HAM , the Prince tells Guildenstern, ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw’ (2.2.315–16). Some editors have changed the word ‘handsaw’ to ‘hernshaw’ to ensure that Hamlet’s comparison includes things of relative similarity – that is, they force the lines to mean that Hamlet can tell the difference between two birds, in which case the comment is a straightforward defence of Hamlet’s reason. Others have retained ‘handsaw’, retaining the possible reference to a type of tool to ensure that the phrase instead further demonstrates Hamlet’s madness: only a madman could think it sensible to say he can distinguish a bird from a saw. Hamlet’s phrasing might be based on a lost proverb. (C) Tilley (1950: H226) quotes the proverb ‘he knows not a hawk from a handsaw’, but names Shakespeare’s play as its origin. Harting (1965) seems certain a hernshaw is meant, and appears to also believe the proverb ‘knowing a hawk from a hernshaw’ is not invented by Shakespeare, although he gives no sources to confirm either assumption. Harting also uses the reference as an opportunity to relate a long story of hunting herons on the premise provided by Swan’s Speculum Mundi (1635), which reports that herons and hawks fight one another out of sheer mutual hatred (223–7). Phipson (1883) agrees that the heron was regarded as a delicacy in Shakespeare’s day, and that hernshaws were hunted frequently (268). Braddy (1941), Drew (1960) and Weedon (1986) also discuss the passage. KR 213

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Figure 4 Seated hare, turned towards the right, by Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), after Albrecht Dürer, pen and ink, brush with watercolour. RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

hare. (A) Members of the family Leporidae, like the rabbit or coney, but larger and with several distinguishing characteristics: unlike rabbits, hares give birth to young that are immediately capable of survival and live in above-ground nests rather than underground warrens. The European hare or brown hare, Lepus europaeus, is especially large (measuring up to 30 inches in length) and swift, able to reach speeds of 45 mph, and capable of running long distances. It may have been introduced to Britain by the Romans as a game animal. Topsell notes the hare’s shyness, its ‘immoderate lust” (1658: 207) and its speed. ‘It is a simple creature, having no defence but to run away, yet it is subtile’ (210) he remarks, discussing the many predators apart from humans that include it in their diet. Because of the hare’s extreme fecundity, it can be a symbol of fertility or, as Topsell says, a reflection of sexual appetite; equally, because it is so defenceless, it is often associated with timidity or cowardice. (B) Portia describes judgement and the ability to act on good advice as difficult to achieve when young: ‘a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree; such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o’er the meshes of good counsel the cripple’ (MV 1.2.18–20). She may refer here to the madness of the March hare, which gambols in spring as it finds a mate, behaviour hares do not display at any other time of year. The idea of mad hares extends to the phrase ‘hare-brained’, which we find Worcester using in 1H4 to describe his nephew Hotspur. Worcester schemes to withhold the news that the King is willing to 214

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forgive the rebels, since where older and more sober plotters like himself would see it as a ruse, he fears amnesty might be a momentarily appealing option for his nephew who is ‘a hare-brained hotspur governed by a spleen’ (5.2.19). The Dauphin in 1H6 calls the English at Orleans ‘hare-brained slaves’ (1.2.37) for their furious fighting outside Orleans. Again, the image indicates both the insignificance of the English to the Dauphin, who is convinced of French superiority, and the surprising burst of energy he witnesses in their attack. In ROM , the hare’s reputation for rampant fornication and its role as the object of the hunt informs Mercutio’s encounter with the Nurse. When Romeo tries to arrange a tryst with Juliet through the Nurse, Mercutio teases: Mercutio: Romeo: Mercutio:

A bawd, a bawd, a bawd! So ho! What hast thou found? No hare sir, unless a hare, sir, in a Lenten pie, that is something stale and hoar ere it be spent. He walks by them and sings. An old hare hoar, and an old hare hoar Is very good meat in Lent. But a hare that is hoar is too much for a score When it hoars ere it be spent. (2.4.126–33)

‘So ho’ is a hunting cry, indicating that the Nurse is the game Mercutio has spotted; the ‘hoar hare’ refers to old or stale ‘meat’, but with a play on the homophone ‘whore’. Mercutio calls out the Nurse for being unappetizing as a sexual partner, with additional puns on hare as ‘hair’ (referring to her gray hair) and ‘spent’, or sexual climax. Hunting the hare provides more metaphorical grist in AYL , when Rosalind as Ganymede tells Silvius that Phoebe’s love ‘is not the hare that I do hunt’ (4.3.18). In ANT , Scarus wants to pursue the Roman forces at Alexandria despite his wounds, to ‘score their backs / And snatch ’em up as we take hares – behind!’ (4.8.12–13). In other words, Scarus will hunt them by chasing them and catching them as they run. Queen Margaret also employs the metaphor of the hunted hare when she characterizes Edward and Richard pursuing her and her troops ‘like a brace of greyhounds / Having the fearful flying hare in sight’ (3H6 2.5.129–33). Like other animals, the hare participates in the humoural system, the medical framework that assigns temperament based on four basic substances, blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile. ‘Hare is melancholy meat,’ goes the proverb (Tilley 1950: H151): in other words, a hare is dominated by black bile, making those who eat it depressed. That explains why in response to Falstaff’s claim in 1H4 that he is ‘melancholy as a gib cat or a lugged bear’ (1.2.71), Prince Hal proposes he might also be as melancholy as a 215

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lion or a lover’s lute; Falstaff offers the drone of a bagpipe as another comparison, and the Prince follows up, ‘What sayst thou to a hare, to the melancholy of Moorditch? (1.2.74–5). Moorditch was a drainage ditch in London, so the implication is that Falstaff must be in a muddy mood (AR3: 155, n. 75) or as gloomy as a hare. More often, the hare’s fearfulness inspires its metaphoric or proverbial uses. For instance, Philip the Bastard tells Austria, ‘You are the hare of whom the proverb goes, / Whose valour plucks dead lions by the beard’ (JN 2.1.137–8). He refers to the proverb ‘Hares may pull dead lions by the beard’ (Tilley 1950: H165), which alludes to the liberties taken by those whose master or governor is absent. Cressida claims lovers ‘have the voice of lions and the act of hares’ (TRO 3.2.85), which she points out actually makes them monsters. Cressida’s comment resonates more broadly with the themes of courage and folly that destabilize the traditionally heroic action depicted in TRO . Elsewhere in the play, Troilus complains that his fellow Trojans, even his brother, are wrong in trying to rationally judge Helen’s value as the justification for the war: ‘Manhood and honor / Should have hare hearts, would they but fat their thoughts / With this crammed reason’ (2.2.47–9). Reason, he says, just makes warriors lily-livered: ‘reason and respect / Make livers pale’ (2.2.49–50). In a much simpler example, Toby calls Cesario ‘more a coward than a hare’ (TN 3.4.383) after Cesario fails to defend Antonio (who thinks Viola/Cesario is actually her brother, Sebastian, and expects her allegiance when he is arrested). Venus wishes Adonis would ‘[u]ncouple at the timorous flying hare’ if he wants to hunt, rather than pursue the dangerous boar (VEN 674). She then goes on to describe in detail the desperate flight of Wat (a common name for a rabbit or hare) from his hunters: By this, poor Wat, far off upon a hill, Stands on his hinder legs with list’ning ear, To hearken of his foes pursue him still. Anon their loud alarums he doth hear; And now his grief may be compared well To one sore sick that hears the passing-bell. (697–702) Shakespeare here offers a small stock episode like those found in hunting manuals that depict the suffering and fear of the prey. Perhaps Venus hopes Adonis will think more carefully on what it means to be the hunted and not the hunter, something he might expect if he tries to chase the more violent boar. Yet her sympathetic depiction of Wat is complicated by the fact that she too is a hunter who chases Adonis for sexual favours; she also repeatedly casts herself as a victim of desire, thoroughly confusing the potential roles for herself and Adonis that would align with Wat and his foes. (C) Gascoigne includes a short poem representing the hare’s point of view in The Noble Art of Venerie (159–60), and Margaret Cavendish writes in the seventeenth century about poor Wat’s torments in her 1653 poem ‘The Hunting of the Hare’. Harley (1985) links Rosalind’s reference in AYL to the hare and other animals to her insistence 216

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on maintaining a fluid sexual identity. Dundas (1987) discusses the hare in VEN as an example of Shakespeare’s visual style and characterization. KR hart, stag. (A) An adult male red deer in its fifth year or older in possession of a full set of antlers. The terms stag and hart can be used interchangeably, although in some cases stag refers to a hart of only four years of age; indeed, the OED also cites the phrase ‘stag of the hart’ as fifteenth-century usage (1a), while hart (Old English herte) is an archaic term for a stag. Topsell (1658) and Gascoigne (1575: 50–1) treat harts as if they were the males of various species, having long or short or different colour coats; Topsell traces the etymology of the hart’s name to Latin cervus or Italian cervo (95), the general term for what is now the family Cervidae, which includes all deer species. However, unlike bucks, which could be male roe or fallow deer, the hart was most often the larger red deer with branching rather than spadelike antlers. The hart was the prey of choice for noble hunts – regal, dangerous, massive in size and reputed to be ferocious in rutting, as well as long-lived. Pliny reports that some stags captured in Greece had collars identifying them as belonging to Alexander the Great a century after his death (NH 8.50.119 [1940: 85]). Because of the homophone linking hart and heart, and because it is the object of the hunt, the animal is a frequent device in love poetry, plays and narratives. Again, because it is a hunted but noble prey animal the hart can stand in for a pursued or endangered ruler or lord, lending its appearance in Shakespeare’s works political overtones. (B) TN opens with a play on the hart/heart homophone, when Orsino responds to his servant’s encouragement to stop mooning over Olivia and join the hunt: Curio: Orsino: Curio: Orsino:

Will you go hunt, my lord? What, Curio? The hart. Why so I do, the noblest that I have. Oh, when mine eyes did see Olivia first Methought she purged the air of pestilence; That instant was I turned into a hart, And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, E’er since pursue me. (1.1.16–22)

Orsino allegorizes himself according to the myth of Diana and Actaeon, torn to pieces by his own hounds for the presumption of viewing the naked goddess in her forest haunts. In so doing, Orsino emphasizes the violence of his own desire as well as the narcissism of his love, which usurps all roles and makes them entirely internal. While Elam glosses reference to Olivia purging the air as a glance at plague and miasma theory (ARD3: 163, n. 19), it is worth noting that Topsell discusses at length the hart’s reputed ability to clear caves of snakes with its breath (1658: 99). In TIT , Tamora and Lavinia 217

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allude to the same myth of Actaeon and Diana during the royal hunt: Tamora is offended by the disruption of her dalliance with Aaron, wishing for Diana’s power to plant horns on the heads of those who surveil her private pleasures; in response, Lavinia tells her ‘Jove shield your husband from his hounds today: / ’Tis pity they should take him for a stag’ (2.2.70–1), making Saturninus the ‘horned’ or betrayed husband. When Titus invites the emperor and Tamora to ‘hunt the panther and the hart’ (1.1.497), little does he realize how comparably dangerous the hart (heart) will be – Lavinia’s rape and mutilation will provide the last blow that sends him on his journey of revenge. Falstaff gleefully occupies the position of horned stag in WIV , since he hopes to win a mistress by impersonating ‘a Windsor stag, and the fattest [. . .] i’the forest’ (5.5.12– 13). When the Lord and servants in SHR trick Sly into believing he is a nobleman, they offer him the pastime of the hunt, with ‘greyhounds [. . .] as swift / As breathed stags’ (Ind. 2.45–6), they introduce the idea of pursuit at the outset of a play that is all about forms of (often-violent) wooing, while the speed of breathed (strong and fast) ‘harts’ allows Posthumus to compare Iachimo’s horses to them in CYM (2.4.27). Some stags and harts reflect the character of those compared to them without necessarily carrying sexual overtones. Octavius remembers Antony, for instance, as a hard military man, not the effeminized consort of Cleopatra, one who could once survive on coarse wild food: ‘Yea, like the stag when snow the pasture sheets, / The barks of trees thou browsed’ (ANT 1.4.66–7). Achilles’ sullen absence from the Greek forces at Troy spurs Ulysses to call him ‘the hart Achilles / [Who k]eeps thicket’ (TRO 2.3.252– 3), that is, who hides away like a hunted animal. Jaques in AYL famously apostrophizes the ‘sequestered stag’ who dies weeping while a ‘careless herd’ passes by uncaring, turning the stag’s death into extended political and social allegory (2.1.33, 52). Hamlet’s reaction to Claudius’s sudden flight from the play he has commissioned is to invoke the weeping deer: ‘Why let the stricken deer go weep / The hart ungalled play’ (HAM 3.2.263–4), depicting the king’s flight as a sign of being galled by the play’s content. Given that Claudius is a king (who presumably wears a crown, an image of the stag’s antlers) as well as being the target of a kind of hunt here, it makes sense that Hamlet sees him as a stag destined to die by an arrow through the heart. But for Talbot in 1H6, a stag is a dangerous beast when trapped: surrounded by the French ‘parked and bounded in a pale’ (4.2.45), Talbot imagines the English as ‘moody-mad and desperate stags’ who ‘[t]urn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel / And make the cowards stand aloof at bay’ (4.2.50–2). The image of the stag or hart at bay (i.e., surrounded by hounds) applies also to the murdered Caesar. ‘Here wast thou bayed, brave hart. / Here didst thou fall’ mourns Antony over Caesar’s bleeding body, ‘O world, thou wast the forest to this hart, / And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee’ (JC 3.1.204–5, 207–8). Antony’s use of the hart/heart homophone borrows the language of love poetry for the dead emperor, poetically transforming him into an object of adoration, conveying a rebuke to the hunters who bathed in his blood. Caesar is ennobled by the image and the assassins demeaned, while the inversion of ‘natural’ hierarchy is registered by Caesar’s transformation into a slaughtered animal. When Belarius and Cymbeline’s sons defend 218

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a narrow lane against the Roman forces, they stop a rout of Britons. According to Posthumus, they call out, ‘Our Britons’ harts die flying, not our men’ (CYM 5.3.24); in other words, the fleeing men are like deer who die merely because they are chased. Indeed, they hasten to hell, according to Belarius. But as a result of their the three men’s bravery, the Britons are recalled and transformed into ‘lions’ who then turn the Roman forces into ‘[c]hickens’ (5.3.38, 42). The dizzying circulation of animal similes and metaphors here reflects the confusion and reversals of war. (C) Berry (2001) discusses Falstaff as the Windsor stag (133–58), as well as the use of hunting imagery involving harts and stags as political commentary in 1H4 (133–8). Jaques’ address to the sobbing deer in AYLI is discussed in Uhlig (1970), Daley (1986), Fitter (1999), Berry (2001: 159–89) and Watson (2005: 80–91). Bates (2013) deals at length with the hart as it figures in the love-hunt in Thomas Wyatt’s poetry (44–107). KR hawk. (A) A general name for several species of birds of prey belonging to the family Accipitridae, among them the goshawk (Accipter gentilis) and sparrow hawk (Accipter nisus). In the context of early modern hawking, the term ‘hawk’ is often used broadly enough to include the falcon, although hawks and falcons differ in their morphology and therefore in their mode of hunting. Hawks have shorter wings and longer tails than falcons and can manoeuvre in woods and brush. They fly at lower altitudes than falcons to approach their prey, and then they use their long, sharp talons to seize and penetrate the body of the prey. Falcons hunt in open country; they dive from high above, hitting their prey with great force, killing it by the impact. Because the same specialized terminology is used in early modern hawking, it is not always possible to know whether a hawk or a falcon is meant. For instance, a tercel is the male of either species, smaller than the female and so not preferred for hunting; an eyas or nyas is a nestling; a wild bird caught for training after its first moult is a haggard. In Shakespeare’s works, the term ‘hawk’ usually occurs in contexts that are not concerned with the specific practices of hawking but rather with the sport or with the bird in a general sense. (B) Paired with hounds and horses, hawks are used in several of Shakespeare’s works to represent the sports of the gentry and nobility. ‘Some glory in their birth’, begins SON 91; ‘[s]ome in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse’ (1, 4). The speaker of the sonnet disparages these signs of social status; they are surpassed by ‘[t]hy love’, he declares, which is ‘better than high birth to me’ and ‘[o]f more delight than hawks or horses be’ (9, 11). When Lucentio proposes twenty crowns for a wager on their wives’ obedience, Petruccio boasts, ‘I’ll venture so much of my hawk or hound, / But twenty times so much upon my wife’ (SHR 5.2.74–5). Petruccio’s response hints that betting was an important element in early modern hawking and hunting. In 1H4 the Earl of Warwick refuses to adjudicate between Suffolk and Somerset on a question of law but acknowledges that he has some facility when it comes to judging ‘[b]etween two hawks, which flies the higher pitch, / Between two dogs, which hath the deeper mouth’ (2.4.11–12). This facility, one suspects, has been employed in the interest of settling wagers. In the framing scenes 219

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of SHR , the unnamed Lord who seeks to persuade Christopher Sly that he is a man of high birth asks, ‘Dost thou love hawking? Thou hast hawks will soar / Above the morning lark. Or wilt thou hunt? / Thy hounds shall make the welkin answer them’ (SHR Ind. 2.41–3). The use of ‘soar’ here suggests that the hawks to which the Lord refers are falcons. The main point, however, is that the ability to maintain hawks and hounds is a signifier of social status. Arcite, in answer to Theseus’s probing, declares that he professes ‘[a] little of all noble qualities. / I could have kept a hawk and well have hallowed / To a deep cry of dogs’ (TNK 2.5.10–12). Arcite is in effect informing Theseus of his high social status. The pairing of hawk and horse has been internalized by the Dauphin in H5. When the Duke of Orleans remarks that the Dauphin is ‘as well provided’ with horse and armour ‘as any prince in the world’ (3.7.9–10), the Dauphin agrees, calling his horse a Pegasus: ‘When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk’ (3.7.15). Hawking and hunting as sports of the elite are subtly ridiculed in ADO , when Beatrice avoids admitting that she is in love and claims instead, ‘I am exceeding ill. Hey-ho!’ (3.4.48). Ill for what? asks Margaret. ‘For a hawk, a horse, or a husband?’ (3.4.49). Beatrice wittily deflects the question by claiming that it is the H (aitch, i.e., the ache) – ‘the letter that begins them all’ (3.4.50) – that makes her ill. Hawking as a more bourgeois activity is represented in WIV , when George Page invites Caius and Evans to breakfast, after which ‘we’ll a-birding together, I have a fine hawk for the bush’ (WIV 3.3.216–17), he says. He refers to the practice of training a hawk to drive small birds into bushes, where they were subsequently shot and probably eaten. In Shakespeare’s early history plays, the language of hawking serves as a code for talking about treacherous ambition. The sport is introduced at the outset of 2H6, when the Messenger announces to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and his wife Eleanor, ‘the King and Queen do mean to hawk’ (1.2.58). Upon the party’s return from hawking, the King praises Gloucester’s high-soaring falcon, and Suffolk snidely remarks, ‘No marvel, an it like your majesty, / My Lord Protector’s hawks do tower so well, / They know their master loves to be aloft, / And bears his thoughts above his falcon’s pitch’ (2.1.9–12). The coded sparring between Gloucester and his enemies at court (Suffolk, the Cardinal and the Queen) continues in this vein, until Gloucester and the Cardinal arrange – out of the king’s hearing – to duel. In answer to the King’s question, ‘Why, how now, uncle Gloucester?’ (2.1.48), Gloucester answers half-truthfully, ‘Talking of hawking, nothing else, my lord’ (2.1.49). The language of hawking provides a metaphor for an activity even more sinister in LUC , when the narrator represents Tarquin’s state of mind after he has committed rape: Look as the full-fed hound or gorged hawk, Unapt for tender smell or speedy flight, Make slow pursuit, or altogether balk The prey wherein by nature they delight, So surfeit-taking Tarquin fares this night: His taste delicious, in digestion souring, Devours his will that lived by foul devouring. (694–700)

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A crucial element in training hawks and falcons is to keep them hungry; a hawk that has gorged itself will balk, that is, let slip, the prey that it normally hunts. Satiated and disgusted by his crime, Tarquin is diminished even in his own eyes. Perhaps the most contested meaning of ‘hawk’ in Shakespeare’s works occurs in Hamlet’s riddling statement to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: ‘I am but mad northnorth-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw’ (HAM 2.2.315– 16). There has been much debate about Hamlet’s statement, eighteenth-century editors suggesting that ‘hernshaw’, meaning a heron, ought to be substituted for ‘handsaw’ (AR3: 261, n. 316). Other scholars observe that the very dissimilarity of hawks and handsaws is the point, even if they disagree about the point itself. Is Hamlet – intentionally or unknowingly – undermining the very sanity he seems to claim? Is the statement designed (if indeed it is designed) to convince Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of his madness? Of his sanity? Does his mention of a bird with keen sight inform them that he knows they are spying on him? Or is Hamlet simply trying to puzzle them? The debate continues. The Jailer’s Daughter in TNK offers another puzzling use of ‘hawk’ in her ditty: There was three fools fell out about an howlet: The one he said it was an owl, The other he said nay, The third he said it was a hawk, And her bells were cut away. (3.5.68–72) If bells are metonymic for jesses, the hawk whose bells have been removed may suggest a stolen hawk or a hawk whose training has failed and which has been released into the wild. In an appendix on the music in the play, Potter (AR3: 408) observes that this song has no relationship to what happens in the scene, except to allow the Jailer’s Daughter to call those around her fools. The use of ‘hawking’ as an adjective in AWW has also raised questions. Helen reflects that it would have been a joy and a torture to see Bertram every hour and to ‘draw / His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls’ in the table of her heart (1.1.93–4). She seems to mean that his eyes are as keen and far-seeing as those of a hawk, although as Gossett and Wilcox (AR3: 134, n. 94) point out, the adjective usually refers to an addiction to hawking. The strength, ferocity and violence implied in the action of a mighty hawk seizing its prey are subverted for rhetorical purposes in MAC and TNK . After the murder of Duncan, the Old Man says to Ross, ‘On Tuesday last / A falcon towering in her pride of place / Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed’ (MAC 2.4.11–13). Disorder in the natural world – for owls should ‘hawk’ at ground-dwelling mice, not at soaring falcons – reflects disorder in the political world. Emilia in TNK refuses to watch the contest between Arcite and Palamon, saying, ‘I had rather see a wren hawk at a fly / Than this decision’ (5.3.2–3), the verb ‘hawk’ disproportionately violent in relation to a small bird that snaps up a fly. 221

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(C) The principal early modern hawking manuals are those of Turberville (1575) and Latham (1614). That social divisions are indicated by attitudes toward hawking is made clear in Jonson’s The Alchemist, when Subtle assures the puritan brethren, Tribulation Wholesome and Ananias, that when they have the philosopher’s stone, they will no longer need to ‘cast / Before your hungry hearers scrupulous bones, / As whether a Christian may hawk or hunt’ (1982a: 3.2.77–9). (Jonson points here to puritans’ assumed tendency to discuss theological questions the way a dog worries a bone.) For representative views on the meaning of Hamlet’s ‘I know a hawk from a handsaw’, see Braddy (1941), Drew (1960) and Weedon (1986). Angus (2009) comments on the phrase but also more widely on Shakespeare’s use of hawks and other birds of prey to signify informers. For the most thorough study of Shakespeare’s references to hawking and falconry, see Pope (1992), who provides a general overview and discussion of several specific passages. Benson (2006) considers hawking metaphors applied to the representation of marriage in the plays, and Berry (2001b: 95–132) focuses on Petruccio’s use of the techniques of training hawks in his treatment of Katherina in SHR . KE hedgehog, hedge-pig, urchin. (A) Erinaceus europaeus, the European hedgehog, is a small mammal covered in spines, with a pointed snout; it is largely nocturnal, hunting slugs, worms, caterpillars and other insects. The animal’s name comes from its habit of dwelling in hedges, and its pig-like snout. It is a slow-moving, cautious creature that curls into a ball when threatened so that its spines can protect its vulnerable belly and throat; unlike the porcupine, a rodent of a different species altogether, its quills are not barbed or poisonous and do not come free when it is attacked. The hedgehog’s diet and lack of aggression should have made it a welcome visitor to gardens, but its nocturnal habits and its ugly appearance instead led to its negative reputation. Topsell calls the ‘inward disposition’ of the hedgehog ‘crafty and full of subtlety’ and says ‘there is no good coming to mankind by this beast’ (1658: 219). (B) Lady Anne calls King Richard III a ‘hedgehog’ (R3 1.2.104) because he has a hunched back but also because he is closely linked to the equally spiny-haired boar: indeed, Anne’s epithet manages to register his ugliness and bestiality at the same time that it trivializes both with comparison to such a small animal. Prospero uses ‘urchins’ or spirits that appear as what the fairy in MND calls ‘[t]horny hedgehogs’ (2.2.10) to torment Caliban (TMP 1.2.327), who naturally resents these ‘urchin-shows’ and the ‘hedgehogs’ that ‘[l]ie tumbling in [his] barefoot way’ to prick his feet (2.2.5, 10–11). Whether ‘urchins’ are animals or goblins is sometimes unclear, since goblins were believed to assume the form of hedgehogs (OED 1c). Thus when Mistress Page plans to dress children as ‘urchins, oafs, and fairies’ to ‘pinch’ Falstaff (WIV 4.4.48, 56), the costumes probably include hedgehog spines. It is also possible that Tamora actually means to refer to the hedgehog in her description of the forest and the pit in which Titus’s sons and Bassianus are discovered, since she links the ‘dead time of night’ to 222

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snakes and toads and ‘urchins’, suggesting a group of nocturnal animals rather than goblins and elves (TIT 2.2.99, 101). The witches in MAC make such speculation unnecessary – the ‘hedge-pig’ that whines to herald their anti-feast (4.1.2) necessarily straddles the boundary of the natural and the supernatural. KR hen. (A) Female bird, usually of a species of domestic fowl like chickens, although also applied occasionally to wild species. (B) The term is used in the plays primarily as an endearment applied to women. Thus, Falstaff calls Mistress Quickly in 1H4 a hen: ‘How now, Dame Partlet the hen, have you enquired yet who picked my pocket?’ (3.3.51–2). A partlet is a ruff, so the title denotes the hen’s hackle feathers which circle the bird’s neck and are usually fluffed out when the bird is broody (i.e., ready to mate). These feathers would resemble the starched ruff that women wore in the period. In conversation with Mistress Quickly again in 2H4, Falstaff refers instead to a guinea hen, albeit one with a similar neck ruff, when assuring the Hostess that Pistol is not that aggressive: ‘He’ll not swagger [harass] with a barbary hen if her feathers turn back in any show of resistance’ (2.4.99–100). ‘Guinea hen’ or Barbary hen (birds with flashy plumages) were slang terms for a prostitute. It is Doll Tearsheet, the tavern prostitute, who initially objects to Pistol for his foul mouth. Iago uses ‘guinea hen’ in the same sense when mocking Roderigo, who claims he loves Desdemona so much he’ll die without her: ‘Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen I would change my humanity with a baboon’ (OTH 1.3.315– 17). Baboon here indicates a lecherous fool. Rosalind promises in AYL to perform the lover’s part for Orlando so well she’ll ‘be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cockpigeon over his hen’ (4.1.139–41). Volumnia somewhat shockingly (given her ruthlessness) seizes on the term ‘hen’ to depict herself as a doting mother to Coriolanus: ‘Thou hast never in thy life / Showed thy dear mother any courtesy, / When she, poor hen, fond of no second brood, / Has clucked thee to the wars and safely home’ (COR 5.3.160–3). Were Volumnia a more traditional nurturing parent, the image of her ‘clucking’ over her only brood would be heart-warming; here, however, it seems thoroughly manipulative instead, since throughout the play she has treated her son so harshly. Meanwhile, Petruccio promises to be ‘a combless cox, so Katharina will be my hen’ (SHR 2.1.228). In a counterpoise to Rosalind’s assumption of the stereotypical masculine role of cock to hen, Petruccio expresses his willingness to symbolically castrate himself for Katharina’s love. KR herd, herdsmen. (A) A group of animals of one type that live, move or are penned together. Although Shakespeare’s herds are often made up of ruminants like deer, or less often, cattle, the term could apply to any group of any kind of creature including fish. Those who attended to any herd could be called herdsmen; there is some overlap with the term ‘shepherd’, the specific guardian of sheep. 223

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(B) A herd can signify conformity, and thus be used as an image for compliance, for weakness of character, or for complacence, as in the case of the ‘careless herd, / Full of the pasture’ that abandons the dying stag in AYL (2.1.52–3). The animal has caught Jaques’ attention, leading him to address its indifferent fellow deer: ‘Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens’ (2.1.55). As he does throughout COR , Coriolanus compares Rome’s various groups to animals, emphasizing that they lack what he considers human qualities of strength and martial vigour: in a rage at the Romans who have failed in their advance against the Volscian army, Coriolanus calls them ‘You shames of Rome! You herd of – boils and plagues / Plaster you o’er [. . .]’ (1.4.32–3); unable in his fury to find an appropriately supine animal to attach to the image of a herd, Coriolanus goes on to call them ‘[y]ou souls of geese’ (1.4.35). Later, he asks Sicinius and Brutus, the mouthpieces of the people, ‘Are these your herd?’ (3.1.34), again dehumanizing the general population of Rome and by extension demoting its leaders to lowly herdsmen. If Jaques’ use of ‘herd’ establishes an allegory that makes deer like fat and unconcerned humans, Coriolanus’s metaphors reverse the process, turning humans into passive, irrational beasts. He is not alone: Menenius makes the same analogy when he calls Brutus and Sicinius ‘herdsmen of the beastly plebeians’ (2.1.92). Caska in JC mobilizes a similar image of Romans as animals that can’t think for themselves, recounting Caesar’s manipulative interaction with the populace: ‘Marry, before he fell down, when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut’ (1.2.262–5). Caska’s language throughout this scene represents the Romans as a theatrical audience, moved to clap or hiss at Caesar for his performance. But the image of Caesar baring his throat to Caska doesn’t just make him a skilled actor – it renders in spectacle the failure of reason and selfcontrol that attends his epilepsy or ‘falling sickness’ (1.2.255) and makes him a sacrificial animal. Talbot, another forceful military man like Coriolanus, finds himself besieged outside Bordeaux where he had instead expected to lay siege to the city. He fashions an animal simile only to turn it on its head: How are we parked and bounded in a pale – A little herd of England’s timorous deer Mazed with a yelping kennel of French curs. If we be English deer, be then in blood: Not rascal-like to fall down with a pinch, But rather, moody-mad and desperate stags, Turn on the bloody hounds with heads of steel And make the cowards stand aloof at bay. (1H6 4.2.45–52) Talbot here hopes to transform the timorous herd of English soldiers trapped in a pale, or fenced enclosure, into stags at bay, or antlered threats. In other words, he embraces an animal analogy, but shifts its content from powerlessness to potential dominance, a 224

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transformation he has repeatedly shown himself capable of enacting on the battlefield. This time, however, both he and his son die, having been betrayed by York and Somerset. Elsewhere, a pair of traitors finds themselves reaching for the image of a herd to defend against suspicion: when Antonio and Sebastian attempt to cover up their incipient attack on Alonso and Gonzalo in TMP , they pretend they have heard a terrible noise, ‘a hollow burst of bellowing, / Like bulls, or rather lions’ which they quickly confirm as ‘the roar / Of a whole herd of lions’ (TMP 2.1.312–13, 316–17). Sebastian’s stammering excuse (the alliterative b-b-b in the burst of bellowing by bulls he first mentions) has to be exaggerated by Antonio to seem to justify their poised weapons. Theseus observes in TNK that to the gods all humans are ‘mortal herd’ who go astray and require punishment (1.4.5). Sebastian and Antonio also discover that Prospero and Alonso, god-like authorities on earth, can do the same to them. Herds move in unison, whether out of fear or out of interest, an attribute that Autolycus uses to describe the festival-goers who are attracted to his wares by the clown’s music: ‘My clown, who wants but something to be a reasonable man, grew so in love with the wenches’ song that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words, which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears’ (WT 4.4.609– 14). Glendower reports that herds were lashed into panic at his birth: ‘The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes, / The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds / Were strangely clamorous’ (1H4 3.1.37–9). Unwilling to become like one of those herd animals, Hotspur unwisely mocks his Welsh co-conspirator’s flight of self-aggrandizing fantasy. The ability of song and poetry to charm non-human animals and objects is the context for Lorenzo’s words to Jessica in MV about a herd of horses roused by music: ‘For do but note a wild and wanton herd, / [. . .] If they but hear, perchance a trumpet sound, / Or any air of music touch their ears’ they stand at attention, ‘Their savage eyes turned to a modest gaze / By the sweet power of music’ (5.1.71–9). While Lorenzo’s words seem meant to flatter Jessica for her sensitivity, they implicitly position her as one of the colts or even ‘trees, stones and floods’ that the poet Orpheus charmed with his lyre (5.1.80). In VEN , Adonis’s voice is almost as powerful as Orpheus’, but instead of moving stones and trees it becomes the storm that buffets the herd and decimates it when he angrily rejects Venus. His mouth opens to produce ‘Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds, / Gusts and foul flaws to herdmen [sic] and to herds’ (455–6). Windy assaults shape the appearance of the herd in TRO , when Nestor indulges in a flood of proverbial images to support Agamemnon’s argument that hardship will produce greater heroism: ‘For in her [Fortune’s] ray and brightness / The herd hath more annoyance by the breese / Than by the tiger’ (1.3.47–9). And the herd partakes in an image that conveys the passage of time in SON 12: ‘When lofty trees I see barren of leaves / Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, / And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves / Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard’ (5–8) the poet thinks of the impermanence of beauty, encouraging the young man to ‘breed’ (14). To be ‘[w]orthy enough a herdsman’ as Polixenes deems Perdita in WT is to be born for a labouring lower-class life (4.4.440); his son Florizel, who has wooed Perdita not 225

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knowing of her royal birth and without informing his father, has also demoted himself, or as Polixenes puts it, made himself ‘[u]nworthy’ even of Perdita (4.4.442). But the guise of a lowly herdsman or shepherd had a long tradition in poetry – it was the fiction that underlay all pastoral poems, as it does those in PP . In one, the herd goes ‘to the hedge for shade’ (6.2), finding the otium, or leisure (the opposite of negotium, or business) that is necessary to provide the opportunity for song and is assumed to be the special purview of shepherds. In another poem, the shepherd’s unrequited love causes him suffering that is reflected in his ‘[h]erds [that] stands [sic] weeping’ (17.27). (C) Daly (1979) notes that the Duke’s exiled court in AYL resembles summer herds of bachelor deer; Watson (2003) also comments on Jacques’ description of the ‘greasy’ herd. Vendler (1997) and Atkins (2007) discuss the implications of the herd in SON XII. Höfele (2011) analyses Coriolanus’s speech in 3.1 (98–101). KR herring, pilchard. (A) Any of number of species of fish of the family Clupiedae; the name may derive from the herring’s behaviour of travelling in large shoals (OED 1). The pilchard is a type of herring. Herring are oily and nutrient rich: as a result, they have historically been an important source of food as well as trade and economic development. Dried or smoked herring featured in early modern diets, and by extension, became a commonplace in describing humans. (B) Romeo arrives after a night out, according to Mercutio, ‘[w]ithout his roe, like a dried herring’ (ROM 2.4.37), meaning a herring that has spawned. In other words, Mercutio believes Romeo has thus lost his sperm, i.e., had sex. Falstaff rails against his treatment during the robbery at Gadshill, lamenting, ‘If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring’ (1H4 2.4.122–4). Since he is clearly neither thin nor without roe (he fancies himself a ladies’ man), then his assertion that men (like Hal and the gang) have become corrupt rogues must be true. Dick the Butcher insults Jack Cade when he mutters that Cade got his name when his father stole ‘a cade of herrings’ (2H6 4.2.30) – a cade was a barrel, so the insult applies to both Cade’s father (the thief) and Cade himself (the by-product of a fishy deed). Thersites too mentions the herring that lacks its roe, when he rages that he would be the lowest animal alive rather than be Menelaus, who has been cuckolded by Paris (TRO 5.1.60). While herring may lack seed or sperm in the examples above, it is the herring’s size that informs Feste’s comparison: fools, he says, ‘are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings – the husband’s the bigger’ (TN 3.1.33–4). But, he implies, they are both the same general species of fish. Poor Tom in LR describes a demon in his belly, Hoppedance, that has the ‘voice of a nightingale’ but ‘cries’ ‘for two white herring’ (3.6.29–31); that is, it demands unsmoked but salted fish. Lincoln, the rabble-rouser in STM , uses the price of herring as a sign that foreigners are driving up prices (Add II. 6.1). In this case, herring function as a commodity by which the economic health of the nation can be measured. 226

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(C) Applebaum (2006: 201–38) discusses the links between herring and indigestion in light of early modern evolving standards of civility. Paice (2019) considers herring’s connections to class, taverns and London’s street culture. Vienne-Guerrin (2016) accounts for the many insults that involve herrings (304–6). KR hind. (A) A female red deer, specifically a mature deer of more than three years age. The hart or stag, the male red deer, was the most sought-after prey for the noble hunt; the hind, like the doe of other species, was a lesser but still important game animal. References to the hind in the plays are, as with so many other such hunted animals, references to women, especially to their vulnerability. In particular, the white hind (a deer suffering from leucism, a genetic condition that causes the animal to lack pigment) was associated with innocence and purity. The white hart, stag or hind appears in Christian accounts of saints, where it may symbolize Christ and inspire conversion; Petrarch (1976: 336) used it as the symbol of his beloved Laura’s transcendent beauty and divinity in his sonnets (see for example his sonnet 190). It was the badge of King Richard II, attesting to his piety; and in folklore the white hart was linked to Herne the Hunter. Because of its rarity and beauty, the white hart or hind can also stand for divine or spiritual treasure and holiness, or the goal of a quest. Although treated as otherworldly, white deer actually occur in nature, but seldom survive long because they are easily discerned by predators. Otherwise, the hind stands in for any female less able to defend herself, or in sexual terms, an available partner to a desiring ‘heart/hart’ (male stag). (B) Lucrece, ‘the picture of piety’, is compared to a ‘white hind under the gripe’s sharp claws’ when Tarquin assaults her in LUC (542–3): the image borrows from the tradition of the white stag or hind to position Tarquin as a ‘rough beast’ (545) who violates law and the sanctity of marital fidelity. Helena emphasizes the vulnerability of the hind to violent predation when she casts herself as a deer and Bertram as a lion: ‘The hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love’ (AWW 1.1.91–2). Cressida too touches on the hind as prey when she vows that the day she betrays Troilus, she should be called as false as air or water, or as false as ‘fox to lamb, or wolf to heifer’s calf, / Pard to the hind’ (TRO 3.2.188–9). Ironically, Cressida’s choice of animal comparisons locates her vow squarely within a broader network of animal images applied to figures like Ajax and Achilles, a network that registers the power of war to destroy even the most apparently solid social, personal and cultural structures. ‘[F]alse as Cressid’ (3.2.191) will indeed become a common phrase by which to call a woman a whore. Touchstone has a much more direct and brutal way of mobilizing the hind’s sexual availability when he mocks Orlando’s terrible poems: ‘If a hart do lack a hind, / Let him seek out Rosalind. / If the cat will after kind, / So be sure will Rosalind’ (AYL 3.2.98– 101). Helena in MND inverts the power relationship between predator and prey when she characterizes her pursuit of Demetrius as the reversal of all such traditions: ‘[T]he story shall be changed’ she avers, ‘The dove pursues the griffon; the mild hind / Makes 227

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speed to catch the tiger’ (2.1.230–3). While Queen Elizabeth in R3 does not invert the power relation between predator and prey, she does raise the hind’s role to the level of national mythology when she learns of Richard’s arrest of her brother and son: I see the ruin of my house: The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind; Insulting tyranny begins to jut Upon the innocent and aweless throne. Welcome destruction, blood and massacre. I see, as in a map, the end of all. (2.4.50–5) Although the timid doe and the ‘gentle hind’ share many qualities, the hind’s position as queen among deer species makes it especially apt in this queen’s prescient lamentation for a lost ideal of the nation. When Tybalt finds the servants of the Capulets and Montagues brawling in the street in ROM he greets Benvolio, ‘What, art thou drawn among these heartless hinds?’ (1.1.64). He calls them cowards, female deer; but his words also resonate with the initial discussion between Samson and Gregory, who joked about raping the Montague women (providing ‘harts’ to the hinds whether they wished it or not). He is also challenging Benvolio to take on a worthy opponent, an adult male instead of the lower ranked servants – that is, he is inviting Benvolio to duel with him instead. ‘Hind’ however could also refer to a boor, a lower-class rustic or a servant (OED 2), all possible meanings in Tybalt’s speech. (C) Bates (2013) delves into the relationship between Sir Thomas Wyatt, King Henry VII and Anne Boleyn as it emerges in his poem ‘Whoso List to Hunt’, where Anne is the ‘hind’ that Wyatt longs for, but who belongs instead to Henry (44–107). Wyatt’s poems may be precursors to the same kind of allegory that informs many of Shakespeare’s uses of hinds. KR honey, honeycomb. (A) Honey is the sweet by-product of bee pollination. Bees collect nectar from plants, and secrete that part of it not used for the energy of their own flight and foraging to store in a hive’s honeycombs, the hexagonal wax structures bees create for nests, as a food source for times of scarcity. Honey has been gathered from either wild or semi-domesticated bees for thousands of years. Because bees add to the sugars in honey an enzyme from their own intestines that resists fermentation, honey will also not deteriorate over time if properly handled, and thus is a preservative of other foods. If exposed to moisture and added yeast, honey will, however, ferment – hence its transformation into mead, a strong alcoholic drink common throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe, although less frequently consumed in Shakespeare’s England. (B) Honey is frequently used metaphorically to refer to sweet, sometimes seductive things or experiences. Perhaps most famous is Hamlet’s accusation that his mother has been ‘[s]tewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty’ that is 228

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Claudius’s bed (HAM 3.4.91–2). Julia in TGV , having torn Proteus’s love letter into pieces, calls her hands wasps that ‘feed on such sweet honey’ (1.2.106): the torn letter stands metonymically for Proteus, its sweetness a reference to the desire its words, or even its mere existence, arouses in Julia. Tamora describes her sons’ lust for Lavinia in terms that confuse it with her own longing for sweet revenge on Titus as well as yoking together bees’ honey with a wasp’s sting: ‘But when ye have the honey we desire, / Let not this wasp outlive, us both to sting’ (TIT 2.2.131–2). ‘Honey’ was a term of endearment just as common in Shakespeare’s day as it is in our own. Petruccio calls Katherina his ‘honey love’ (SHR 4.3.54) in keeping with his plan to treat her as if she really were a compliant spouse, although she is at this moment still quite waspish. Poins calls Prince Hal ‘my good sweet honey lord’ in 1H4 (1.2.152) – the epithet casts Hal as a sweetener to the plot Poins is hatching against Falstaff. Later in the play, King Henry warns Hal that Richard II fell because he was too readily available to the common people, ‘being daily swallowed by men’s eyes, / They surfeited with honey and began / To loathe the taste of sweetness’ (3.2.70–2). The king’s advice posits that Hal’s time in the taverns can over-expose him to a public whose appetites are changeable: they will eat him up only to ultimately tire of his flavour. This is the same problem that ROM ’s Friar warns about, albeit in the context of Romeo’s excessive passion, when he notes that ‘These violent delights have violent ends [. . .] The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness’ (2.6.9–12). The link between sweetness and sickness reflects one possible outcome of sexual desire that leads to illicit sex and to venereal disease. When Falstaff remarks that Mistress Quickly is ‘a sweet wench’, Prince Hal adds ‘[a]s the honey of Hybla’ (1H4 1.2.39–40), referencing a Sicilian town famous for its honey – but also alluding to Quickly’s trade as tavern keeper where she may procure prostitutes for her customers. She is also a widow, and so assumed to be sexually rapacious, even suspected of being a prostitute in her own right. The mouth’s double role in tasting the sweetness of honey and producing sweet or beguiling speech is present in a number of references. When Cressida tells Diomedes, ‘Sweet honey Greek, tempt me no more to folly’ (TRO 5.2.20), her words reflect the temptation of his suit, but on the larger scale they resonate with the play’s staging of conflicted loyalties, even the temptation to treachery – Cressida’s own father has, after all, switched allegiance to the Greek side, the very reason she has been taken from Troilus and made available to Diomedes. Pandarus’s ditty at the end of the play turns on the intersecting problems of sexual desire and treachery, although in his mind he is the undeserving object of ire: ‘Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing, / Till he hath lost his honey and his sting; / And being once subdued in armed tail, / Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail’ (5.11.41–4). R3’s Queen Anne revisits the impossibly strange scene in which Richard wooed and won her as she tries to explain Richard’s appeal to Elizabeth: ‘Lo, ere I can repeat this curse again, / Within so small a time, my woman’s heart / Grossly grew captive to his honey words’ (4.1.77–9), while in H8, Wolsey’s antagonists reference the ‘honey of his language’ that once swayed the king, but will no longer protect him (3.2.22). In LLL , Berowne approaches the Princess saying, ‘one 229

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sweet word with thee’, to which she answers, ‘Honey, and milk, and sugar: there is three’ (5.2.230–1). Elsewhere in the play, Berowne’s scathing mockery of Boyet ends with him imagining ‘consciences that will not die in debt / Pay him the due of “honeytongued Boyet” ’ (5.2.333–4) – to which the king replies, ‘A blister on his sweet tongue’ (5.2.335). More straightforwardly, references to honey can involve the idea of productivity, as in the case of Gower, who approves Helicanus’s service to Pericles for not ‘eat[ing] honey like a drone / From others’ labours’ (PER 2 Ch. 18–19), or Ulysses who laments in TRO the ‘honey’ or hierarchical order that is lost ‘When than the general is not like the hive / To whom the foragers shall all repair’ (1.3.81–3). A surprisingly negative use of the honeycomb occurs in TMP when Prospero promises to have Caliban tormented for cursing him and Miranda: ‘thou shalt be pinched / As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging / Than bees that made ’em’ (1.2.329–31). (C) Ellis (2004) covers the general history of honey and bees. KR horn. (A) The hard, bony outgrowth projecting from the head of cattle, goats, rams and other animals. While horns are now distinguished from antlers in deer, early moderns did not always reflect that difference in their speech or writing – indeed, the word ‘antler’ does not occur in any of Shakespeare’s works. In some species, horns and antlers grow exclusively on males as part of the equipment with which they engage in mating contests, as in the case of deer. In other species, like some varieties of cattle, horns grow on both males and females. By extension or analogy, protrusions found on other animals can also be called horns, although they may not properly be made of bone. The term ‘horn’ may refer to an instrument manufactured from a hollow animal’s horn (like that from a goat or steer), especially those blown in service of the hunt. Because of their strong connection to stags and other males, horns in Shakespeare’s works signify male virility; however, somewhat paradoxically, they also frequently signify the cuckolding of a male – that is, the sexual infidelity of his spouse, and his relegation to impotence by another’s sexual prowess. While the cuckold’s name comes from the cuckoo’s practice of supplanting a bird’s eggs with its own young, human cuckolds wore metaphorical ‘horns’ or were compared to stags, bucks and goats with horns, all ways of indicating that they were being cheated on. The origin for the use of the horn as the mark of a cuckold is obscure: the OED cites the fact that the word in German for cuckold, hahnreh or hahnrei, originally meant ‘capon’ (7a); cocks when gelded had their spurs planted or grafted in their combs (see Graber and Richter 1987), where they remained and resembled horns. Other lore that applied to horns involved their presence on the devil in early iconography: Revelation 12.3 describes a ‘great red dragon having seven heads, and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads’ (GNV), which is usually assumed to represent the devil. Elsewhere early Christian iconography seems to have borrowed images of pagan gods with horns, goat’s hooves and other bestial characteristics. Horns also appear on statues and paintings of Moses, due to a mistranslation from the Hebrew 230

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of the term ‘ray of light’ (keren, which also means horn, in Exod. 34.29). The antiSemitic effect of this depiction stems through the Middle Ages into the Renaissance, with Jews depicted as horned devils. (B) Angelo’s image in MM of ‘writ[ing] good angel on the devil’s horn’ (2.4.16) brings together a reference to his name, his growing resolve to proposition Isabella, and the traditional image of the devil with horns. Troilus vows to attack Diomedes, who has commandeered the token he gave Cressida: ‘Wert thou the devil, and wor’st it on thy horn, / It should be challenged’ (TRO 5.2.102–3). The hunting horn makes an appearance in MND (4.1.124), TIT (1.1.498), JN (1.1.219) and VEN (868, 1025). Just how quickly a simple hunting horn can turn into a cuckold’s horn, however, is attested in all of these sources, as well as several others that contain hunting scenes. In JN , Philip the Bastard marks the arrival of his mother (or stepmother, since he is the illegitimate offspring of his father), Lady Faulconbridge, with the comment, ‘What woman-post is this? Hath she no husband / That will take pains to blow a horn before her?’ (1.1.218–19). He refers to the practice of a ‘post-rider’ (a courtier) being announced by horns, but the implication is that his mother, a widow, is potentially sexually active – indeed, AR3 suggests that her companion James Gurney might be her lover (159, n. 219). In TIT , on the other hand, the lighter tone of Titus’s pleasure at setting up the hunt to celebrate Saturninus’s marriage to Tamora is quickly soured by Tamora’s dalliance with Aaron and her wish that she might see horns planted on Bassianus’s head as they were on Actaeon’s (thus wishing him killed by his own hounds; 2.2.63). Venus bemoans Adonis’s stubborn desire to hunt; she ‘hearkens for his hounds and for his horn’ (868), a reference that cannot be other than an expression of her desire given the poem’s overall tenor and the deep penetrative wound Adonis suffers in the end from a boar’s tusk. In MND , the noble characters tease the mechanicals who perform Pyramus and Thisbe: while Moonshine tries valiantly to impersonate the ‘horned moon’ (i.e., the crescent moon), Demetrius jokes that he ‘should have worn the horns on his head’ (5.1.234–5), a ribald moment that is has unfortunate resonance for the newly-married couples. Cuckold’s horns, hunting jokes and hints, and horns as phallic symbols are everywhere in the plays. Pushed to believe Desdemona is unfaithful, Othello says, ‘A horned man’s a monster, and a beast’ (OTH 4.1.62), a complicated opinion in a play where Othello has already been bestialized by Iago’s descriptions of him in Act 1 and where part of Iago’s strategy is convincing him that in Venice’s cosmopolitan urban society there is ‘many a civil monster’ (4.1.64), suggesting that Desdemona’s upbringing would all but guarantee she was sexually promiscuous. In WIV , Mistress Ford and Mistress Page cleverly avoid making their husbands cuckolds when Falstaff pursues them, but instead arrange for him to be horned in the guise of Herne the Hunter in Windsor Forest. Mistress Quickly finds Falstaff a pair of horns to wear (5.1.6) and Falstaff willing goes to the forest ‘with huge horns on his head’ (4.4.41) in hopes of finally possessing Mistress Ford. Ford, who calls himself ‘horn-mad’ (3.5.141) because he is certain his wife is unfaithful, is forced to acknowledge that he has been wrong about 231

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her – in other words, the cuckold’s horns on Falstaff turn out to actually be a sign of the wives’ virtue and his own folly. Since ADO is a play about infidelity and male suspicion, it is not surprising that horns feature repeatedly in the banter among characters. Benedick resists the suggestion that he will inevitably marry: Don Pedro quotes the adage ‘ “In time the savage bull doth bear the yoke” ’ (1.1.242–3; Dent T303), but Benedick counters, ‘The savage bull may, but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull’s horns and set them in my forehead’ (1.1.244–6) – in other words, pull the phallic sign of my potency off my head and turn it into cuckold’s horns. Beatrice gets the same treatment, claiming ‘God sends a curst cow short horns’ (2.1.20–1), meaning either she won’t stoop to cuckolding a husband, or she won’t be cheated on by one. Or, since Leonato concludes God will send her no horns because she is too curst (perverse), perhaps the meaning is that she will never enjoy penetrative sex. In LLL , Boyet remarks to Rosaline, who is off to join the hunt, ‘My lady goes to kill horns, but if thou marry / Hang me by the neck if horns that year miscarry’ (4.1.110–11). AR3 glosses this as ‘cuckolds’ horns are in short supply’, that is, ‘penises don’t get what they want’ (181, n. 111). Rosaline then insults him by saying she would not shoot at him if he were a deer since his horns are likely too small to be worthwhile (4.1.114); Katherine says essentially the same thing to Longaville, ‘Then die a calf before your horns do grow’ (5.2.253), when he asks if she will give a man (i.e., him) horns. All these horns, and the dozens more in many plays, speak eloquently to early modern anxieties about women’s sexual fidelity that inform encounters between men and women in Shakespeare’s world. Those anxieties, so delightfully playful in the comedies, can as OTH demonstrates have serious, destructive consequences. Like the hunt, which is heralded by a horn and involves the pursuit of a horned animal on which an impressive set of antlers is an object of desire, ‘horning’ involves violence – if not always the physical violence of death and dismemberment, then the subtle cultural violence of male distrust and misogyny. Ford’s description of himself as ‘horn-mad’ is a good measure of this problem: horn-mad means as angry as an animal, ready to gore with one’s horn. As such, it is not necessarily about cuckolding, but a description of someone who has been driven to an extreme of rage. Dromio of Ephesus has to make that important distinction when he tells Adriana her husband is out of his wits (as he believes, mistaking Antipholus of Syracuse for his master): Dromio of Ephesus: Adriana: Dromio of Ephesus:

Why, mistress, sure my master is horn-mad. ‘Horn-mad’, thou villain? I mean not cuckold-mad! But sure he is stark mad. (ERR 2.1.56–8)

The problem for Dromio, and for everyone who invokes the horn, is that since the horn is an allegory for adultery it is difficult to imagine it without that contaminating 232

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implication. Every hunt, every deer, every horned animal can be a sign of sexuality, promiscuity and physical brutality. If one of the frequently beaten Dromios trips on this obstacle, the audience may laugh. But in plays like OTH or TRO or even ADO , the real stakes of the horn are made concrete. And no horn is safe from infection: even the mythological horn of plenty, created when Zeus suckled at his foster-mother’s breast (his nurse Amaltheia, ‘nourishing goddess’, had the form of a horned goat), is turned by Falstaff into a curse that his tailor be made a cuckold (2H4 1.2.46–7). (C) Parten (1984) analyses Beatrice’s horn imagery in ADO , and elsewhere (1985) discusses the many meanings of Falstaff’s horns in WIV . St. Pierre (1988) also addresses ADO ’s plays on horns; while Iwasaki links the cuckold’s horns in WIV with the skimmington ritual. Silva (2006) touches on WIV ’s horn imagery in plumbing the history of the cuckold’s horns. Godshalk (1972) examines Angelo’s reference to the devil’s horns. Bruster (1992) links cuckoldry, the horn of plenty, labour and capitalist economics in several Shakespeare plays. KR horse, horsemanship, manage. (A) Equus caballus is a significant domesticated species of herd animal: a large, single-toed ungulate of the family Equidae, horses have proved adaptable to human use both for their behaviour – they tolerate human association more

Figure 5 Four horses, sixteenth century, by Hans Sebald Beham, engraving. Photo: Dietmar Katz/Art Resource, NY.

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easily than many animals – and for their genetic malleability, which allows the creation through breeding of a range of types with diverse characteristics. Uncastrated male horses are stallions, females are mares, and castrated males are geldings. The young of the species are foals; colts refer to young male animals and fillies are young females. Horses were everywhere in Shakespeare’s world the principal means for moving humans and goods from place to place, as farm labour occasionally used in place of oxen, and as objects of trade themselves. Early modern horses came in several breeds and types, from heavy animals for pulling ploughs or carts, to powerful warhorses, or swift animals for travel. Rare North African and Middle-Eastern breeds like the Barb (Barbary or Berber), the Turk or the Arabian entered Europe through trade, diplomatic gift-giving or as the spoils of war. Some of the language associated with horses derives from the medieval military tradition of heavily armoured knights used as shock troops in war. Knights would have maintained more than one animal: a courser (a swift runner) would have served as a riding animal, while a destrier was a battle mount; the destrier is most often referred to as a steed in Shakespeare’s plays, rather than by the formal French term. Likewise, terminology for equine characteristics and uses influenced definitions for the jennet or gennet, a smaller horse usually with Spanish bloodlines, which was smooth gaited for riding. A palfrey is a smaller animal with rideable gaits, sometimes thought of as more suitable for a woman rider. But palfreys might be called jennets, and vice versa. A mistreated, recalcitrant or otherwise broken-down or worthless equine was a jade. The sheer variety of terminology related to horses and horsemanship suggests the many domains of expertise that governed how horses and humans interacted. The manage, from the French manège, referring to the highest form of schooling of the horse, was understood to refer to the way the art of elite horsemanship was practised in the great riding schools of Europe. Training horses and riders for war had once required extreme skill, but by the late sixteenth century new weapons and tactics rendered the knight’s skill less important; at the same time, manage riding remained useful as a means of aristocratic display, an ideological tool in demonstrating the fitness of noblemen and monarchs to rule over the beastly masses. (B) Horses were an important means for establishing one’s social class not only because the cost for the purchase and upkeep of a good riding animal was beyond the means of the middling or poorer classes, but because horses functioned in a range of symbolic and ideological registers that drew distinctions between social groups. While early modern aristocracy no longer defined themselves by the practical requirements of chivalry (from the French word for horse, cheval) involving training as warrior knights, they did define themselves according to chivalry’s social codes. Noble behaviour, the love of honour, courtliness toward women, and pleasure in adventure were associated with chivalry, as were the skills of horsemanship. Classical sources for horses and horsemanship included the tale of Phaëton, the child of the sun-god, who drove his father’s sun-chariot across the sky but lost control of the horses and threatened the destruction of the earth. Zeus destroyed him with a thunderbolt. The myth served as an ominous sign of uncontained passion, as in the case of Juliet’s impatience as she awaits Romeo: ‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,’ she exclaims, and imagines Phaëton 234

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rushing toward the west (ROM 3.2.1–4), foreshadowing the doomed nature of their love. In both classical literature and in the Bible, horses were also associated with war and death. The New Testament’s Book of Revelation includes the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (6.1–8), glancingly referenced in HAM in the description of the French horseman who seems ‘incorpsed’ with his horse (4.7.86). This rider’s name in Q2 is Lamord (4.7.90), an echo of la mort, French for death – and death is clearly what Claudius expects will be the result when he uses Lamord to provoke Laertes into fighting Hamlet. Treatises on horsemanship emphasized the noble rider’s requisite self-control as the basis for domination of a powerful beast, and by extension authority over those humans of lower status. Right ‘reining’ equalled ‘right reigning’ and the consequent right to rule. Good horsemanship was thus a model, even a prerequisite, for good governance, and even a model for the godly order of the cosmos. When King Duncan is murdered in MAC , for instance, Ross reports that his horses ‘Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out / Contending ’gainst obedience, as they would / Make war with mankind’ (2.4.16–18). Ross confirms that they even cannibalized each other, a clear inversion of natural order (2.4.18). King Richard III finds himself unhorsed in battle at Bosworth Field, where his cry ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!’ (R3 5.4.7) reflects his failure to rule effectively; in contrast, both Bolingbroke in R2 and Prince Hal in 1H4, 2H4 and H5 are represented as skilful leaders, good horsemen and in Hal’s case even miraculously godlike in his appearance on horseback. Richard II chides himself for blaming his horse, Barbary, who submits to the usurper Bolingbroke (R2 5.5.85–94) because the horse, like the English people, is hierarchically defined by its need for guidance from a sovereign hand. Lamenting Bolingbroke’s triumph over him, King Richard compares himself to Phaëton, who could not ‘manage [the] unruly jades’ that pulled Apollo’s chariot (R2 3.3.179). The term manage here refers to the specific art of horsemanship, as well as the general idea of control. Prince Hal emerges in the final act of 1H4 from the London underworld, with its lowclass ostlers and horse thieves, in order to ‘[vault] with such ease into his seat / As if an angel dropped down from the clouds / To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus / And witch the world with noble horsemanship’ (4.1.106–9). His foil and enemy, Hotspur, meanwhile, is also a great horseman: his sleep is disturbed by his battlefield experiences – Lady Percy worries that she hears him ‘murmur tales of iron wars’ and ‘[s]peak terms of manage to [his]bounding steed’ (2.3.47–8) – but he lacks the self-control that Hal possesses. He, like King Richard II (about whom Gaunt declares from his deathbed, ‘He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes’; R2 2.1.36) is too hot, spurring too fast, failing to attend to the number and condition of the cavalry that will back him at Shrewsbury: ‘not a horse is half the half himself’ warns Vernon (1H4 4.3.24). When Hotspur imagines fighting Prince Hal, he phrases it in terms of his relationship to his horse: ‘Come, let me taste my horse, / Who is to bear me like a thunderbolt’ against the Prince, ‘Harry to Harry, hot horse to horse’ (4.1.118–21). Once Hal becomes King and makes war in France, his association with horses is transformed, however. In H5, the King walks among his troops as among a ‘band of brothers’ (4.3.60), while it is the French who 235

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display the arts of horsemanship. One of the French earls describes the English cavalry as sitting ‘like fixed candlesticks [. . .] and their poor jades / Lob down their heads, drooping the hides and hips’ with gummed eyes and dirty bits (4.2.44–6). The French Dauphin lauds his beloved mount in a lengthy scene that demonstrates the fatal flaw of the French cavalry, otherwise considered the most formidable force on the continent: the French heir has become overly-confident, effete, vulgar and more interested in words than deeds, all signs that his force will fail when faced with the brutally effective English archers and foot soldiers at Agincourt. Speaking of the sonnet he has addressed to his animal, the Dauphin declares ‘my horse is my mistress’ (3.7.43), prompting ribald wordplay among the Constable and Orleans that ends in dismissive remarks about the Dauphin’s valour. The elevation of the horse as a sign of nobility and the right to rule has been transformed in the case of the Dauphin into desire for the horse itself, rather than desire to properly use the animal for its purposes in war. He is in this not unlike Hotspur who calls his roan mount ‘my throne’ (1H4 2.3.69) and tells his wife, who has been ‘banished’ from his bed for a fortnight, ‘when I am a-horseback, I will swear / I love thee infinitely’ (2.3.38, 97–8). Philip Sidney pokes fun at such misdirections of desire when in his Defence of Poetry (1577) he describes his riding master Pugliano so ardently praising the horse that Sidney is moved to wish he were a horse instead of a human (Duncan-Jones 1995: 73). Not all references to the manage involve the delicate and sensitive training advocated in the horsemanship treatises: King Henry’s secretary Gardiner advises that growing heresies among the population must be repressed brutally, in the same way that those who tame wild horses ‘stop their mouths with stubborn bits and spur ’em / Till they obey the manage’ (H8 5.2.57–8). Traditionally the elevation of the rider on horseback above those on foot indicated superiority of status, wealth, character – something that was easily converted into its reverse via the image of a man or woman unhorsed by some means. When Mistresses Page and Ford conspire to separate Falstaff from his horses by forcing him to pawn them for cash to court them (WIV 2.1.86), their intention is likely frustrated by the fact that the knight has no horse in the first place, meaning he is not a very noble knight at all since he has neither the wealth nor the (literally) superior position a horse permits a rider. Of course, he proves exactly that in 1H4 in the robbery at Gad’s Hill, where Poins and Hal take his horse away, leaving the fat knight complaining he’ll break his wind by having to walk (2.2.1–30). Hal reduces Falstaff’s status even further by instructing him to ‘lay thine ear close to the ground’ (2.2.31–2). To the old knight’s complaint that he is being ‘colted’ (i.e., cheated), Hal observes that’s impossible since he’s ‘uncolted’ (i.e., unhorsed; 2.2.38). Another comical inversion comes in SHR when Grumio reports the unhorsing of Katherina, ‘she under her horse; thou shouldst have heard in how miry a place, how she was bemoiled, how he [Petruccio] left her with the horse upon her’ (4.1.66–8). Apart from the sexual innuendo here, the episode clarifies that Katherina’s punishment involves demotion from fully human status, not merely removed from horseback but placed under the horse, reducing her to less than a beast of burden. In a more tragic register, although King Lear clearly arrives at his daughters’ estates with 236

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horses (he calls repeatedly for them: LR 1.4.250, 1.5.32 and 1.5.46), he ends up wandering the heath on foot, no more elevated than a beggar like Poor Tom. And when Adonis’s courser (which he later calls his palfrey; VEN 384) abandons him for a ‘breeding jennet’, the implication is not only that the two animals respond to the heat of passion in a way that Adonis resists with the goddess Venus, but that he is reduced in several other ways – his masculinity under erasure, his objective in the hunt delayed, while he is left subject to Venus’s attention rather than able to depart at speed (VEN 260). Orlando seems to feel a related emasculation when he complains that his brother denies him the proper place of a gentleman: ‘His horses are bred better, for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage and to that end riders dearly hired’ (AYL 1.1.10–12). In effect, Adonis and Orlando are gelded, cut off from the animal expression of their masculine authority. Throughout the period’s literature, riding and horsemanship are associated with sexual activity, gender and marriage. The association of riding with intercourse is inspired both by the intimate connection of human and animal bodies as well as by the motion of the rider on horseback, which seemed analogous to the movements of coitus. The application of training methods to a horse can be a means for describing the taming of any creature, including a woman; that is clearly what is at stake in LC , where the young man’s facility with horses makes him more tempting to the young maiden, and suggests his skill in deflowering her: Well could he ride, and often men would say, ‘That horse his mettle from his rider takes, Proud of subjection, noble by the sway, What round, what bounds, what course, what stop he makes!’ And controversy hence a question takes, Whether the horse by him became his deed, Or he his manage, by th’ well-doing steed. (106–12) In PER , the Bawd promises Marina to Lysimachus, despite the fact that she is ‘not paced yet’ (i.e., is still a virgin; 4.5.67), and so advises that Lysimachus must ‘take some pains to work her to your manage’ (4.5.67–8). Arcites’ fatal fall in TNK comes after a display of horsemanship in response to a surly mount’s efforts to rear and bolt, forgetting its ‘school-doing, being therein trained / And of kind manage’ (5.4.68–9). Falling on Arcites, his horse ‘[b]ecomes the rider’s load’ (5.4.82), hinting at an inversion of the more ‘natural’ relationship, a possible reference to Arcites’ inverted values (since this is a play about love which usually involves the woman being ‘ridden’), demonstrated in his pre-tournament prayers to Mars for victory, rather than to Venus for love. Women were usually understood to be the ‘ridden’ partner, as Puck’s ditty in MND hints: ‘Jack shall have Jill, / Nought shall go ill, / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well’ (3.2.461–3). Cleopatra clearly invokes this kind of human–animal 237

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relationship when she envies Antony’s horse: ‘O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony! (ANT 1.5.22). The scandalous sexual exploitation of the jailer’s mad daughter by the Wooer dressed as Palamon in TNK includes the daughter’s self-comparison to the ‘chestnut mare the Duke has’ who is ‘horribly in love with’ Palamon’s mount but rejected by him (5.2.61–2). Women were sometimes depicted as not fully human in the sense that they did not enjoy the degree of reason attributed to men; marriage could therefore be seen as the yoking of two creatures of different species. A sexually available woman was called a hobby-horse, on the premise that she resembled a manufactured performance outfit for Morris celebrations that let the wearer act out the gambols of a spirited mount, or in other words meaning she was light and false. Katherina’s tumble off horseback in SHR aligns her with the animal that bears her, while her ‘fall’ resonates with her fall into sexuality through marriage. The courser and jennet episode in VEN reflects complexly on the gender inversions involved in the aggressive courtship by a female goddess for a recalcitrant male human, expressing as it does a more direct and gender-normed image of animal passion. If, however, the bestial nature of the two horses’ courtship also suggests by contrast that Adonis is unnaturally disdainful of physical indulgence, then the horses might be a hint that his resistance to Venus is also as inappropriately asexual or anti-sexual. Sexual activity, however, usually seemed to many early moderns a sign of human beings’ beastliness, a thing of the body not the mind, that tempted humans to gratify their lowest natures and forget their more godly attributes. Whether or not LC is Shakespeare’s own writing has been disputed, but its female narrator depicts the handsome young man who has stolen her virginity as a skilled horseman of the sort we find in the plays: ‘Well could he ride [. . .] And controversy hence a question takes, / Whether the horse by him became his deed, / Or he his manage, by th’ well-doing steed’ (106–12). The youth’s ability to dominate his mount and lead it to prodigious accomplishments aligns with his ability to persuade the chaste young woman to surrender herself to him; that she refers to her virtue as a ‘city’ under siege (176–7) suggests that the youth’s horsemanship also reflects his skill in the battles of love. SONs 50 and 51 ‘equimorphize’ desire itself by casting the speaker as a rider whose mount ‘As if by some instinct’ knows that leaving the speaker’s beloved is torture: ‘The bloody spur cannot provoke him on [. . .] Which heavily he answers with a groan’ (50, 7–11). When returning to his lover, however, ‘Then can no horse with my desires keep pace’ (51, 9). Yet the horse and desire itself oscillate until it is unclear which is which, an effect enhanced by references to groaning, fiery spurring and other aspects of riding that evoke either sexual consummation or frustration. Breeding horses was an important part of both economic and ideological aspects of early modern culture, providing an adaptable register for discussions of race, religion, nation and other human differences. When Iago hounds Brabantio with the mental image of the Moor Othello making ‘the beast with two backs’ with his daughter Desdemona, it is no accident that he turns to the horse for one of his animal comparisons: ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews 238

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neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans!’ (OTH 1.1.114– 15, 109–12). Horses are here linked to sexuality, as we might expect, but are also the vehicles by which a threat to nation and race are conveyed. As a Moor, Othello is ‘barbarous’, that is derived from Berber or Arab blood, and so a foreigner, above all marked as such by his skin colour. The French characters in H5 cannot understand how the English can persist since they are a nation that drink merely ‘sodden water, / A drench for sur-reined jades’ (3.5.18–19); like their horses, the English are imagined to be weak and useless creatures, unfit for war. It is surprising to note, given the absolute ubiquity of the horse in the imagery and context of the plays, that horses were probably never featured on stage, unlike dogs or other animals – even bears or apes might have appeared in the flesh but as far as theatre historians can determine, horses were almost entirely absent, reported only indirectly in characters’ speeches. Such absence is particularly important in the history plays, where nearly every battle would have involved troops of the animals. H5 calls attention to this absence directly, advising the audience, ‘Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth’ (Pro 26–7). Yet by constantly mentioning that characters arrive or depart on horseback, and even by presenting the labour of training and caring for horses, the plays feel as if they are populated by veritable herds. What is more, affection and loyalty to individual equines is noted, as when King Richard begs ‘[f]orgiveness, horse’ (R2 5.5.90) for blaming his mount Barbary for accepting Bolingbroke’s hand on the reins; or when one of the carriers in 1H4 asks his fellow to ‘beat [soften] Cut’s saddle; put a few flocks in the point [stuff the pommel with padding]’ because the ‘poor jade is wrung in the withers’ (2.1.5–6). Even the brutally practical Ulysses imagines the fate of a dead war horse, ‘fall’n in first rank, / L[ying] there for pavement to the abject rear, / O’er-run and trampled on’ (TRO 3.3.162–4). In contrast, characters who fail to value horses are suspect: even Hotspur, who so enjoys noble horsemanship, demonstrates his lack of consideration for his troops’ mounts when he arrives at the battlefield with ‘journey-bated’ horses (1H4 4.3.26). Falstaff deserves his reduced status afoot, since his physical engrossment makes him a ‘horse-back-breaker’ (1H4 2.4.236), a sign that his fat is not merely jolly but the result of a drain or burden on others. (C) Topsell reflects the general opinion of the horse, much repeated throughout literary texts, natural histories and riding manuals, when he calls it the ‘most noble and necessary creature of all four-footed beasts’ (1658: 220). English horsemen like John Astley represented the importance of the writings of Xenophon in cultivating good training (Astley’s The Art of Riding [1584] was in part a translation of Xenophon’s On Riding), but also were increasingly influenced by Italian masters: Philip Sidney, for instance, refers in his Defence of Poesy to his time observing and learning from John Pietro Pugliano, riding master to the court of the Emperor Maximillian II. Writing by the Italian master Claudio Corte was translated into English in 1584 (possibly by Thomas Bedingly), and the Neapolitan Federigo Grisone’s manual of manage riding, Gli ordine di cavalcare (1550), was redacted by Thomas Blundeville in 1560. There is 239

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some debate over how much, exactly, the plays reflect a deep knowledge of horses and horsemanship: Carleton Brown (1912) sees the playwright drawing mainly on classical sources, while Spurgeon (1935) finds him uniquely compassionate and aware among his fellow playwrights. Fatout (1940) discusses the breeds, colours and types of horse with which Shakespeare would have been familiar. Levin (1946) discusses the absence of horses as itself a nascent convention, a means for making meaning, especially in the case of Falstaff who is repeatedly and insistently removed from horseback or from owning horses. Dent (1987) covers nearly all of the many uses of horses in the plays, from agriculture and transportation, to their service in the hunt; his work is notable for dealing with the lower-class servants like grooms and carriers involved in horsekeeping, and for addressing horses in crime and the law. SHR ’s use of horses and horsemanship metaphors is detailed in work by Roberts (1983, 2002), Hartwig (1982), Watson (1983), Heaney (1998) and Sloan (2004). Boehrer (2005, 2010: 28–73) charts the diminishment of the horse as a marker of social rank and attendant chivalric values, while De Ornellas (2014) describes the horse as a blank slate, endlessly malleable to represent divergent values. Maclean (1966) associates the views of various characters in the histories on time with their language about horses and horsemanship. Of the second tetralogy specifically, Watson (1983) argues that horsemanship is used to express control of both self and other, the premise for good rule. Borlik links the failures of horsemanship especially in 1H4 to the environmental problem of dearth, while MacInnes (2011) describes references to horses and breeding in the histories to geohumoural theory, particularly that involving the distinction between English and French animals. Richard III’s infamous horselessness reflects the character’s ‘creaturely life’ argues Sheen (2016: 285). Berger focuses on the carriers of 1H4, describing them as the equivalent of truck drivers at a rest stop (2015). Horses as erotic objects and partners figure in the work of Blythe (1980), Ross (1980) and Raber (2013, 2016, 2020). States (1985) discusses the horse imagery in MAC , which he argues reflects the spurring ambition that controls Macbeth. VEN ’s courser episode is the subject of work by Doebler (1988) and Blythe (1995) as well as Raber (2013). Smith (2013) argues that rhythm in the poetry is often determined by the movement of a rider on horseback. KR hound. (A) A general descriptor for a hunting dog: a hound might be sight- or scentoriented (thus including everything from bloodhounds to greyhounds). While they are usually distinguished from dogs that flush game or retrieve it, dig for prey or serve in ordinary household tasks, the use of the term is variable, and so a hound might sometimes refer to a harrier, a dog who chases down game, or to a retriever. Caius’s Of Englishe Dogges (1576) divides dogs into three groups: ‘gentle’ (hunting) dogs, ‘homely’ ones and ‘currish’ ones; among the hunting dogs, Caius names harriers, terriers, bloodhounds, ‘gazehounds’ (sight hunters), greyhounds, the ‘leviner’ (another type of scent hound), the tumbler who seems to ‘pretend friendship’ and gambol with his prey to seize it (11), and stealers, or night-time hunting dogs. Hounds, and the hunts in which they are 240

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central, have several possible meanings at any given time, beyond the actual activity in which they are involved: the analogy of love to the hunt is a commonplace in the period, while the hunt and the hounds that accompany hunters can refer to any kind of preyseeking, including that directed at humans, i.e., war. Chasing certain prey with hounds encodes masculine and noble identity. And the many types of dogs, hounds among them, can stand in for the various classes of human beings. (B) Theseus and Hippolyta’s famous exchange about her memory of bear-baiting in Crete in MND clearly marks Theseus’s hounds as being from a famous lineage: My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind: So flewed, so sanded, and their heads are hung With ears that sweep away the morning dew; Crook-kneed, and dewlapped like Thessalian bulls; Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells’ (4.1.118–22) These are heavy dogs with long jowls, stocky legs, light brown colour, loose skin at the neck and a relatively slow gait – a perfect description of the bloodhound, despite the fact that Cretan hounds were usually lighter, faster animals. Hounds’ ‘bell-like’ voices reflect the concordia discors that Hippolyta’s and Theseus’ argument, and wedding, exemplify in this scene. The music of the hounds is referenced ironically in the hunt scene of TIT , where Tamora notes how the ‘babbling echo mocks the hounds, / Replying shrilly to the well-tuned horns’ to hint at the ‘double hunt’ that is taking place (i.e., of both animal and human prey; 2.2.17–19). As is evidenced in Theseus’s boast about his carefully matched hounds, which were bred for musicality as well as prowess at the hunt, hounds are an accoutrement of the rich, since both the hunt and dog breeding incurred significant expense. Thus, in the induction of SHR the lord who enters discussing the performance of his hounds by individual names signals his aristocratic status: ‘Breathe Merriman [. . .] And couple Clowder with the deep-mouthed brach’ (that is, give Merriman a rest and leash Clowder to the deep-voiced bitch; Ind. 1.16–17). The Lord tricks Christopher Sly, the poor drunk he meets, into believing he is actually noble in part by tempting him with a hunt featuring ‘hounds’ that will ‘make the welkin answer them / And fetch shrill echoes from the hollow earth’ (Ind. 2.39–44). The link between hunting and celebrations of events like marriages is perhaps implied in the framing of SHR ’s various couplings of its characters with this set of references to hounds and the hunt. Other hunts that accompany marriages do not end so well. When Titus eagerly arranges one for Saturninus and Tamora, he clearly hopes to create a kind of concordia discors among his previously outraged emperor and war hostages. ‘Uncouple here,’ he tells the hunting party, loosing his hounds, ‘and let us make a bay / And wake the emperor and his lovely bride’ (TIT 2.1.3–4). Marcus brags that he has dogs that ‘Will rouse the proudest panther in the chase’, but among the targets of this hunt, unbeknownst to the Romans, are Bassianus, Lavinia, Mutius and Martius, all of whom are caught in 241

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Tamora and Aaron’s traps (2.1.21). Hounds can also present a threat, either directly or indirectly, to their human companions. The tale of Actaeon reminds audiences that both humans and hounds are capable of mistaken violence. Tamora mentions the myth when she wishes that she could destroy Bassianus the way Diana dispatched Actaeon (TIT 2.2.63–4), immediately before her sons do in fact kill him. The reference is particularly appropriate since she has just been attempting to seduce Aaron, thus linking the penetrative gaze of Actaeon to Bassianus’s intrusion and harsh words (and not coincidentally, if entirely perversely, aligning herself with the chaste goddess). Love as a form of hunt shapes TN in a more comedic fashion. Orsino rejects the proper pastime of hunting for wallowing in his misguided love for Olivia, imagining that his desires for her ‘like fell and cruel hounds’ pursue him instead (TN 1.1.21). Like Tamora, Orsino alludes to the Actaeon myth, but this time as a fully internalized conflict. While Orsino is neither killed by nor kills Olivia, his words do predict the outbursts of retributive anger he later directs briefly at Viola/Cesario. In many of the examples we’ve discussed so far, it is human beings who act as hounds, reflecting the way animals stand in for human character and actions. Macbeth takes this analogical possibility in a different direction when he qualifies the First Murderer’s assertion that he is a man (and so capable of the actions required of him), pointing out that among men there are as many kinds as there are types of dogs, ‘hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs (MAC 3.1.94). Hounds’ role in defining gender difference is at stake for a poetic figure like Adonis, who persistently rejects Venus in favour of joining the boar-hunt. Adonis insists on a kind of chaste masculinity, making himself almost a cross-gendered version of Diana. His manly courage, however, leaves him vulnerable to the monstrous beast’s ferocious nature. Venus tries to lure him with the skills of other, less dangerous prey, giving the example of the hare who ‘runs among a flock of sheep’ or mingles with a herd of deer ‘[t]o make the cunning hounds mistake [his] smell [. . .] the hot scent-snuffing hounds are driven to doubt / Ceasing their clamorous cry till they have singled / With much ado the cold fault cleanly out’ (VEN 685–94). But stubborn Adonis goes after the boar, to his mind the only truly worthy foe. Venus ‘harkens for his hounds and for his horn: / Anon she hears them chant it lustily,’ but learns from the hounds’ ‘timorous yelping’ that it is the boar they face (868–9, 881), thus realizing Adonis’ probable fate too late to prevent it. (C) Regarding Theseus and Hippolyta’s discussion of hounds in MND , Gabriner (1994) observes that Theseus’s response indicates a continued tension about his marriage, which involves a new status (husband) and a challenge to ideas of masculinity given Hippolyta’s martial history. The role of concordia discors in the hounds’ matched voices has preoccupied critics: Brooks (AR2: Introduction) argues that Theseus ‘stands for rational order’ and ‘cultivates what is harmonious’ in the rule of Athens much as he does in the case of his hounds and his marriage (ciii); his insights are echoed more generally by Chaudhuri (AR3: 105–8) though without reference to the hounds specifically. Berry (2001), like Gabriner, finds there is plenty of competition in the debate about which hounds, Spartan or Athenian, are better (212). KR 242

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human, humane, humanity. (A) A primate of the family Hominidae, homo sapiens is characterized by upright posture, bipedalism, manual dexterity, complex language acquisition and sophisticated social organization. Early moderns thought of humans as belonging just below the angels and just above higher orders of mammals on the scala natura (ladder of nature), the hierarchical order of all things most early Europeans accepted as the structure of earthly creation. The scala derives from Aristotle’s ranking in his Historia animalium of those beings that have a rational, a locomotive and a vegetative soul, but the idea was much elaborated and expanded throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Humans displayed attributes of those orders above as well as below them in the scala, while gradations within categories allowed for differences among humans, as well as between humans and other beings. For most Renaissance thinkers and writers, humans were distinct for their intellectual and spiritual capacities, yet in danger of devolving toward lower rungs of the ladder. (B) One of the principal attributes that raises humans to a superior position over animals is the quality of reason. ERR , perhaps Shakespeare’s most irrational play, acknowledges this over and over again but mainly because reason seems completely inadequate to the events it stages, which involve two sets of identical twins mistaken for one another. Adriana registers the madness characters in the play experience, and on which the plot rests, when she exclaims at Antipholus’s apparent reappearance in the street though everyone present ‘knows’ he fled to and was taken into the abbey where they are gathered, ‘Even now we housed him in the abbey here, / And how he’s there, past thought of human reason’ (5.2.188–9). MND also stages episodes of apparent madness when the young lovers are dosed by Oberon’s love juice. Lysander, claiming ‘human skill’ and ‘[r]eason’ that ‘becomes the marshal to my will’ (2.2.123–4), horrifies Helena, who is certain she knows he is in love with Hermia – while he is convinced he is now rationally aware of her superiority to Hermia, Helena takes this as cruel mockery. Paulina describes the possibility of refusing to believe Apollo’s oracle as ‘monstrous to our human reason / As my Antigonus to break his grave / And come again to me’ (WT 5.1.41–3) – although Paulina’s piety here is a bit suspect given that she knows Hermione at least is waiting to be brought back to ‘life’. Indeed, human reason is never fully in evidence in many of the plays – when Cassio becomes drunk, for instance, or when characters like Lady Macbeth are driven mad – suggesting that this important faculty is unstable and provisional, leaving the category of ‘human’ likewise unstable and provisional. Humans in the plays exhibit other qualities that seem definitional, but often prove not to be: mercy, compassion, modesty, a sense of justice. Although she has fled to the forest with Lysander, Hermia asks him specifically to ‘[l]ie further off, in human modesty’ (MND 2.2.61): unlike the animals that share with the two young lovers this wild environment, humans are supposed to cover their nakedness, avoid sexual congress outside of marriage and honour the rules of decorum. One of the more famous moments in MAC is Lady Macbeth’s reaction to her husband’s letter informing her of the witches’ prophecy. She worries that Macbeth is too compassionate to undertake to murder King Duncan: ‘Yet do I fear thy nature, / It is too full o’th’milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way’ 243

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(1.5.16–18). Her remark is complicated: her reference to kindness suggests an obligation to one’s own kind as well as humaneness, expressing the degree to which her ambition drives her to exit the category of human beings. At the same time, while Macbeth seems full of milk, Lady Macbeth characterizes herself both as one who has ‘given suck’, or fed a child on milk, but who is willing to dash out that child’s brains (1.7.54, 58). Certainly, her milk is now, as she demands of the spirits, turned to ‘gall’ (1.5.48), either because she suckles demons or because she offers only poison to her husband. Either way, these passages associate humanity with ‘natural’ functions of motherhood, like the uncorrupted milk Lady Macbeth seems to lack. MV also addresses the conundrum of ‘humane’ behaviour through the currish persistence of Shylock in demanding his pound of flesh from Antonio. Shylock is constantly animalized, most often called a dog, and at least once a wolf, and thus portrayed slavering over the chunk of meat he will carve from his enemy’s body. Yet the Duke presumes to believe that Shylock will ‘show [his] mercy’ and be ‘touched with humane gentleness and love’ to forgive the debt (4.1.19, 24). Since Shylock too is neither ‘kind’ (he is of a different tribe, and therefore the Christians see him as a different species) nor ‘gentle’ (which is homophonic with ‘gentile’, a term designating Christians only), he resists being categorized for abstract (Christian) qualities like mercy or remorse. Not all human beings are humane. One might go so far as to say the plays even entertain the idea that not all humans are human. In contrast, some non-humans are more humane than their human peers. In TMP , Ariel reports to Prospero that his revenge against Alonso, Antonio, Sebastian and their company is accomplished. Their discomfiture, and Gonzalo’s tears, inspire Ariel to a moment of powerful rebuke: Ariel:

Prospero: Ariel:

Your charm so strongly works ’em That, if you now beheld them, your affections Would become tender. Dost thou think so, spirit? Mine would, sir, were I human. (5.1.17–20)

To be tender is to be human, something the impervious airy Ariel somehow knows well. His words bring Prospero to an epiphany: ‘Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling / Of their afflictions, and shall not myself [. . .] be kindlier moved than thou art?’ (5.1.21–4). Again, the language of kind joins the discourse of feeling and touching, reintegrating the sensitive, the locomotive and the rational souls of a human being to prevent Prospero from becoming inhumane, another Lady Macbeth or Shylock. And yet it is precisely a non-human, one who – like Caliban, his alter ego – is ‘not honoured with / A human shape’ (1.2.283–4), whose intervention accomplishes this rescue. Whether certain groups count as ‘human’ is a constant undercurrent in many plays. Women, foreigners, racial and religious Others are all sometimes viewed as animal, not human. This distinction, however, is fluid, ephemeral and often arbitrarily enforced. We see 244

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Shylock called a dog and destroyed as if he were in fact a street cur, yet at the conclusion of MV he is forced to become a Christian, which removes him from his (non-human, bestial) tribe or kind, albeit without giving him a genuine place in the Christian world. Conversion, the play seems to suggest, can overcome species category. Because of Othello’s black skin, Iago is able to constantly portray him as an animal, as in his vivid descriptions to Brabantio of his daughter in sexual congress with the Moor: ‘Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’ and ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’ (OTH 1.1.87–8, 109–10). But Iago hints that he is equally capable of thinking of Rodrigo and Desdemona as animals: he mocks Rodrigo for being suicidally in love with Desdemona, saying ‘Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a guinea-hen I would change my humanity with a baboon’ (1.3.315–17). Desdemona is transformed here into a domestic fowl (or prostitute, depending on how audiences wanted to interpret the reference to a guinea-hen), and Rodrigo is called a baboon for his lust. Slippery indeed is the ladder of creation if love can render one a baboon. Women too are commonly cast as various animals, as if their assumed sexual profligacy, their lack of comparable reason and their ideological location as always subordinate removes them from the status of human beings. Even apparently loving epithets like hen, chuck or hind bestialize them. Katherina in SHR is an ass and an ox; Puck promises to mend the lovers’ mix-ups in MND by singing ‘[t]he man shall have his mare again’ (3.2.463), and TIT ’s Tamora is every wild animal her interlocutors can imagine. Any individual who is not male and upper class could potentially fail to qualify as human. ‘What a piece of work is a man,’ muses Hamlet, ‘how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties [. . .] how like an angel [. . .] the paragon of animals’ (HAM 2.2.269–73). While he ends by dismissing ‘this quintessence of dust’ (2.2.274), he has set up the standard by which humans must be judged. Who can achieve such glorious superiority? Perhaps Talbot does in 1H6, embodying the perfect military leader: ‘valiant Talbot, above human thought, / Enacted wonders’ (1.1.121–2); or the safely-dead Antony in ANT , of whom Agrippa says, ‘A rarer spirit never / Did steer humanity’ (5.1.31–2). More common are Lear’s and Titus’s conclusion, that men are not only not human or even animal, but inert matter – mere stones (LR 5.3.255; TIT 3.1.37–47). In the words of Albany in LR , ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep’ (4.2.50–1). Rather than the exceptionalism of Hamlet’s proposed ‘piece of work’, the plays tend to endorse the negative exceptionalism of Albany and his fellows. (C) It is possible to insist that every piece of critical scholarship on Shakespeare’s works is in some way about humans or humanity. Those that link the category and condition of ‘the human’ to Shakespeare’s animals include nearly all of the bibliographical works listed in this volume. KR humble-bee. (A) A bumble bee, a large, hairy bee belonging to the genus Bombus. ‘Humble’ refers to its loud and distinctive humming. (B) In Shakespeare’s plays, the humble-bee, unlike the honey-bee, tends to appear in comical or faintly ribald contexts, and possibly (in TRO and LLL ) in political allegory. 245

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When Titania directs her fairies to feed Bottom with various delicacies, she commands them to steal ‘[t]he honey-bags [. . .] from the humble-bees, / And for night-tapers, crop their waxen thighs / And light them at the fiery glow-worms’ eyes’ (MND 3.1.162–4). The humble-bee’s honey-bag is the cage or basket (formed from thick hairs on the bees’ legs) in which pollen and nectar are packed for the flight back to the hive (Chinery 1993: 277). To steal the honey-bag would in fact mean sacrificing the bee. Titania’s notion of the humble-bee as a sort of living candle is equally fanciful, for the thighs and indeed the rest of the bee’s body are covered in pollen rather than wax. Bottom is ready to sacrifice the humble-bee to his own pleasure. He asks Cobweb to take up some weapons ‘and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and good Monsieur, bring me the honey-bag [. . .] and good Monsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not. I would be loath to have you overflown with a honey-bag’ (MND 4.1.11–16). Humblebees are mostly black, but various species are banded with different colours, to which their common names often refer. Bottom’s ‘red-hipped humble-bee’ almost certainly refers to the Red-tailed Bumble Bee (Bombus lapidarius). Similarly, Lafeu in AWW insultingly calls the flamboyantly dressed Paroles ‘that red-tailed humble-bee’ (4.5.6– 7). Pandarus consoles himself with a little ditty about the fate of the ‘agent’, as he calls himself, when the lovers he has brought together are satiated with each other and turn on him in disgust. Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing, Till he hath lost his honey and his sting; And being once subdued in armed tail, Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail. (TRO 5.11.41–4) The humble-bee here is male, apparently alluding to Troilus, and the loss of sting and honey has clear sexual implications. It has been suggested that Pandarus’s poem also contains a reference to the downfall of the Earl of Essex, nicknamed the Humble-bee (Petti 1960: 213). While a favourite with the Queen, he sang merrily; ‘when his rebellion (the arméd tail) failed, his influence and his life were swiftly terminated’ (Petti 1960: 213). The case for a political allegory may be stronger in LLL . There the humble-bee appears in another brief verse that is repeated three times. The context is one of the many wit battles between Armado and Moth; here they quibble over the meaning of ‘l’envoy’, which is the conclusion to a ‘moral’ (the lesson). Armado supplies the moral, which is suggestive of a beast fable, although the verse turns out to be a play on odd and even: ‘The fox, the ape and the humble-bee / Were still at odds, being but three’ (3.1.82– 3). Armado repeats the moral at 3.1.86–7, and Moth adds the l’envoy: ‘Until the goose came out of door, / And stayed the odds by adding four’ (3.1.88–9). Moth repeats the moral (at 3.1.92–3), and Armado repeats the l’envoy (3.1.94–5), leading Moth to remark, ‘A good l’envoy, ending in the goose’ (3.1.96). Woudhuysen (AR3: 167, n. 96, 101) notes that the last syllable of ‘l’envoy’ sounds like the French word for goose (‘oie’), so that Moth is in effect calling Armado a goose. This implied bilingual insult may explain 246

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the inclusion of the characters’ exchange about the meaning of ‘l’envoy’, although it is a relatively long discussion for a relatively small return. (C) Marren and Mabey (2010: 393–5) survey the rich variety of popular names given to the humble-bee in various parts of Britain. Petti (1960), in keeping with his reading of the humble-bee in TRO , suggests that the beast fable in LLL is a political allegory making use of well-known nicknames for Elizabeth’s ministers and courtiers. The fox is William Cecil, the ape, Robert Cecil (William’s son), the humble-bee, the Earl of Essex, and the goose, Walter Raleigh. The first three strive for political influence with the Queen, until Raleigh, making the odd number even, joins in the contest when he is briefly released from prison in 1592. But evidently dissatisfied with Petti’s reading, Woudhuysen (AR3: 166, n. 82–3, 86–9) holds that the meaning of the beast fable remains obscure. KE hunt, hunting. The pursuit of wild animals, the hunt was a critical part of early modern social, political, economic and religious life; it was a daily endeavour for some, while a highly ritualized and spectacular event for those of the upper ranks, and thus a rich source of images, metaphors and allusions in Shakespeare’s plays. Hunting usually involved a chase either on foot or on horses, often accompanied by hounds; weapons used included spears and arrows, while for royal hunts a host of companions and servants provided support for the hunting party. The hunt was a key instrument in the nobility’s demonstration of power over both animals and humans, while for the lower classes hunting was both a necessary daily activity and a potential source of devastating trouble – as well as political resistance – when pursuit of game violated poaching laws. The poem introducing Gascoigne’s Noble Art of Venerie or Hunting (1575) calls hunting ‘A noble sport to recreate the minds of men [. . .] a sport for noble peers, a sport for gentle bloods’ (but notes that the ‘pain’ is left to servants who labour for their masters). Hunting was associated with specialized terminology: in general, the sport of hunting is referred to as ‘venery’; ‘coursing’ refers to the use of sight, rather than scent, hounds to chase game, while hunters might use a ‘stalking-horse’ to hide behind in order to surprise game. ‘Fowling’ refers to the hunt for avian prey. Elite hunts focused on the stag, the hart or male red deer, the hind or female red deer, roe deer, as well as the boar (far rarer in the Renaissance because of dwindling numbers), and even the hare and other smaller animals. ‘Bow and stable’ hunting involved beaters who drove game animals to hunters positioned in ambush who wielded bows and arrows. Royal hunts theoretically trained young nobles for practices associated with war and enforced social hierarchies; complex rituals like the ‘breaking of the stag’ (its dismemberment and distribution to hunters) registered rank and noble favouritism. The hunt could represent many forms of human relation: the pursuit of a loved one in courtship, with the male hunter chasing the (usually reticent) female target of his affection, was a common formula in poetry, while armies or warriors might hunt their enemies in war. There was, however, a competing early modern tradition that scorned the hunt as a waste of resources, an 247

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exercise in cruelty, a practice designed to degrade humans and enact horrible suffering on innocent animals. Some hunting manuals, like Gascoigne’s, register a degree of internal conflict by including poems in the voice of prey animals, or commenting on the possible political implications of sudden, unanticipated hunters’ deaths when attacked by enraged beasts. (B) The hunt, presented as both an appropriate accompaniment to the pursuit of a love object, and a figurative or metaphoric register by which the experience of love could be expressed, structures several plays. The Induction of SHR finds the Lord who first enters ‘from hunting’ dictating the care of his hounds to his huntsmen (Ind. 1.14, s.d.), while Christopher Sly, the drunken target of the Lord’s elaborate ruse, is offered the option of hunting or hawking among other noble pursuits, all of which frames the entertainment that follows in relation to the sport. And indeed, in the play that follows, Petruccio discusses his tactic of starving Katherine in terms of falcon-taming: ‘My falcon now is sharp and passing empty, / And till she stoop she must not be full-gorged, / For then she never looks upon her lure’ (4.1.179–81). Reducing Katherine to the status of an animal pays off for Petruccio not only by forcing her to adapt to her submissive role in marriage, but as a means to turn the tables on his rivals Hortensio and Lucentio when he wins his wager that he will succeed in taming her. A hunt’s dispatch of prey is not more important than its structuring of social relations among men. In MND the gendering of the hunt is complicated by Theseus’s bride, Hippolyta, a skilled warrior and equal of the men around her. Aristocratic women, including Queen Elizabeth, did hunt enthusiastically, embracing the image of Diana, goddess of the hunt, for her autonomy and prowess as much as for her chastity. As an Amazon, Hippolyta has participated in famous hunts, a fact that provokes Theseus to jealousy when the two head out in advance of their wedding to course with hounds. Hippolyta reminisces, ‘I was with Hercules and Cadmus once / When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear / With hounds of Sparta’ (4.1.111–13). To her praise of those Spartan hounds (and their heroic masters), Theseus responds a bit testily that his animals are their equal or better, ‘matched in mouth like bells’ and so more ‘tunable’ in their combined musical voices (4.1.122–3). Both the hounds’ bell-like voices raised in pursuit of prey, and the reconciliation of these two competitors through marriage reflect the concept of concordia discors, or the harmonious balancing of opposites. The moment also retroactively casts the play’s action as a kind of comparable hunt, with lovers in pursuit of one another but ultimately amicably sorted into marital pairs. Even the changeling boy, the source of conflict between Titania and Oberon, is presumably returned to Oberon to become ‘[k]night of his train, to trace the forests wild’ (2.1.25), a fate that sounds much like accompanying a hunt. In LLL , the convention of using the hunt as a metaphor for love is central. As soon as Navarre’s fellow lords swear to withdraw from female society to find the ‘fame, that all hunt after in their lives’ (1.1.1), they encounter the Princess of France and her ladies, and immediately become erotically obsessed with the women. ‘Courtship’ in this play is both multilayered and sportive: the women come to engage in diplomacy, and instead 248

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(or perhaps, in an entirely predictable courtly process) find themselves joking, playing games, masquerading – and hunting. The whole action of the play occurs in a park, the usual site of noble hunts, and Act 4 involves an actual hunt, allowing a series of cliched plays on words like ‘deer/dear’ or ‘hart/heart’, and references to being slain by love. ‘The King, he is hunting the deer; I am coursing myself’ muses Berowne (4.3.1–2). But the hunt itself is of the bow and stable type: the Princess asks ‘forester, my friend, where is the bush / That we must stand and play the murderer in?’ (4.1.7–8), meaning that servants will drive the deer to her to shoot. The Princess demonstrates noble authority and dominion over nature in a suitably (especially for women) restrained form of the hunt; yet, because bow and stable hunts were often despised as lazy, false or insufficiently virile exhibitions of aggression and fighting skills – unlike coursing, a more adventurous practice – this hunt further emasculates the men in both its practical form and its metaphoric dimension. Instead of storming the women’s battlements in war-like fashion, they are peppered with the arrows of love; instead of racing headlong after the prey on horseback, they gather statically for a spectator sport. The Princess articulates the blend of courtship conventions and hunting imagery that governs this hunt when she laments the fate of the innocent deer she shoots: Not wounding, pity would not let me do’t; If wounding, then it was to show my skill, That more for praise than purpose meant to kill. And out of question so it is sometimes, Glory grows guilty of the detested crimes, When for fame’s sake, for praise, an outward part, We bend to that the working of the heart; As I for praise alone now seek to spill The poor deer’s blood, that my heart means no ill. (4.1.27–35) Hunting to gain glory and praise is part of the coquette’s expected repertoire, but the Princess is suspicious of the role of beauty (‘outward parts’) and reputation in romantic pursuit. The actual slaughter of the ‘poor deer’ also seems to register the violence implicit in wooing in a patriarchal context, although in this play the women are the ‘murderers’ and the men ‘killed’ by love’s darts. It turns out the winner of their sport is quickly made the loser, when news arrives soon after of the death of the Princess’s father, putting an end to the games and amusements of the group. The violence of the hunt makes it an uncomfortable metaphor, then, for love and courtship. Jaques’ speech in AYL about the weeping deer, while in some ways an unoriginal elaboration of the tradition in literature and social commentary that deplores the brutality and brutalizing influence of the hunt, resonates with the Princess’s discomfort in LLL about making herself a ‘murderer’ even in love. Duke Senior and his men must hunt while in exile in Arden forest, but the Duke himself has reservations about doing so: ‘Come, shall we go and kill us venison?’ he asks, but then adds that he 249

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is ‘irk[ed]’ that the deer must ‘[h]ave their rounded haunches gored’ (AYL 2.1.21–5). Amiens then recounts Jaques’ extreme response to a stag’s death elsewhere in the wood. As the animal ‘heaved forth such groans [. . .] and the big round tears / Coursed one another down his innocent nose’ (2.1.36–9), Jaques holds forth when the stag is abandoned by the ‘careless herd’: ‘Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens! ’Tis just the fashion. Wherefore do you look Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there?’ Thus most invectively he pierceth through The body of country, city, court, Yea, and of this our life, swearing that we Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what’s worse, To fright the animals and to kill them us In their assigned and native dwelling place. (2.1.52, 55–63) Both the Duke and Jaques anthropomorphize prey animals, the Duke imagining them ‘native burghers’ (2.1.23) and Jaques continuing the image with the language of bankruptcy and political oppression. Yet both acknowledge that humans are interlopers in the territory of these animals, bringing with them violent death. These scenes might strike Shakespeare’s audience as laughable for their absurd elevation of animals to quasi-human status; but they echo the many portraits of prey animals in the hunting manuals who speak for themselves about human destruction and their own suffering. Gascoigne (1575), for instance, includes a poem in the voice of a hart rebuking the author for sharing the techniques for pursuit: ‘oh cruel, be content, to take in worth my tears’ (137). A catalogue of the hart’s many medicinal and other uses is included in the poem, but it expresses at length the animal’s terror, ending with its wish that the hunter might encounter the goddess Diana and, like Actaeon, learn how awful it is to be hunted (140). Indirect but still uncomfortable allusion to the violence of the hunt emerges also at the conclusion of WIV , when Falstaff, who is at the play’s outset marked as a poacher of deer, is forced to play the stag himself when the wives concoct a punishment that has all the attributes of an illicit hunt – he is made a ‘Windsor stag’ (5.5.12), given a crown of horns to wear, and tormented during a night-time romp that includes the noise of ‘hunting horns’ (5.5 s.d.) and endless hunt-inflected wordplay. Mistress Ford tells him Mistress Page is with her, and he responds, ‘Divide me like a bribed [stolen] buck, each a haunch [. . .] Am I a woodman, ha? Speak I like Herne the hunter?’ (5.5.24–8). Since Falstaff has been pursuing the wives throughout, in effect attempting to poach them from their husbands, the final scene offers a fitting turnabout, with Falstaff made prey, wearing the cuckold’s horns himself; his flesh is tenderized, beaten, burned and pinched by what he thinks are fairies. Although Falstaff is not actually killed, his treatment comically reproduces the torments of the hunted deer, if for a more salubrious outcome. 250

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Not all love-hunts end so positively. Venus’s pursuit of Adonis not only involves images of love as a hunt, but ends with Adonis’s death from the tusks of a boar. Venus woos the young man in an inversion of the usual imagery that has the male pursuing the demure resisting female: ‘ “Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemmed thee here / Within the circuit of this ivory pale, / I’ll be park and thou shalt be my deer” ’ (VEN 229–31). If here Adonis resists the encircling arms (the ivory pale) that trap him, later in the poem he temporarily yields ‘as the fleet-foot roe that’s tired with chasing’ (561). But Adonis ultimately will not cooperate in his emasculation and insists upon hunting the ‘churlish swine’ (616), the boar. The contrast is between Venus’s erotic domination and the hyper-masculine sport of boar hunting, which risks life and limb to kill a fierce and bloodthirsty animal. Venus pleads ‘if thou needs wilt hunt, be ruled by me: / Uncouple at the timorous flying hare, / [. . .] / Or at the roe which no encounter dare’ (673–76). Because he is a young man, Adonis aspires to a more challenging hunt to secure that initiation into adult manhood accomplished through coursing after more capable targets. The hunt, however, undoes this heteronormative gendering of the hunt, just as the poem generally fails to resolve to any sexual binarism. Venus describes Adonis’s death thus: ‘ ’nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine / Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin’ (1115–16), using an image of the encounter as erotic union in which Adonis, armed with a phallic boar spear and seeking to pierce the animal’s tough hide with it, is instead penetrated by the ‘loving swine’s’ tusk. Indeed, the plays too represent the violence of the hunt as integrally related to sexual desire. After their marriage, Saturninus and Tamora venture on a ‘solemn [ceremonial] hunting’ (TIT 1.1.612) along with Titus and his family. But this hunt ends up cornering not an animal, but Bassianus and Lavinia, whose destruction Aaron plots with Chiron and Demetrius. Titus rouses the household, ‘The hunt is up [. . .] Uncouple here, and let us make a bay / And wake the emperor and his lovely bride’ (2.1.1–4), only for the Amazonian Tamora to make this ‘sport’ (2.1.19) her own, as she rendezvoused with Aaron in a glade. Meanwhile, Chiron and Demetrius ‘hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground’ (2.1.26). The ‘double hunt’ Tamora imagines the echoing voices of the hounds create (2.2.19) is indeed afoot: its double quarry the two Romans who find Aaron and Tamora ‘horning’ (2.2.67) Saturninus. Tamora wishes she had the goddess Diana’s capacity to transform Bassianus into an Actaeon, and drive ‘the hounds / [. . .] upon thy new-transformed limbs’ (2.2.63–4). Instead, her sons dispatch Bassianus and attack Lavinia, raping and mutilating her. Titus unknowingly echoes their description of her as a dainty doe when he reacts in shock to the sight of her wounds: ‘It was my dear, and he that wounded her / Hath hurt me more than had he killed me dead’ (3.1.92–3). In a play that ends with Chiron and Demetrius baked into a pie and fed to their mother, the chain of links between sexual desire and the hunt extends to include the relationship between hunting and eating, as well as hunting and reproduction. Tamora tries to tempt Aaron during the hunt with the idea of lingering in each other’s arms ‘[w]hiles hounds and horns and sweet melodious birds / Be unto us as is a nurse’s song / Of lullaby to bring her babe asleep’ (2.2.27–9), an ominous image given the later pregnancy that threatens 251

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to betray her dalliance with the Moor, and which results in the nurse’s death. At the same time, Tamora acts as pander to her two sons, allowing them to enjoy ‘the honey we desire’ (2.2.131). Their actions in turn result in Titus’s experiment with pie-making: the sport of hunting has a new set of victims, on whom Titus will ‘play the cook’ (5.2.204) at a final ceremonial feast. Hunting involves acts of savagery and carnage that can be mobilized for explicitly political ends. In JC , the bloodiness of Caesar’s assassination is translated into imagery redolent of the ‘sobbing deer’ episode in AYL and its long tradition in both hunting manuals and literary texts. Antony gazes on the mutilated body of Caesar: Here wast thou bayed, brave hart. Here didst thou fall. And here thy hunters stand Signed in thy spoil and crimsoned in thy lethe. O world, thou wast the forest to this hart, And this indeed, O world, the heart of thee. How like a deer, strucken by many princes Dost thou here lie? (JC 3.1.204–10) The hart/heart homophone is the same as we encounter in the comedies, but its meaning is aimed not at love but rather at undermining the legitimacy of the conspirators’ deeds – those conspirators who gathered around Caesar like ‘princes’ at the ritual breaking or dismemberment of the deer. What they have struck at, however, is, in Antony’s view, the heart of Rome. Indeed, later Antony will imagine Caesar hunting the conspirators in turn: ‘Caesar’s spirit, ranging for revenge [. . .] Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice, / Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war’ (3.1.270–3). On the one hand, the dominion over nature expressed through the killing of hunted animals was part of the logic that guaranteed the monarch’s right to rule, and is by the conspirators clearly inverted, since they depose Caesar in part simply by making him a mere victim. On the other hand, scenes like this convey discomfort over the hunt’s bloodiness, its unleashing of human viciousness, recalling contemporary warnings that hunting coarsened and degraded humans who engaged in it. That hunting was linked to war and vice versa was a Renaissance commonplace. Many of Shakespeare’s history plays mobilize the language of the hunt (as well as images of bear-baiting, and other ways of tormenting or destroying animals). King Henry V rallies his troops at Harfleur by transforming them into hunters of the French: ‘I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, / Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot’ (H5 3.1.31–2). Aufidius in COR (1.1.230–1), Clifford in 2H6 (5.2.15), young Clifford in 3H6 (2.4.13) and Achilles in TRO (2.3.252) are all described as prey being hunted. The herald in JN depicts King John’s English troops fresh from fighting Arthur’s forces as ‘a jolly troop of huntsmen come / [. . .] all with purpled hands, / Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes’ (2.1.321–3). The citizens of Angiers being invited to admit the English to their besieged town rightly decide ‘Blood hath bought blood’ (2.1.329), 252

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rejecting the idea that one group of blood-letters is better than the other. Hunting one’s enemies on the battlefield is likewise problematically levelling where Renaissance beliefs about human exceptionalism are concerned – anyone, any solder, any ruler, can quickly shift from hunter to hunted, from Prince to prey. Humans and animals, in other words, may share more than distinguishes them in the hunt. (C) General historical and cultural background on the hunt can be found in Fatout (1945), Thomas (1983) and Cartmill (1993). Although they cover medieval practices, Thiébaux (1974), Cummins (1988) and Rooney (1993) are also useful background given the historical continuity in most aspects of the hunt. The most comprehensive treatment of hunting specifically in Shakespeare’s oeuvre to date is found in Berry (2001). On poaching, see Manning (1993); on the gendering of the hunt in general, see Bates (2013: 1–43). Spurgeon (1966) insists that Shakespeare demonstrates a strong sense of sympathy with the hunt’s victims (100–1) rather than with the sport’s human participants. Jacques’ address to the sobbing deer in AYLI is discussed in Uhlig (1970), Daley (1986), Watson (2005: 80–91) and Fitter (1999); the play’s general approach to hunting is covered in Daley (1993). Wakeman (2017) discusses moral reservations about the hunts in LLL and AYL . The issue of the hunt as concordia discors is analysed in relation to Theseus and Hippolyta’s hunt in MND in Watson (2011), and in relation to the Induction of SHR in Gabriner (1994). Maguire considers SHR ’s use of hunting imagery as a way to convey patriarchal control (1995). Ramsay-Kurz (2007) addresses Katherina’s transformation from predator to prey in SHR . Falstaff’s role as hunter and hunted in WIV is covered in Jonassen (1991), Stephen (2005) and Nardizzi (2011). Falconry as a hunting practice is discussed in Benson (2006), who summarizes its terminology; and by Schultz (1938), Morrow (1988) and Pope (1992). Mansour details falconry imagery in ROM (2008). The hunt of LLL is treated by Berry (1995) and Wakeman (2017), with the latter situating it as part of the tradition of ambivalence over hunt violence. Lennartz looks at the hunt as an analogue for courtship (2009). Shohet (2002) and Berry (2001b) turn to VEN and Adonis’s lust for hunting. Stewart (2004) addresses hunting’s connection to governance and kingship through the example of King James I. Akhimie (2018) argues that early modern hunting acted as a means for educating and affirming the status of the elite over that of the ‘hard-handed’ lower classes; she uses MND to illustrate how the exclusion of the play’s mechanicals becomes a racializing process (118–22, 136–45). Reid (2020) addresses the class origins and elements of the hunt in AYL and WIV. KR Hydra. (A) The name ‘hydra’ means ‘water serpent’; however, as a proper noun, the name was applied to the many-headed, serpentine monster of Greek mythology that inhabited the swamps near Lerna. How many heads it has varies from story to story. One of Hercules’ tasks was to kill it, yet each time a head was cut off, two would grow in its place, and one of its many heads was immortal. For centuries the many-headed Hydra has served as a derogatory political image for the rebellious mob. 253

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(B) The Hydra is invoked in Shakespeare’s works as a symbol of monstrous or proliferating multiplicity. Cassio in OTH fully realizes that his night of drunkenness has turned him into a beast and lost him his place as Othello’s lieutenant. Urged by Iago to plead for his place again, Cassio in his self-loathing imagines the scene in which Othello ‘shall tell me I am a drunkard: had I as many mouths as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all’ (2.3.298–300). After killing several soldiers dressed as King Henry IV on the battlefield at Shrewsbury, the rebel Douglas comes upon what he assumes to be yet one more counterfeit: ‘Another king!’ he exclaims; ‘They grow like Hydra’s heads’ (1H4 5.4.24). This king, however, is the genuine king; moreover, according to the traditional use of the metaphor, it is Douglas and his fellow rebels who are the true Hydra. Another rebel, the Archbishop of Canterbury, evokes the Hydra as he seeks to excuse taking up arms against the king, an action which, he admits, has a ‘monstrous form’ (2H4 4.1.262). His list of grievances had been disregarded, he claims, ‘Whereon this Hydra, son of war, is born, / Whose dangerous eyes may well be charmed asleep / With grant of our most just and right desires’ (2H4 4.1.266–8). While his use of ‘Hydra’ is an admission that he is rebelling, his attempt at negotiation (i.e., give us what we ask for and the rebellion will die) suggests that he has not grasped the full horror of the monster he has unleashed. Not until the final play of the second Henriad does the Hydra disappear from the political affairs of Henry IV and Henry V. When he describes Hal’s reformation upon becoming king, the new Archbishop of Canterbury marvels that ‘never Hydra-headed wilfulness / So soon did lose his seat, and all at once, / As in this king’ (H5 1.1.35–7). Here the Hydra of youthful rebelliousness, having resided for a time in the very seat of established authority, has finally been overthrown by maturity. As a group of citizens discusses whether to support Coriolanus as consul, one citizen indignantly recalls that when ‘we stood up about the corn, he himself stuck not to call us the many-headed multitude’ (COR 2.3.14–16). ‘We have been called so of many’, observes a second citizen (2.3.17). The Hydra lurks behind the insult. When the issue of ‘the corn’ is raised again, Coriolanus’ objection to its being given gratis to the people is made clear. So, too, is his contempt not only for the multitude, but also for its spokesperson, the tribune Sicinius. Coriolanus calls him ‘this Triton of the minnows’ (3.1.90), ‘minnows’ being a degraded incarnation of the multiplicity inherent in the Hydra. Indeed, Coriolanus goes on to demand of the Roman senators, ‘have you thus / Given Hydra here to choose an officer’ who, although only ‘[t]he horn and noise o’th’monster’s’ (3.1.94–6), will act as if he has power in his own person? Holland (AR3: 276, n. 96) suggests that Coriolanus is effectively merging Hydra and Triton here to create a new, hybrid monster. The reference to the horn of the monster may also echo the language of biblical prophecy, as at Daniel 7.8, when among the horns of terrible beasts, ‘there came up among them another litle horne [. . .] & beholde, in this horne were eyes like the eyes of man, and a mouthe speaking presumptious things’ (GNV). (C) As Topsell observes, ‘all Water-Serpents, as well of the fresh, salt, and sweet waters may be called Hyders’ (1628: 759), but he devotes a separate chapter to the Hydra (735–6), conveying deep scepticism about its existence. With the phrase ‘Hydra 254

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of villainie!’, Surly sweepingly condemns the whole household of alchemical charlatans (Subtle, Face and Dol) in Jonson’s The Alchemist (1982a: 4.7.34). Ogden provides a thorough account of the Hydra in classical literature (2013: 26–33). W. Williams (2011: 126–7) argues that a hero who conquers a multicephalic monster subsumes its identity (the head being the source of identity); thus Hercules, having killed the Lernean Hydra, uses its blood to create poisonous arrows, which he uses to kill his enemies. Hill (1991) traces the political use of the hydra metaphor from antiquity through the early modern period, focusing especially on the seventeenth century, when the metaphoric hydra comes into its own during the English Civil Wars. McEachern (1994) considers Hal’s ‘Hydra-headed wilfulness’ in the context of his role as the head of the body politic. KE

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I inhuman, inhumanity. (A) If concepts like human, humane and humanity are defined by that which is not either bestial or superhuman, then inhumanity is defined as a human’s devolution into either animal savagery or devilish evil. (B) Titus calls Chiron and Demetrius ‘[i]nhuman traitors’ (TIT 5.2.177), a fascinating remark since it suggests they have not committed political treason in raping and mutilating Lavinia so much as acted as traitors to their species. Titus at least feels this justifies his decision to bake them into pies like the animals they have proven themselves to be. Likewise, Lucius calls Aaron ‘inhuman dog’ (5.3.14), unable to arrive at any more eloquent explanation of Aaron’s combination of black skin and unrepentant devilry. Accusations of inhumanity are a common refuge for those trying to sum up what is offensive about evildoers: Lady Anne calls King Richard’s actions ‘inhuman and unnatural’ (R3 1.2.60), torn between branding him with animal epithets and casting him as demonic. Roderigo does something similar when Iago stabs him, ‘O damned Iago! O inhuman dog!’ (OTH 5.1.62), making him both dog and devil; while the Duke of Venice also heaps such descriptors on Shylock, calling him ‘A stony adversary, an inhumane wretch, / Uncapable of pity, void and empty / From any dram of mercy’ (MV 4.1.3–5). Given how often Shylock is named a dog, this cascade of terrible indictments seeks to express how much worse than merely bestial his insistence on taking a pound of flesh for his bond makes him. Apparently only humans are capable of embodying multiple hateful, non-human qualities at once (in addition to dog, stone and void, the Duke’s use of the term ‘adversary’ makes Shylock a version of Satan himself). In this manner too, York passionately condemns Queen Margaret, the ‘She-wolf of France’ (3H6 1.4.111), lamenting Rutland’s death: ‘That face of his the hungry cannibals / Would not have touched [. . .] But you are more inhuman, more inexorable, / O, ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania’ (1.4.152–5). We have brought inhumanity full circle, from Titus’s cannibal feast to a queen worse even than cannibals. KR

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J jackanape. (A) The term derives from the nickname for William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (murdered by a mob in 1450 for his perceived mismanagement of policy that led to the renewal of war with France), whose badge was an ape’s clog (wooden block) and chain (OED 1), and probably written ‘Jack Napes’ in its earliest form. Some sources associate the word with ‘Jack of Naples’, although the OED does not; ‘Napes’ was indeed a shortened version of ‘Naples’ – see the entry for ‘fustian of Naples’ (OED 1c) describing a kind of Italian velvet; one might speculate that performing monkeys were so clothed, as is suggested in the painting by David Teniers the Younger, Guardroom with Monkeys (1633), which depicts monkeys dressed in rich human outfits. The term came to refer to either a performing ape or monkey (OED 2), or a human being who was being compared to such an animal. (B) The term shows up several times in WIV : it is Caius’s favourite insult – he refers to his servant Jack Rugby as a ‘Jack’nape’ (1.4.100), a play on Rugby’s name; he then immediately also calls Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson whom he is challenging to a duel, a ‘scurvy jackanape priest’ (1.4.102). He later accuses Sir Hugh of ‘speak[ing] for a jackanape to Anne Page’, meaning speaking on behalf of Slender to woo Anne (2.3.75–6). Finally, Evans steps right into the role of ‘jackanape’ when he promises to teach the children who are going to torment Falstaff in Windsor forest and join them in burning the knight with his candle: ‘I will be like a jackanapes also,’ he says to Ford (4.4.65–6). The repeated use of the term and the image in WIV is perhaps not surprising – this is a comedy, after all, and one that revolves around foolish and lecherous behaviour on the part of most of the male characters. The French Caius and the Welsh Evans both display a weaker grasp of the language; both are outsiders to the community and so their repetition of jackanapes may be linked to their imperfect repertoire of insults. But it is also possible that watching Falstaff, the Fords and the Pages behave like clowns and dupes has something to do with the term’s frequency. Elsewhere, Diana calls Paroles a ‘jackanapes’ in AWW (3.5.84) – and he is indeed a classic example of a foppish, empty-headed braggart. When Cloten calls his opponent in a game of bowls a jackanape, however, the joke is on him since his railing only shows that he is himself a loudmouthed buffoon (CYM 2.1.4). KR jade. (A) A poorly bred, weary or ill-tempered horse. (B) In R2, King Richard describes himself as Phaëton, ‘Wanting the manage of unruly jades’ (3.3.179) for failing to control the nation and prevent Bolingbroke’s 257

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usurpation. Phaëton is the doomed son of the sun god who tries to drive his father’s chariot carrying the sun across the sky. Because he cannot control the powerful, belligerent steeds, he nearly burns the earth before Zeus strikes him down. Richard later deplores the fact that his former mount is proud to carry Bolingbroke: ‘That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand’ (5.5.85). In 2H6, a character uses the image of the night drawn across the sky by exhausted horses (a kind of inverted Phaëton image) to accentuate the melancholy of the scene, which follows the conclusion of battle during a ‘remorseful day’ (4.1.1): ‘And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades / That drag the tragic melancholy night’ (4.1.3–4). The French in H5 repeatedly note that the English forces are mounted on jades – Grandpré describes them as horsemen sitting ‘like fixed candlesticks’ on ‘poor jades [who] / Lob down their heads, drooping the hides and hips, / The gum down-roping from their pale-dead eyes / And in their palled dull mouths the gimmaled bit / Lies foul with chewed grass, still and motionless’ (4.2.44–9). This evocative image of exhausted animals reflects the general French disdain for anything English: the Constable itemizes the English diet’s shortcomings by calling the water they drink ‘[a] drench for sur-reined [overworked] jades’ (3.5.19). The First Carrier in 1H4 shows compassion for a horse named Cut whose saddle he orders softened because the ‘[p]oor jade is wrung in the withers’ (2.1.6), while Travers in 2H4 describes another much-abused ‘jade’ belonging to a rider bringing the news of Harry Percy’s failed rebellion whose sides are punctured by the man’s spurs (1.1.45). In JC , Brutus expresses his concern about Cassius, who he believes may be ‘cooling’ (4.2.19) just as the battle with Antony looms: But hollow men, like horses hot at hand, Make gallant show and promise of their mettle: But when they should endure the bloody spur, They fall in their crests, and like deceitful jades Sink in the trial. (4.2.23–7) Here again, as in H5, we find the image of jades as horses with lowered head (fallen in their crests or necks), joined to the idea of the animal as ‘deceitful’; the simile melds the condition of the imagined jades with Cassius’s feared loss of commitment. Hamlet deploys a proverbial reference to abused jades (Tilley 1950: H700) to assure Claudius that the entertainment he is about to see performed is benign: ‘Your majesty and we that have free souls – it touches us not. Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’ (HAM 3.2.234–6). Of course, Claudius does ‘wince’ at the play, signalling his guilt and indicating that he does not, in fact, have a ‘free’ soul. Because comparisons are so often made between riding and gender relations, especially sex, jade also refers to a sexually loose or bad-tempered woman, with many instances of the word intended to blur the distinction between human and animal referent. Thus, when the Dauphin in H5 is teased by Orleans and the Constable for calling his horse his mistress, the Constable retorts, ‘I had as lief have my mistress a jade’ (3.7.60), 258

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maintaining the sexual innuendo and further irritating the Dauphin. Jade serves as a frequent insult in SHR : Lucentio dismisses Tranio, ‘I know he’ll prove a jade’ (1.2.248), Katherina calls Petruccio a jade more fit to ‘bear’ than women are (2.2.201) and Grumio names himself among them when he complains about his treatment by Petruccio, ‘Fie, fie on all tired jades’ (4.1.1). And when Benedick wishes he had a horse with the speed of her tongue and then refuses to speak with her more, Beatrice concludes, ‘You always end with a jade’s trick,’ i.e., the antics of a bad-tempered mount (ADO 1.1.138). In this manner she turns the tables on him as she does elsewhere by making him the animal, countering the usual association of women with horses – and of course, she gets the last word. (C) Doloff connects the galled jades of HAM to chafing and both Claudius’s and Gertrude’s sexuality (2015). KR jay. A colourful bird of the family Corvidae, related to crows and ravens, but with blue plumage. Like the magpie, jays are also loud chatterers. Innogen refers to a brightly dressed whore in CYM as ‘Some jay of Italy’ (3.4.49) who betrayed Posthumus, rather than accept that he has repudiated her. Mistress Ford, offended that her husband might likewise suspect her virtue with Falstaff, promises to ‘teach him to know turtles from jays’ (WIV 3.3.36–7), that is, to tell the difference between a prostitute and a faithful dove. The association of the jay with sexual promiscuity continues in Autolycus’s song in WT , where it is included in a verse with other spring and summer birds as well as several kinds of loose women (4.3.10). Meanwhile, Petruccio defends his and Katherina’s poor clothing, asking ‘is the jay more precious than the lark / Because his feathers are more beautiful?’ (SHR 4.3.174–5). The lark’s beautiful song is disguised by relatively plain plumage, while the jay, like his species brethren, cannot sing well at all. KR jennet, gennet. (A) A small, lighter-weight horse with smooth gaits originally from Spain, widely used in Europe as both a riding mount and a breeding animal. (B) Indeed, the breeding jennet in VEN may refer to the ubiquity of these horses and their importance for herd improvements – she shows up unexpectedly in a nearby thicket of trees to tempt Adonis’s courser to abandon him. Although the jennet is ‘lusty, young, and proud’, she is ‘unbacked’ or untrained, and is described twice with the terms ‘breeder’ and ‘breeding’ (260, 320) to suggest that unlike Adonis’s horse she is at liberty, unconstrained by human authority and of course sexually available. The courtship of the courser and jennet forms a discrete episode in the poem, detailing the sexual performance of both animals and suggesting a counter-example to Venus’s unsuccessful wooing of Adonis. The courser, who is described as a paragon of equine beauty much as his rider is the epitome of male human beauty, breaks his restraints, champs his bit, and hightails it to join the jennet. A very different use of the jennet appears in OTH , when Iago rouses 259

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Brabantio with his racially specific images of the products of Othello’s and Desdemona’s sexual liaison: ‘[Y]ou’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans’ (1.1.112). Here, the bestializing imagery is ironically about elegant and valuable creatures (coursers and jennets as well as the Barbary horse Iago refers to a line or two earlier would have been relatively expensive animals) as if affirming the Moor’s value, if not his humanity. (C) R. Miller (1952) contextualizes the courser and jennet episode in VEN as part of the history of horse imagery in accounts of rhetoric, where it represents the problem of temperance; for Shakespeare, Miller notes, the horses speak of a libidinal energy in poetic language but because the jennet is a breeder, her sexuality is superior to Venus’s since the goddess seeks only pleasure. Raber (2013) discusses the horse-human erotics of the courser and jennet episode in relation to the pleasures of riding, which require a different critical language than that of bestiality. KR

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K kite. (A) A carrion-eating bird of the family Accipitridae, most likely a red kite (Milvus milvus). Kites in the plays are indistinguishable from buzzards or puttocks; like buzzards, it can feed on both live prey and carrion. This categorical confusion in naming the carrion birds makes it difficult to know which bird is actually referenced by the term kite. While most kites are medium to large sized (with wing spans up to five feet, making them highly visible birds), and capable of prodigious speed and the ability to hover for long periods of time, the kites in Shakespeare’s plays often seem defined mainly by their role as consumers of all kinds of horrific offal. Kites were associated with war, since they gathered for the feast that dead bodies on a battlefield provided; their circling overhead announced scenes of death, accounting for their reputation as a bad omen. The Bible calls the kite ‘unclean’ (Deut. 14.3, KJV), and the bird was a proverbial example of a low, degraded creature as in the saying ‘A carrion kite will never make a good hawk’ (Tilley 1950: K114). In Shakespeare’s day, kites would have been a common sight even – or especially – in urban areas where scavenging was easy, making it a close cohabitant with humans. However, the population of red kites in England diminished throughout the seventeenth to the twentieth century until they were nearly extinct; only recently have their numbers rebounded. (B) The kite’s association with the bloodshed of war is most frequently invoked in the plays. In 2H6, York gloats that he has killed Clifford’s horse, the ‘bonny beast’, in exchange for Clifford’s slaughter of his own: ‘But match to match I have encountered him / And made a prey for carrion kites and crows’ (5.2.12, 10–11). Hamlet’s revenge is as yet fantasy, but he imagines it in the same terms when he berates himself after the players’ first appearance for not yet killing Claudius: ‘But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall / To make oppression bitter, or ere this / I should ha’ fatted all the region [sic] kites / With this slave’s offal’ (HAM 2.2.512–15). At Philippi, Cassius describes two eagles (symbols of Rome and of victory) who accompanied his troops but abandoned them the morning of battle: ‘And in their steads to ravens, crows and kites / Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us / As we were sickly prey’ (JC 5.1.84–6). Although he was once sceptical of omens, Cassius has been sensitized to them by the birds’ appearance, which terrifies his army – the birds’ shadows create ‘[a] canopy most fatal’ that has the troops ‘ready to give up the ghost’ (5.1.87–8). Eagles and kites figure in Hastings’ lament in R3 that ‘eagles should be mewed, / Whiles kites and buzzards play at liberty’ (1.1.132–3). The eagles here are Clarence, imprisoned because of a misinterpreted prophecy, and Hastings himself, imprisoned by the Woodvilles with whom he has 261

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feuded. At the banquet where he sees the ghost of dead Banquo, Macbeth imagines that this unnatural reappearance signals a new and terrifying world: ‘If charnel-houses and our graves must send / Those that we bury back, our monuments / Shall be the maws of kites’ (MAC 3.4.68–70). Not only do these lines portray kites, notorious eaters of dead flesh, as graves, but they also suggest the horror of Macbeth’s sense that the dead will not stay dead, but might emerge like the regurgitated meat with which the kite feeds its young. Because kites scavenge vulnerable animals from humans (chickens especially, which were both valuable and defenceless), they compete for resources, making it possible to brand them thieves, murderers and traitors. Macduff calls Macbeth a ‘hellkite’ for killing his wife and children, ‘all my pretty chickens’ (MAC 4.3.220–1). York impugns both Humphrey and Gloucester in 2H6 by likewise calling the first an ‘empty [hungry] eagle’ set to guard the chicken, in this case the King, from Gloucester who is a ‘hungry kite’ (3.1.248, 249). In other words, replacing Gloucester as Protector with Duke Humphrey will still risk the King’s life. In fact, a thief could be called a kite, as Autolycus implies in WT when he brags, ‘My traffic is sheets – when the kite builds, look to lesser linen’ (4.3.23–4). Like a kite, who will steal small items for its nest, Autolycus is a ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ (4.3.26). Coriolanus is probably thinking of the rabble’s influence in Rome when he calls it a ‘city of kites and crows’ (COR 4.5.43), equally disparaging both plebeians who want more from the government and the senators who abet them in overturning what Coriolanus sees as the only virtue, martial valour. ‘Kite’ is a straightforward term of insult in ANT (3.13.954) and LR (1.4.254). Pistol calls the prostitute Doll Tearsheet ‘the lazar kite of Cressid’s kind’ (H5 2.1.77): she is a bird of prey and one who contaminates men with disease. In SHR , Petrucchio describes Katherina as a falcon he must teach to ‘stoop’ (descend on prey, but here also bend the knee figuratively to her husband); ‘That is,’ he goes on, ‘to watch her, as we watch these kites / That bate, and beat, and will not be obedient’ (4.1.180, 184–5). While he may mean kite to refer to a resistant falcon, Petruccio might also be playing on Katherina’s nickname (kate/kite). Perhaps the only positive image involving kites comes in WT when Antigonus is ordered to abandon the infant Perdita to die; ‘Some powerful spirit,’ Antigonus says, ‘instruct the kites and ravens / To be thy nurse’ (2.3.184–5). Of course, his thought is based on the hope that kites will go against their nature and protect the child rather than eat its dead body. Ironically, it is Antigonus who will be killed and eaten by a bear when he deposits the child on the shores of Bohemia, a fitting punishment perhaps for his willingness to follow Leontes’ orders. (C) Harting discusses Shakespeare’s uses of the kite (1965: 42–6); Armstrong analyses its role in channelling Shakespeare’s concern with death and the grave (14– 17); and Edwards (2005) details the kite’s reputation and representation in works by Milton. Vienne-Guerrin (2016) comments on the way kite is used as an insult in the plays (347–8).

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L lamb. (A) The offspring of a sheep; lamb can also refer to the meat of a young sheep (as opposed to mutton, which is the meat of an adult sheep). In the same way that sheep fulfil a variety of symbolic functions, lambs can indicate sacrifice, danger (when threatened by foxes or wolves), weakness, innocence, infancy, or all of these. The Bible notably associates Christ’s reign over the kingdom of peace with the fate of the lamb: ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie with the kid, and the calf, and the lion, and the fat beast together, and a little child shall lead them’ (Isa. 11.6, GNV). Christ’s sacrifice makes him the Lamb of God, again combining the lamb’s weak and innocent nature with his martyrdom. (B) King Henry VI imagines he need not fear Edward’s forces since he has treated his people with ‘mildness’ and ‘mercy’, concluding, ‘And when the lion fawns upon the lamb, / The lamb will never cease to follow him’ (3H6 4.8.42, 43, 49–50). Henry casts himself as the lion, in a version of the biblical scenario of the lion and the lamb, imagining that his caresses ensure the lamb-like English will support him. But as Margaret recognizes, the weak, incompetent Henry is himself a lamb worried (attacked) by Edward, the ‘wolf that makes this spoil’ (5.4.80). York uses similar terms to compare King Richard II negatively with his father: ‘In war was never lion raged more fierce, / In peace was never gentle lamb more mild’ (R2 2.1.173–4), he says of the father. A good ruler is capable of extreme violence when it is required, but also capable of turning mild; Richard’s problem is the opposite of King Henry’s in 3H6 – Henry cannot bear to be cruel, while Richard cannot be peaceful. Tyrants are defined in early modern political thought as those who are incapable of self-control and who turn their violence against the innocent. King Richard III is just such a tyrant according to Queen Margaret, who calls him a ‘dog, that had his teeth before his eyes, / To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood ‘(R3 4.4.49–50). In 2H6, it is yet another sign of Henry’s unfitness to rule that he sees Richard as ‘as innocent / From meaning treason to our royal person / As is the sucking lamb or harmless dove’ (3.1.69–71). Queen Margaret tries unsuccessfully to warn him: ‘Is he a lamb? His skin is surely lent him, / For he’s inclined as the ravenous wolves’ (3.1.77–8). When Martius discovers the dead body of Bassianus at the bottom of the pit into which he falls in the woods, he exclaims, ‘Lord Bassianus lies berayed in blood / All on a heap, like to a slaughtered lamb’ (TIT 2.2.222–3). TIT is full of sacrificial victims to keep Bassianus company: first the body of Alarbus is dismembered for the Andronici’s rites, then Bassianus is killed and Lavinia raped and mutilated; ultimately Quintus and 263

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Martius die as well, until finally Titus slaughters Tamora’s sons to feed them to her in punishment for her attacks on his family. The subtext of sacrifice as food takes its darkest form in the reference to Bassianus as a lamb, just as it will in the Thyestian banquet that ends the play. In contrast with TIT , Malcolm in MAC turns the idea of sacrifice into a political strategy on multiple levels when he tells Macduff that he may find traces of Macbeth’s tyranny in him and ‘wisdom / To offer up a weak, poor, innocent lamb / T’appease an angry god’ (4.3.15–17). Malcolm evokes his father’s death, slaughtered by Macbeth, and at the same time pretends to be weak and innocent, a mere victim, even as he manipulates Macduff into revealing himself. In fact, he later tells Macduff, ‘[e]steem him [Macbeth] as a lamb, being compared / With my confineless harms’ (4.3.54–5). Like so many other moments in the play, the rapid inversion (‘I am a weak lamb to Macbeth’s powerful tyrant’ that suddenly becomes ‘he is a mere lamb to my evil’) brings opposites into bewildering conjunction, here in service of Malcolm’s Machiavellian tactics. Orsino also uses the language of tyranny and slaughter in TN , albeit with a happier ending, when he threatens to ‘sacrifice the lamb that I do love / To spite a raven’s heart within a dove’ (5.1.126–7). Orsino promises to execute Cesario, who he believes has married Olivia, turning his murderous anger away from the ‘marble-breasted tyrant’ Olivia (5.1.120) and toward an easier mark. Shylock too is called a lamb-killer: in a scene that revolves around sacrifice, flesh and mercy, Antonio tells Bassiano to stop asking why Shylock pursues his case: ‘You may as well use question with the wolf / Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb’ (MV 4.1.72–3). The trial scene in MV pits supposedly Christian values against Jewish legalism, with Antonio as the body which, like Christ’s, will be slaughtered as a consequence of his guarantee for money used in the salvation of his friend. In other words, Antonio ends up a Christianized lamb saved from death, or perhaps resurrected, by Portia’s intervention. Like many animals, the lamb features as an endearment addressed to women. When Boyet calls Katherine in LLL ‘sweet lamb’, she responds, ‘You sheep, and I pasture’ (2.1.219–20). Pasture puns on ‘pastor’, making Katherine the guardian not the innocent weakling. Later, Armado concludes his letter to Jaquenetta with reference to the Nemean lion which will ‘roar / ’Gainst thee, thou lamb, that standest as his prey’(4.1.87–8), promising that the lion will be turned into a toothless playfellow by her charms. Like the rest of Armado’s writing, the conclusion is a complete misapplication of words and images. Juliet’s Nurse calls her lamb, and calls Romeo a gentle lamb (ROM 1.3.3, 2.5.44). Juliet then condemns Romeo for killing Tybalt in terms that show her divided loyalties: ‘Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb’ (3.2.76). When he meets Innogen, Iachimo is also overcome and seems to project his own corrupt desires onto Posthumus (if Wayne’s interpretation of the lines is correct AR3: 183, n. 48): ‘That satiate yet unsatisfied desire, that tub / Both filled and running, ravening first the lamb / Longs after for the garbage’ (CYM 1.6.48–50). Later Innogen calls herself a lamb, demanding that Pisanio kill her when she learns that Posthumus believes she has slept with Iachimo: ‘The lamb entreats the butcher. Where’s thy knife?’ (3.4.96). Even as she accepts the act of butchery, she asserts her innocence in this image. When Hubert arrives 264

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to execute King John’s nephew Arthur, he promises to ‘sit quiet as a lamb’ (JN 4.1.79), remarking on his own innocence even as he tries to avoid death. Innocence, especially from sexual knowledge, is at stake in Polixenes’ depiction of his and Leontes’ youth together: ‘We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’sun / And bleat the one at th’other’ (WT 1.2.67–8). His image is ominous, since what linked the two is their lack of maturity, which Polixenes imagines could have been maintained to give them an escape from original sin. The problem with this idea is that it denies Christian doctrine, which requires all humans to bear the burden of sin; it also stigmatizes even marital sexuality as always sinful, since what removes the twin lambs from their pasture is their eventual love for their spouses. It is this perspective that allows Leontes to wrongly suspect Hermione’s chastity. Over and over in LUC , Tarquin is figured as a predator and Lucrece as an innocent victim, a lamb: he wraps her in her nightgown to stifle her cries like a ‘poor lamb’ smothered with ‘her own white fleece’ (677–8). Lucrece ‘like a wearied lamb lies panting’ beneath the ‘dog’ who assaults her (737, 736), and later she apostrophizes Opportunity, blaming it for setting ‘the wolf where he the lamb may get’ (878). In sum, the poem insists that Lucrece is as innocent as a lamb. On the other hand, SON 96 asks, ‘How many lambs might the stern wolf betray / If like a lamb he could his looks translate?’ (9–10). The poem concerns the beloved youth’s ability to get away with more because he is both young and attractive. The echo of Matthew 7.16 (referring to wolves in sheep’s clothing) makes the lines more ominous – the boy is not innocent even though he is young enough to be thought so. Ancient Rome did not view the lamb’s weak innocence as a virtue; in a martial society, the lamb is mere food. Menenius speaks to Sicinius and Brutus about Martius’s (later Coriolanus) conflict with the Roman people: Menenius: Sicinius: Meneius: Brutus: Menenius:

Pray you, who does the wolf love? The lamb. Ay, to devour him, as the hungry plebeians would the noble Martius. He’s a lamb indeed that baas like a bear. He’s a bear indeed that lives like a lamb. (COR 2.1.7–12)

The biblical counter-example to Isaiah is Ecclesiastes, which asks, ‘What fellowship hath the wolf with the lamb?’ (13.17, KJV), which more aptly describes the mutual loathing between Coriolanus and the Roman citizens. The lamb is the victim of many predators. Along with the lion and the wolf, the less ferocious fox is also guilty of stealing and killing lambs. The Duke in MM , disguised as the Friar, tells Escalus and Lucio that they will find no mercy for Isabella or Mariana with Angelo: ‘O, poor souls, / Come you to seek the lamb here of the fox?’ (5.1.295–6). Julia in TGV , also in disguise, is charged by Proteus with giving Silvia a message and a ring, the same one she once gave him; she calls herself the ‘fox’ he has chosen to be ‘shepherd of thy lambs’ (4.4.90). And Suffolk likewise tells the Queen ‘were’t not madness then / To make 265

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the fox surveyor of the fold’ (2H6 3.1.252–3). All three examples allude to the proverb that counsels ‘do not give the fox the sheep to keep’ (Tilley 1950: 240, F643). Timon rants at Apemantus, ‘If thou wert the lion, the fox would beguile thee; if thou wert the lamb, the fox would eat thee; if thou wert the fox, the lion would suspect thee when peradventure thou wert accused by the ass’ (TIM 4.3.327–30). In other words, there’s no instance in which a beast is not the pawn of another beast, a position that justifies Timon’s absolute misanthropy. (C) Vitale (2017) delves into the image of the lamb’s skin when he discusses the relationship of sin, confession, books (made out of lambskin or parchment) and salvation in the first tetralogy. KR lapwing. (A) A member of the family Charadriidae, the lapwing of Shakespeare’s plays is the Northern lapwing (Vanellus vanellus or Vanellus cristatus); the ground-nesting bird is also called a peewit for its characteristic cry, or a green plover for its green back plumage. The OED mentions the lapwing’s ubiquity as the bird that supplied the plover’s eggs often referred to in descriptions of the goods at London’s markets or in early modern pantries. Its name is usually believed to derive from its reputation for pretending to have a broken wing to draw predators away from its nest; in some cases, authorities assert that it was named for its mode of flight rather than its defensive ploys. The bird is also distinctive for its sweeping black crest. Lapwings in Shakespeare’s day would have been present in huge flocks on wetlands and on crop fields, but the bird is now increasingly rare due to habitat destruction and changes in agricultural methods. (B) Lucio compares himself to the lapwing for his habit of using humour to mislead young women: ‘ ’[T]is my familiar sin / With maids to seem the lapwing and to jest, / Tongue far from heart’ (MM 1.4.31–3). ERR ’s Adriana also uses the lapwing’s protective strategy to qualify the intentions behind her criticism of her husband: ‘Ah, but I think him better than I say, [. . .] Far from her nest the lapwing cries away; / My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse (4.2.25–8). And Beatrice is likewise branded with a degree of bird-like deception as Ursula, Margaret and Hero plot to trap her in their plot to make her love Benedick: ‘For look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs / Close by the ground to hear our conference’ (ADO 3.1.24–5), says Hero – yet while Beatrice’s movement may resemble the bird’s luring zig-zag, it is the other women who deceive and distract. These two examples thus suggest that either gender is perfectly capable of the bird’s brand of deception and distraction. In HAM , the lapwing’s ability to leave the nest almost as soon as it hatches informs Horatio’s comment on Osric: ‘This lapwing runs away with the shell on his head’ (5.2.165). The proverb he echoes (Tilley 1950: L 69) conveys precociousness, and not usually of the positive sort; some editors, however, believe it is Osric’s hat that inspires Horatio’s comment (Bevington 1146, n. 184; Jenkins AR3: 405, n. 183), especially possible given the lapwing’s feather-like crest. (C) Harting (1965) contextualizes references to the lapwing among other Renaissance texts about the bird. KR 266

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lark. (A) A small, drab bird of the family Alaudidae, a subfamily of the finches, the lark is known for its beautifully elaborate song, which is traditionally associated with dawn. Shakespeare’s larks are very likely skylarks (Alauda arvensis), but there are numerous species across Europe and England that are equal candidates. The bird sings while in flight, so with its trilling, bright call and its soaring flight, the lark is associated with love, inspiration, freedom and other positive qualities or events. Spenser notes that ‘the merry Lark her Matins sings aloft,’ in his Epithalamion, a marriage poem that repeatedly calls the sleeping beloved to wake and enjoy the ‘day’s merriment’ (1997: 80, 110). (B) One of the lark’s most well-known appearances comes in ROM when Juliet tries to deter Romeo from leaving their marriage bed. ‘Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear’ (3.5.1–3). Romeo at first resists, insisting, ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn,’ but when he mentions the possible punishment that awaits him if he is discovered with her, Juliet changes her tune: ‘It is the lark that sings so out of tune [. . .] Some say the lark makes sweet division; / This doth not so, for she divideth us’ (3.5.6, 27–30). AR3 (271, n. 1–36) notes that Romeo and Juliet create together a song of their own, an aubade or song of lovers parting. Their reversal of position on the lark’s identity reflects their new union (each trying to satisfy the other), but possibly also Juliet’s new authority, since it is her position that wins each time (Romeo first gives in about the lark, then accepts that he must leave). The lark’s ‘division’ is a musical one – a division is ‘the execution of a rapid melodic passage’ (OED 7a), while also of course the separation of the lovers that will be more permanent than they know. VEN too lauds the lark, not only as the herald of dawn, but as a change from Venus’s ‘tedious’ song that ‘outwore the night’ (841) as she laments Adonis’s resistance to her: ‘Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest, / From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, / And wakes the morning’ (853–5). Oberon acknowledges the lark as the sign of daybreak in MND , when reminded by Puck that they should be off to observe Hippolyta’s marriage to Theseus: ‘Fairy king, attend and mark: / I do hear the morning lark’ (4.1.92–3). Troilus has a rather less auspicious waking with Cressida (who will be married off to another by play’s end), when, echoing Romeo, he says ‘But that the busy day, / Waked by the lark, hath roused the ribald crows [. . .] I would not from thee’ (TRO 4.2.9–12). On the eve of battle, King Richard advises Norfolk to ‘[s]tir with the lark tomorrow’ (R3 5.3.56) – that is, be up at dawn. In LLL , larks are the ‘ploughmen’s clocks’ (5.2.892). The lark is used to create contrast in CYM when a musician sings outside Innogen’s door: ‘Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings, / And Phoebus ’gins arise, / His steeds to water at those springs / On chaliced flowers [. . .]’ (2.3.20–3). Cloten’s courtship, for which he has ordered this song, stands in stark relief with this lovely portrait of morning dew watering the sun’s horse; the moment is generated out of his cloddish lust: ‘I am advised to give her music o’mornings; they say it will penetrate’ (2.3.11–13). 267

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Whether the lark’s song is actually pleasant to listen to is a bit unclear (its constant twittering can sound harsh to some ears when heard up close), but Helena uses it to reflect Demetrius’s preference for Hermia in MND : ‘Your eyes are lode-stars, and your tongue’s sweet air / More tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear’ (1.1.183–4). Of course, what sounds pleasant to a shepherd needing to be roused in the morning may be different from what others enjoy, but Autolycus agrees, singing a song of ‘the sweet birds’ that includes his onomatopoeic imitation of the lark: ‘The lark, that tirra-lirra chants’ (WT 4.3.6, 9). Titus too uses the lark’s song as a source of pleasure, telling Aaron, who has come to report (falsely) that he can cut off his hand to save his sons, ‘Did ever raven sing so like a lark / That gives sweet tidings of the sun’s uprise?’ (TIT 3.1.159–60). Titus means that since Aaron is black, he is like a raven but his good news is more tuneful than that bird’s croaking. While pleading for mercy from his mother’s revenge, Lavinia tells Chiron that ‘the raven doth not hatch a lark’ (2.2.149). The lark in TIT is thus made part of a network of references that pertain to race, ‘natural’ malice and miscegenation. Lavinia confirms that a child necessarily takes after its parent: that may have once been true of some, like Titus’s sons who followed steadfastly his military career and commitment to duty; it may also be true of Tamora’s vengeful sons. But Martius has rebelled against his father, while Aaron has produced a child with Tamora, leaving the question open as to which parent that infant, though dark-skinned like his father, will most resemble in character. The issue of a man’s character is what concerns Bertram and Lafeu when they discuss Paroles. Lafeu concedes, ‘Then my dial goes not true. I took this lark for a bunting’ (AWW 2.5.5–6). Of course, it turns out Lafeu was quite right when Paroles is ultimately exposed as a coward and liar. Portia seizes on the lark’s musical voice to wax philosophical about harmony, hierarchy and order in Act 5 of MV . She returns from the trial in Venice to hear the music Lorenzo and Jessica have been enjoying in the evening, when the light shining from her home and the tune playing strike her as ‘sweeter’ and more welcome than usual (5.1.100): The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark When neither is attended; and, I think, The nightingale, if she should sing by day When every goose is cackling, would be thought No better a musician than the wren. How many things by season seasoned are To their right praise and true perfection. (5.1.102–8) Having triumphed at Shylock’s trial, Portia’s response to the comforts of her household is thoughtful and a bit melancholy, as if she recognizes that Belmont’s pleasures are contingent, even uncertain. Her mood matches that of Jessica, who is also made sad by music, perhaps because both have had a (literally) dislocating experience. In typical fashion, however, Portia’s contemplation is enlivened by a satiric subtext – mentioning seasons and seasoning when speaking of geese injects a wry wit into the scene. 268

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The lark was known for its soaring flight – when disturbed in a field, larks explode upwards to a great height, and in general they also hover at altitude as day breaks. This allows the lark to express ideas of elevation, of rising above the mundane. SON 29 compares the thought of the poet’s beloved, which raises his spirits out of the depths of his despair at his fate, to the lark: ‘Haply I think on thee, and then my state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising, / From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate’ (10–12). This image echoes a similar one in CYM , with its repetition of ‘[a]rise, arise’ (2.3.26). Edgar uses the lark as a register of the height of Dover’s cliffs, from which he pretends his father has fallen: ‘Look up a-height: the shrill-gorged lark so far / Cannot be seen or heard’ (LR 4.6.58–9). Edgar reassures Gloucester that he has tumbled from great height to ‘sullen earth’ and yet survived, perhaps allowing his father access to ‘heaven’s gate’ by averting his suicide. (C) Harting (1965) discusses the lark, noting its appearance in other poetry from Chaucer to Milton (130–6). Baker (1950) notes SON 29 among literary lark references. Bach (2017) touches on the lark in discussing bird voices and song (11–13, 79–85). KR leech. (A) A blood-sucking, aquatic, segmented worm belonging to the genus Hirudo. The Old English words for leech and physician are homonyms (lǽch), and the OED surmises that the former eventually became assimilated to the latter, given the fact that leeches have been used since antiquity as a means of drawing blood from patients (see Fields 1991). (B) Shakespeare refers to the worm as ‘horse leech’ in H5, when Pistol urges his fellow soldiers to head for France ‘like horse-leeches, my boys / To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck!’ (2.3.53–4). As Iyengar (2011: 154) observes, he is looking forward to plundering, not fighting. The Boy’s response to Pistol – ‘And that’s but unwholesome food, they say’ (2.3.55) – may be critical of Pistol’s greed, or rude about the French, or simply naïve in assuming that Pistol speaks literally about blood (AR3: 186, n. 55). In the closing lines of TIM , when Alcibiades promises to return to Athens and ‘[m]ake war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each / Prescribe to other, as each other’s leech’ (5.5.81–2), the primary meaning of ‘leech’ is physician. As Dawson and Minton note, however, the implicit presence of the animal in the word hints darkly that bloodletting is not at an end (AR3: 340, n. 82). Today leech therapy is used especially after plastic and reconstructive surgery to improve blood flow and reduce clotting (J. Edwards 2017). When the leech has had its fill of blood, it drops off (although it is now known that the anticoagulants it has introduced into the body continue to work). In Shakespeare’s day, leeches were thought to draw off the corrupted blood causing the disease (see Pettigrew 2016). Thus, Palamon prays that leeches might rid him of his contaminating kinship to his uncle Creon: ‘Let / The blood of mine that’s sib [i.e., kin] to him be sucked / From me with leeches, let them break and fall / Off me with that corruption’ (TNK 1.2.71–4). In an abusive exchange between them in Jonson’s The Alchemist, Face calls Subtle a 269

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‘dog-leech, / The vomit of all prisons’ (1982a: 1.1.103–4), an epithet that doubles the insult by pairing two lowly creatures, as when Thersites declares that he ‘had rather be a tick in a sheep’ than be Achilles (TRO 4.1.312–13). KE leopard, libbard. (A) A big cat (Panthera pardus) now found mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. It is likely, however, that at least some of the animals called leopards by early modern Europeans were in fact cheetahs, which are also spotted but are smaller than leopards and more easily observed, captured and trained. The name ‘leopard’ stems from the ancient belief that the creature was the offspring of an adulterous lionness (leo) and a panther (pard). The probable pronunciation of the word in Shakespeare’s day – LE -o-PARD – emphasizes this belief. (A panther is in fact a melanistic, i.e., solid black, leopard.) Because of its supposed illicit origins, imprinted on its body in the form of spots, the leopard was found by medieval heralds to be an appropriate emblem for anyone conceived in adultery. Its distinctively marked coat is responsible for the best known biblical saying about the leopard, that it cannot change its spots. (B) Its spots are central to two representations of the leopard in Shakespeare’s works, and both representations are complex. In R2, Mowbray’s statement that the leopard cannot change its spots occurs in a coded exchange with King Richard. Responding to Mowbray’s impassioned charge that he has been slandered by Henry Bolingbroke, the king responds, ‘Rage must be withstood. / Give me his gage. Lions make leopards tame’ (1.1.173–4). Mowbray’s gage, perhaps a mailed glove, is his pledge to engage in combat with Bolingbroke. Asking for Mowbray’s gage is an exercise of power on Richard’s part, confirmed by his reference to lions and leopards. As Forker (AR3: 196, n. 174) explains, Richard is using heraldic symbolism to say that the royal coat of arms, with its three lions passant gardant (standing on three legs with right forepaw raised), trumps the crest of Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, with its lion léopardé, heraldic terminology for a lion in any position other than passant gardant or rampant. In other words, the leopard to which Richard refers is not a leopard, but rather a lesser lion. The king is making it clear that he alone, as monarch, will decide on the justice of Mowbray’s claim. Mowbray’s response to Richard – ‘Yea, but not change his spots. Take but my shame, / And I resign my gage’ (1.1.175–6) – returns ‘leopard’ to its non-heraldic meaning as he alludes to the biblical saying, with ‘spots’ here meaning moral stains or sins. The ‘spotless reputation’ that Mowbray regards as his ‘purest treasure’ (1.1.177–8) has been threatened by Bolingbroke’s accusations, and Mowbray begs the king to allow him to prove his innocence in trial by combat. To resign his gage to the king means that he accepts the king’s right to decide the issue. In TIM , when the cynic Apemantus says that he would, if he could, give the world back to the beasts and remain among them as a beast himself, Timon points out that power relations obtain even in the world of beasts. ‘What beast couldst thou be that were not subject to a beast?’ Timon asks (4.3.341–2): ‘wert thou a horse, thou wouldst be 270

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seized by the leopard; wert thou a leopard, thou wert germane to the lion, and the spots of thy kindred were jurors on thy life – all thy safety were remotion and thy defence absence’ (4.3.337–41). The fact that a leopard has spots (another play on spots as crimes or sins) means that all its relatives are also assumed to be guilty and so liable to punishment. The leopard’s only safety lies in remotion, or constantly moving on (Bevington 2014: 1323, n. 346–7). A leopard is mentioned in jest in LLL , apparently in connection with a shield carried by Costard in the masque of the Nine Worthies. Costard plays Pompey, whose arms, as Woudhuysen observes, were traditionally thought to be a leopard holding a sword (AR3: 274, n. 544). When Costard enters and introduces himself to the audience (‘I Pompey am – ’), Berowne interrupts him: ‘You lie, you are not he’ (5.2.543). ‘Lie’ is almost certainly a pun, meaning not only that Costard is pretending to be Pompey (that is, acting a part) but probably also suggesting that he has tripped and fallen. When Costard starts again (‘I Pompey am –’), Boyet completes the line: ‘With leopard’s head on knee’ (5.2.544). Woudhuysen suggests three possibilities here: the prostrate Costard has ended up with the shield on his knee; he holds his shield upside down; or he is wearing a ‘masquine’, a garment with a leopard’s or lion’s head pictured on knees or elbows (AR3: 274, n. 544). So, too, the leopard (or what is probably a leopard) is given light-hearted treatment in 2H4, when the Hostess attempts to help Sergeant Fang with his investigations. She reports that Falstaff ‘comes continuantly to Pie Corner, saving your manhoods, to buy a saddle [i.e., to visit a prostitute], and he is indited to dinner to the Lubber’s Head in Lumbert Street to Master Smooths the silkman’ (2.1.25–8). Mistress Quickly perhaps means a tavern named the Leopard’s or Libbard’s Head in Lombard Street, although ‘Lubbard’ has some relevance to Falstaff (AR3: 216, n. 27). (At LR 1.4.89, ‘lubber’ has its usual sense of lout.) It is also possible that the leopard sign hangs above the door of Mr Smooth’s shop, since, as Bulman points out (AR3: 216, n. 27), an embroidered leopard’s head was often to be found on silken garments. (C) Pliny associates the leopard (L. pardus) with guile, stating that ‘[i]n Africa [. . .] leopards crouch in the thick foliage of the trees and hidden by their boughs leap down on to animals passing by, and stalk their prey from the perches of birds’ (1940: 421 [8.94]). Now critically endangered in the Middle East, the leopard has a striking presence in the Bible, from ancient prophecy to apocalypse, but its most famous occurrence is in Jeremiah’s rhetorical question, ‘Can [. . .] the leopard [change] his spottes?’ (Jer. 13.23, GNV), which has become proverbial (Tilley 1950: L206). The ‘hunting leopards’ that appear on leashes in paintings of Renaissance courts are cheetahs (as is obvious in the illustrations in Lloyd 1971: 58–60). For cheetahs’ long history of being trained as hunting animals, see Cansdale (1970: 113) and Masseti (2009). In medieval bestiaries, the leopard is said to be the bastard offspring of a lion and so serves as an emblem for an illegitimate family line (Woodcock and Robinson 1988: 264). Guillim (1638: 190), reflecting this tradition, speaks of ‘the degenerate and Bastard race of Leopards’. In The Faerie Queene, Satyrane (the illegitimate offspring of Thyamis and a satyr) is so mighty a hunter that he makes the lion stoop to him ‘and the Libbard sterne / Leave roaring’ 271

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(Spenser 2001: 1.6.25). Berman (1982–3) discusses the leopard on the coat of arms in LLL . Gardette (2000) discusses the historical development of the Plantagenets’ heraldic lion and its relationship to the lion léopardé in R2. KE leviathan. (A) A biblical sea-monster, thought in Shakespeare’s day to be a whale, although a whale of surpassing size and strength. There is thus considerable overlap between the lore associated with the whale and that associated with the leviathan, as, for instance, sailors’ mistaken assumption that the huge leviathan, afloat upon the surface of the sea, is an island. The sailors anchor their boats on it and are then drowned when the leviathan plunges into the deep. The book of Job is largely responsible for early modern conceptions of the leviathan, as God impresses upon Job the feebleness and ignorance of human beings in the face of the created world in all its mystery and power. The Hebrew word livyathan means simply ‘great water animal’, and today scholars think the name signifies a hippopotamus or a crocodile. (B) As befitting an animal with quasi-supernatural powers, the leviathans alluded to in Shakespeare’s plays have something fabulous or fantastic about them, as when Proteus in TGV praises the power of poetry: Orpheus’s lute, he says, ‘could soften steel and stones, / Make tigers tame and huge leviathans / Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands’ (3.2.78–80). In H5, urging Harfleur’s governor to surrender the besieged town, Henry V warns that he will be unable to restrain his soldiers from rape and pillage once they have broken down the walls: ‘We may as bootless spend our vain command / Upon th’enraged soldiers in their spoil / As send precepts to the leviathan / To come ashore’ (3.3.24–7). Henry thus implies that ‘enraged soldiers’ are as impervious to human government as the mighty leviathan. Job 41 also attributes great speed to the leviathan: ‘He maketh the deepe to boyle like a pot. [. . .] He maketh a path to shine after him’ (31, 32). Oberon invokes this speed when he commands Robin Goodfellow, or Puck, to ‘[f]etch me this herb, and be thou here again / Ere the Leviathan can swim a league’ (MND 2.1.173–4). That Puck understands the allusion to the leviathan’s formidable speed is demonstrated by his answer: ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes’ (2.1.175–6). (C) The most vivid description of the biblical leviathan occurs in chapters 40 and 41 of Job, a description which establishes the creature’s mightiness, as, for instance, when God demands, ‘Canst thou draw out Liviathan with an hooke? [. . .] Canst thou cast an hooke into his nose?’ (Job 40.20–1, GNV). ‘His breath maketh the coles burn: for a flame goeth out of his mouth. [. . .] He estemeth yron as strawe, and brasse as rotten wood’ (Job 41.12, 18, GNV). Milton turns the legend of the leviathan mistaken for an island into a simile for Satan in Paradise Lost (1998: 1.194–209). For the relationship between the leviathan and classical sea-monsters, see Ogden (2013: 14). See Kruijf (2017) for representations of the leviathan in late medieval and early modern art, some of which are satirical. KE 272

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Figure 6 Two studies of a lion, 1521, by Albrecht Dürer, silverpoint. Photo: Jörg Anders. Kupferstichkabinett, Staätliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Art Resource, NY.

lion, leonine. (A) A large predator cat of the species Felidae native to Africa and Eurasia; male lions have full manes (which females lack) and can weigh 300–500 lbs. Lions dwell communally in prides and mainly hunt large ungulates. The lion provides a ubiquitous and flexible symbol in the ancient and early modern world, associated in many cultures with monarchy, nobility and strength – Topsell asserts that it is ‘justly styled by all writers as the King of Beasts (1658: 355), and English rulers claimed leonine qualities, keeping lions in the royal menagerie from the twelfth century on. Natural histories note the lion’s noble capacity for self-control: Pliny claims that ‘The lion alone of wild animals shows mercy to supplicants’; he adds that its ‘nobility of spirit is detected most in dangers’, but that although they attack men, they spare women or children (NH 8.19.48–60 [1940: 37–9]). Topsell also credits the lion’s honourable ‘clemency’ towards those weaker than itself; he remarks on the lion’s roar or bellow and repeats the lore that lions fear only cocks and basilisks, along with fire (1658: 364, 359, 362). Its presence in heraldry is ubiquitous. The lion’s strength and ferocity contrasted with its purported capacity for mercy and gentleness, often in response to perceived noble qualities in its prey. Biblically, the lion features in the tale of the prophet Daniel who emerges alive and untouched from the lion’s den to which Darius consigns him, demonstrating God’s protection of faithful worshippers’; in Isaiah it is a sign of peace: ‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them’ (Isa. 11.6, KJV). The tale of the thorn removed from the lion’s paw features in both the folklore tradition, through the story of Androcles (included in Aesop’s fables by the Middle Ages), and in the religious tradition, where 273

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paintings and stories associate the tale with St Jerome (c. 347–420), who is reputed to have tamed a lion this way while living as a hermit in the desert. (B) Perhaps Shakespeare’s most famous lion is not a real one at all, but the comical performance of Snug the joiner in MND , who is assigned the part in Pyramus and Thisbe. The rude mechanicals are sensitive to the lion’s terrifying nature; thus Bottom, who would like to perform this part himself (as well as all the others), promises to roar ‘as gently as any sucking dove’ (1.2.77–8). During their rehearsals, the lion’s potential to frighten the ladies is their particular concern: ‘a lion among the ladies is a most dreadful thing’ (3.1.28–9). The group decides Snug’s face must be visible through the lion’s neck, and they add a speech in which he can reassure the audience and apologize for his ferocity. Thus, in performance, he announces that if he roars ‘know that I, as Snug the joiner, am / No lion fell [. . .] For if I should, as Lion, come in strife / Into this place, ’twere pity on my life’ (5.1.221–4). While Snug’s performance is treated as ludicrous by Theseus and the young men, he quite rightly registers that it is Theseus and Hippolyta, not he or his fellows, who are to be feared, given their noble status and power to punish what they don’t approve. They are lions; he is a mere lamb. While the episode is pure comedy, it is also a reflection of the complex mythology that casts lions as both threatening and potentially benevolent – but it transposes real noble ferocity possible from Theseus (as famous for his feats of savage violence as for his escapades with women) into Snug’s self-conscious denial of savagery. Despite his class status, then, Snug and his companions might seem more humane than Theseus was reputed to be. Pyramus and Thisbe’s lion shows up in less comic guise at the conclusion of MV when Jessica mentions it among the ominous love stories that the moonlit night of Belmont resembles to Lorenzo and herself: ‘In such a night / Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew, / And saw the lion’s shadow ere himself, / And ran dismayed away’ (5.1.6–9). Dido, lamenting Aeneas and throwing herself on a funeral pyre, Cressida betraying Troilus, even Medea gathering herbs – these and the ill-fated Pyramus and Thisbe are examples of love matches that go horribly wrong, leading audiences to consider how happy Jessica’s marriage to Lorenzo will make them both. Lions are associated with unpredictable violence but also the chance for redemption in AYL . Having treated his brother Orlando abominably, Oliver travels into Arden forest to find him, but is attacked while resting by a hungry lioness; Orlando defends him, occasioning Oliver’s conversion. The scene is replete with religious allusions and imagery: Oliver is first threatened by a snake coiled around his neck that slithers into the bush where the lion, ‘with udders all drawn and dry’, lies waiting for her prey to awaken (4.3.113). Rather than leave his brother ‘[f]ood to the sucked and hungry lioness’, Orlando battles the animal ‘Who quickly fell before him,’ but not before taking a chunk of flesh from Orlando’s arm (4.3.125, 130). The resulting ‘bloody napkin’ terrifies Rosalind into a swoon (4.3.137). The snake could function as a reference to either sin (the biblical tradition) or to wisdom (the Egyptian tradition), while the ‘sucked’ lioness might represent either royalty or even, indirectly, the aging Elizabeth I, permitting a number of interpretations of the animals’ significance. Whatever their function, the 274

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lioness’s attack is a catalyst for the reconciliation of Orlando and Oliver to loving brotherhood. Through that and Oliver’s marriage to Celia, Oliver is restored to civil life. The histories and Roman plays are rife with allusions to lions as registers of nobility, strength and aggression: not surprisingly, Richard I, known as Coeur de Leon or the Lionheart, is invoked in JN (2.1.3 or 2.1.141–2, for instance) – his memory haunts both King John, Richard’s brother, and Philip the Bastard, his illegitimate son. Richard II’s queen in R2 offers the lion as a model to stir her beleaguered husband: The lion, dying, thrusteth forth his paw, And wounds the earth, if nothing else, with rage To be o’erpowered; and wilt thou, pupil-like, Take thy correction mildly, kiss the rod And fawn on rage with base humility, Which art a lion and the king of beasts? (5.1.29–34) Richard responds, ‘A king of beasts, indeed! If aught but beasts, / I had been still a happy king of men’ (5.1.35–6). In fact, the queen’s image of a raging lion that lashes out when dying is closer to the erratic Richard we have seen thus far in the play. His changeable vacillating among responses and emotions, especially rage and fear, is far from the steadfast and noble king of beasts. Gaunt’s criticism of Richard, that his ‘rash fierce blaze of riot’ will not last (2.1.33), and York’s image of the king as like a hot young colt (2.1.70) suggest that Richard may already be too prone to the lack of rational control early moderns saw as quintessentially animal, not human. In 1H6, Talbot faces Joan Puzel (Joan of Arc), who temporarily terrifies his men and causes a rout. He shouts to them ‘either renew the fight / Or tear the lions out of England’s coat, / Renounce your soil, give sheep in lions’ stead’ (1.5.27–9). England here, as in JN , is identified with the lion as their heraldic animal; but Talbot’s words set the lion against the sheep (another animal closely linked to England’s wealth) as a reminder of England’s claims on French territory. Coriolanus touches on the commonplace that contrasts lions versus hares, when he denigrates Rome’s citizens who are threatening to riot over food: ‘He that trusts to you, / Where he should find you lions finds you hares, / Where foxes, geese’ (COR 1.1.165–7). Talbot would like to restore English courage so that Joan, like Renier earlier in the play, finds herself confronted with soldiers ‘like lions wanting food’ (1H6 1.2.27). Julius Caesar perhaps unwisely boasts that he and danger are ‘two lions littered in one day, / And I the elder and more terrible’ (JC 2.2.46–7). Ignoring the warnings of those around him, Caesar eventually leaves his home on the ides of March and is assassinated in the Senate as was foretold by a soothsayer (1.2.18). The lion’s reputation as a fierce beast extends to many plays beyond the histories. Cressida momentarily expresses doubt about Troilus’ love, which he defends by claiming there is nothing monstrous in ‘Cupid’s pageant’ (TRO 3.2.71–2). Cressida, however, responds that lovers always promise more than they can perform – they ‘have the voice of lions and the act of hares’ so they are in fact ‘monsters’ (3.2.85–6). 275

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England’s national identity is bound up with lions: the heraldic symbol of the Plantagenets features three lions, an image eventually associated with the nation itself. When Falstaff, for instance, calls Prince Hal the ‘lion’s whelp’ (1H4 3.3.146), he is not just locating Hal as the king’s son, he is also alluding to Hal’s lineage – the house of Lancaster was a branch of the Plantagenets. Posthumus Leonatus in CYM is named after the lion – Leonatus means ‘lion born’ (AR3: 140, n. 3). It is the name of Posthumus’ father, but one he also earns himself by fighting against Rome, a journey that signifies his apotheosis as the figure who will unite Britain and Rome through his marriage to Innogen. Although his character vacillates among identities – he is an orphan child whose father dies before he was born and whose mother died in childbirth, hence his first name and the complicated trajectory of his self-definition – Posthumus ultimately assumes the place of the ‘lion’s whelp’ who is foretold in prophecy (5.4.108–15 and 5.5.434–41). As the soothsayer puts it, he is revealed in the final act as truly ‘Leonatus [. . .] being leo-natus’ (442–4), an image that counterbalances his posthumous birth and consequent lower status. Posthumus is first exiled by King Cymbeline for marrying the king’s daughter in secret, then joins the Italians as they march through Britain, assumes British clothing to defend his home nation, but then dresses again as an Italian and is taken prisoner. Ultimately, however, his restoration to British identity and to his beloved Innogen is part of a generally redemptive plot arc (see Wayne: 73–4). A sign of the lion’s strength is its roar. Thus, Petruccio boasts about his imperviousness to the ‘din’ of Katherina’s insults by saying that as a former soldier he has heard worse: ‘Have I not in my time heard lion’s roar?’ (SHR 1.2.199). In this way he asserts that he is the more obdurate of the pair and will come out ahead in the conflict. Sebastian and Antonio explain why they have swords drawn as Alonso and Gonzalo wake: ‘While we stood here securing your repose, / Even now we heard a hollow burst of bellowing, / Like bulls, or rather lions’ (TMP 2.1.311–13). In this fashion they cover up their murderous intent, Antonio even exaggerating that it was surely ‘the roar / Of a whole herd of lions’ (2.1.316–17). Roman Antony roars with rage that he is not obeyed in ANT when he calls for Thidias to be whipped for enjoying Cleopatra’s attentions: Enobarbus remarks in an aside, ‘ ’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp / Than with an old one dying’ (3.13.99–100), pointing out the fact that Antony is reacting out of insecurity. The fact that even the lion has its weaknesses and is subject to the forces of nature is registered in SON 19, which begins ‘Devouring time, blunt thou the lion’s paws’ (1). Hamlet makes a glancing, but odd, reference to the Nemean lion, an enormous beast that was the object of the first of Hercules’ twelve labours. Hercules undertook these feats in penance for killing his wife and children in an episode of madness; the Nemean lion had fur that could not be penetrated by a weapon, so Hercules strangled it with his bare hands. In response to pleas from Marcellus and Horatio not to follow the ghost lest it drive him mad and kill him, Hamlet insists ‘My fate cries out / And makes each petty artery in this body / As hardy as the Nemean lion’s nerve’ (HAM 1.4.81–3). Rather than comparing himself to Hercules, Hamlet aligns himself with the monstrous lion in this analogy. The dehumanization and de-heroification of Hamlet here matches his opinion in his first 276

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soliloquy that Claudius is ‘no more like my father / Than I to Hercules’ (1.2.152–3). Given Hamlet’s additional scorn for Claudius as a kind of ‘satyr’ (1.2.140), he establishes a pattern in which his uncle is bestial, but he, Hamlet, is equally monstrous. Theseus in TNK mentions the tale when praising the First Queen’s beauty as that which would have unmanned Hercules and made him ‘tumbl[e] down upon his Nemean hide’ (1.1.68). In 1H4, Falstaff alludes to the idea that lions will recognize noble blood and forbear attacking royalty. After the robbery at Gad’s Hill, Falstaff claims to have known the thieves were Prince Hal and Poins: ‘By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye [. . .] The lion will not touch the true prince’ (2.4.259–63). Falstaff thus turns his own cowardice into courage, since he implicitly compares himself to the lion here and explicitly a line or two later; and at the same time, he insists he had a kind of animal ‘instinct’ (his word; 2.4.263) about the Prince’s identity. Later, Falstaff draws a distinction between the fear he feels for Hal, ‘I fear thee as I fear the roaring of the lion’s whelp’ (3.3.145–6), and that he feels for Hal’s father who is the adult lion (identified with the Plantagenet line and its heraldic arms, and by extension with English itself). In this scene, Falstaff again defends his courage despite backing away from a fight with the prince when Hal dares him to it, again on the basis that he cannot show violence toward a royal. While Hal may be a man, he is also a lion (or at least its cub), and so untouchable by his subjects. On a more serious note, King Henry VI demonstrates his utter lack of political awareness when he claims that Edward will gain no added forces because ‘when the lion fawns upon the lamb, / The lamb will never cease to follow him’ (3H6 4.8.49– 50). Henry believes that his kindness, generosity and other good qualities as a ruler will protect him. However, his use of the biblical model of the lion that lies with the lamb instead proves his weakness: he has forgotten the lessons of Machiavelli, who insisted in The Prince that a successful ruler should combine the qualities of the lion and the fox (2009: 69–70). Henry lacks the qualities of the fox. When his opponent Edward becomes king, he too misreads his situation, celebrating ‘the two brave bears’ Warwick and Montague ‘[t]hat in their chains fettered the kingly lion / And made the forest tremble when they roared’ (5.7.10–12). Having dispatched those enemies responsible for toppling both Edward himself and Henry at different points, Edward is sublimely oblivious to the fact that Richard of Gloucester, later Richard III, plots against him already. Duke Vincentio compares his neglect of Vienna’s ‘strict statutes and most biting laws’ to ‘an o’ergrown lion in a cave / That goes not out to prey’ (MM 1.3.19, 22–3), possibly obliquely refererring to the fable of the lion who, to compensate for his old age, lay in the mouth of his cave pretending to be ill, trying to trick forest creatures into attacking him so that he might instead eat them (Perry Index 142). Angelo tries to be the lion who no longer allows the ‘mice’ to ‘run by’ the lion with impunity (1.4.63–4). The enfeeblement of Vienna’s laws, that no longer ‘bite’ or prey on its citizens, suggests the problem with enforcing them anew – and indeed in this play about the balance between mercy and justice, Angelo’s interpretation of the lion’s role requires the Duke’s return to mitigate the results. The lion’s instincts are implicated in Helena’s complaint in AWW that ‘[t]he hind that would be mated by the lion / Must die for love’ (1.1.91–2); 277

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the play again alludes glancingly at fables that involve lions turning on lesser animals who have the poor judgement to aid or bond with them. Yet Lavinia cites the example of the ‘lion, moved with pity, did endure / To have his princely paws pared all away’ (TIT 2.2.151–52) when pleading with Tamora to prevent her mistreatment by Chiron and Demetrius. In this case the fable Lavinia’s words refer to has the lion killed in the end by the father whose daughter he wishes to marry (Perry Index 140) and for whom he disarms himself, a result that resonates on many levels with Lavinia’s fate. Lest his savagery not fully register, Marina’s attempted murderer in PER is given the name Leonine: in the play’s explorations of barbarity vs civilization, Leonine, Dionyza’s servant, is ordered by her to murder Marina, although he sees her as ‘a goodly creature’ (4.1.8). His failure represents all that threatens civil society – and he is dispatched like a beast by Dionyza, who poisons him (4.3.10), only to be in turn burned with her family by her own countrymen when they learn of her evil plot. (C) Yoder (1947) describes the various fables in which lions are featured, while Salisbury (1994) touches on both the fables and the broader tradition of the lion as king, with particular attention to its role in exploring social justice. Haist (1999) also accounts for the lion’s role in medieval bestiaries and heraldry, especially its association with kingship’s requisite strength and mercy. Fortin (1972) argues that the religious symbolism in the lioness scene in AYLI relies on the animal’s association with ‘natural evil’, since she hunts only to feed her young, while the snake stands for ‘moral evil’, since the creature has a choice about whether to commit a sin or not. Mennell (2020) argues that Shakespeare’s use of lion imagery, especially in conjunction with that of the wolf, is designed to legitimate monarchy, but only when tempered by mercy. KR lizard. (A) A small, harmless reptile (Lacerta or Zootoca vivipara, the common lizard) resembling a newt. One of three lizards native to Britain, the common lizard is variable in its size and colour (which may be brown, green, grey or even reddish), and, as its scientific name implies, it is viviparous. The two other native lizard species are the rarer, egg-laying sand lizard (Lacerta agilis) and the slow- or blind-worm (Anguis fragilis), often mistaken for a snake. The nature and behaviour of the lizard was not well understood in the early modern period, and, as was often the case with mysterious creatures, lizards were assumed to be poisonous. (B) ‘Lizard’s leg’ appears as an ingredient in the witches’ cauldron in MAC (4.1.17). In Suffolk’s extended invective in 2H6, which systematically works through all the senses (AR3: 275, n. 324), the lizard is enlisted to curse his enemies’ sense of touch. May ‘[t]heir softest touch [be] as smart as lizards’ stings’ (3.2.325), Suffolk prays. In 3H6, Queen Margaret declares that Richard of York is like neither of his parents but is instead ‘like a foul misshapen stigmatic, / Marked by the Destinies to be avoided, / As venom toads or lizards’ dreadful stings’ (2.2.136–8). She means that the sinister or malformed appearance of human beings, like that of animals, serves as a warning that they are venomous, literally or figuratively. A comprehensive disparaging of the lizard 278

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occurs in Thersites’s listing of all the low or detestable creatures he would choose to be rather than to be Menelaus: ‘To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus! I would conspire against destiny’ (TRO 5.1.59–62). (C) Topsell’s chapter on the lizard, which appears in the volume on serpents, suggests some experiential knowledge of the reptile (1628: 737–8). See Neri (2011: 78–9) for a discussion and reproduction of Roelant Savery’s still life painting, Bouquet of Flowers with Two Lizards (1603). Crump (2015: 166–75) gathers lore connected with lizards. KE loach. A freshwater fish (Barbatula barbatula, the stone loach) valued in earlier centuries for its flavour and alleged promotion of good health. The loach, says Izaak Walton (in the slightly expanded second edition of his Compleat Angler), ‘is a most daintie fish’ (1655: 320–1); it ‘is by Gesner and other learned Physicians commended for great nourishment; and to be very grateful both to the palate and stomack of sick persons’ (322). Complaining about the inn and his flea-infested room, the Second Carrier in 1H4 seems drawn to similes involving fish. After announcing, ‘I am stung like a tench’ (2.1.15), he shortly afterwards declares, ‘Why, they will allow us ne’er a jordan, and then we leak in your chimney, and your chamber lye breeds fleas like a loach’ (2.1.19–21). The lack of a chamber-pot, that is, means that guests must urinate in the fireplace, and fleas multiply in the urine. Why an infestation of fleas brings the loach to the Second Carrier’s mind is not clear. Perhaps, notes Kastan (AR3: 185, n. 21), there is an allusion to Pliny, who observes that some fish breed parasites, but the allusion could also be to the presumed fertility of loaches (1940: 269 [9.71]). It might be best simply to assume that Shakespeare is drawing upon the traditional association of fish names with comedy (Baskervill 1929: 93). KE loon, lown. Aquatic bird of the family Gaviidae. The loon is a perplexing case of confusion over how history, terminology and animal identification have evolved. The only uses of the word loon (or lown, an alternate spelling) do not necessarily refer to a bird at all: according to the OED ,‘loon’ defined as a ‘worthless person, a scamp’ traces its usage to the fifteenth century; the application of the word to the bird we now consider a loon comes later, in the mid-sixteenth century, and the first cited uses are all from New England; however, the etymological roots of the term loon may include ‘loom’ (or lumme, the same root as leads to the word lummox), which spelling is used in Northern Europe. Did the word for a foolish person migrate to describe the bird, which is notably awkward on land? Or is it possible that Shakespeare was familiar with some presumably rural oral tradition that conflated the human loon with the avian one? The plays give no clear answer: while the term’s appearance in PER (4.5.25) and OTH (2.3.88) appears clearly to refer to human rogues, its appearance in MAC is more equivocal. Macbeth calls the servant who arrives to give him news of the English army’s arrival a ‘cream-faced loon’ (5.3.11), which at first seems to follow the pattern of other plays – but Macbeth then immediately describes the 279

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servant’s ‘goose-look’ (5.3.12), suggesting that the playwright has birds on his mind. Harting (1965: 258–9) seems unconcerned about the etymological conundrum, easily arguing that the cowardly human loon is identical with the avian variety, calling ‘loon’ a ‘provincial name’ of the class of diving birds that includes grebes and dive-dappers. KR louse, lousy, nit. (A) Lice are parasitic insects of the order Phthiraptera that infest the skins, hair and plumage of mammals and birds. Their nits, or eggs, are cemented to the host’s hair or feathers. Humans are host to three kinds of lice: head, body and pubic. Lice were ubiquitous pests in the early modern period, but despite that fact they are most often associated with poverty, low status and vulgarity. Because of their size, lice could also convey triviality and insignificance. (B) Fluellen in H5 uses the term ‘lousy’ in verbal attacks on Williams (4.8.36) and Pistol (5.1.5, 18, 22) – it numbers among his favourite slurs. Another Welshman, Evans in WIV , calls his nemesis Caius ‘[a] lousy knave’ as well (3.3.225). King Henry scolds his courtiers for their disrespectful treatment of Cromwell: ‘Was it discretion, lords, to let this man, / This good man [. . .] This honest man, wait like a lousy footboy / At chamber door?’ (H8 5.2.171–4), here using lousiness as a means of distinguishing rank and status. Thersites takes it one step further, exclaiming that he would rather be ‘the louse of a lazar’ (TRO 5.1.63) as long as he was not Menelaus: that is, he would not mind being the lowly parasite on a lowly leper as long as he was not the King of Sparta, who has been cuckolded by Paris. Likewise, Costard refers to Moth (already defined as miniscule by his name) as a ‘nit’ (LLL 4.1.147), and Petruccio calls the tailor who is trying to dress Katherina ‘Thou flea, thou nit’ (SHR 4.3.111). Lear’s Fool sings a ditty that hints at the role of sexual behaviours in transmitting parasites and other pestilence: ‘The codpiece that will house / Before the head has any, / The head and he shall house: / So beggars marry many’ (LR 3.2.27–30) – or in other words, anyone who engages in sex before finding shelter will find himself poor, infested with lice and ‘married’ to (or stuck with) a gaggle of harlots. (C) Robert Hooke includes the illustration of a louse seen under the microscope in his Micrographia (1667), a famous image that is often cited to convey the radical shift in perspective caused by the scientific revolution. Most early references to lice involve remedies to treat them: Fornaciari et al. (2011) discuss a range of such treatments. Iyengar (2011) details the medical history of the louse (270–2) and Vienne-Guerrin discusses the use of louse as an insult (2016: 366). KR

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M mackerel. The general name for a variety of species of fish, most of them striped and with deeply forked tails, from the family Scombridae. Mackerel are only referred to once in the plays, when Falstaff and Prince Hal are discussing the fact that Hotspur, Glendower and Mortimer have taken to the field against King Henry IV. ‘You may buy land now,’ Falstaff tells Hal, ‘as cheap as stinking mackerel’ (1H4 2.4.350–1). The prince responds by turning mackerel into maidenheads: ‘Why then, it is like if there come a hot June and this civil buffeting hold, we shall buy maidenheads as they buy hobnails: by the hundreds’ (2.4.352–4). The use of fish to refer to loose women is commonplace in the plays; in this case, mackerel is straightforward slang for prostitute (OED 2). Hal thus deflects the actual politics of the brewing conflict back into the (perhaps more comfortable) language of the taverns. KR maggot. (A) The larva of an insect such as the blowfly; it is also referred to as a worm, which seems to be the preferred term in the early modern period. In a process known as spontaneous generation, maggots were thought in Shakespeare’s day to be bred by the decaying flesh on which they are, in fact, feeding. (B) In LLL , Biron swears off pretentious language: ‘Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical: these summer flies / Have blown me full of maggot ostentation’ (5.2.406–9). As the OED notes, this is a rare and obsolete use of ‘maggot’ as an adjective; ‘blown’ refers to a fly’s laying its eggs in meat. Biron, in short, is likening his inflated rhetoric to a swollen corpse. Maggots in HAM have a more direct, if riddling, association with decaying flesh. In an exchange deeply perplexing to Polonius, Hamlet muses, ‘For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion – have you a daughter?’ (2.2.178–9). When Polonius answers that he does, Hamlet warns, ‘Let her not walk i’th’ sun: conception is a blessing but as your daughter may conceive, friend – look to’t’ (2.2.181–3). Hamlet’s words pivot on the idea of conception, which includes the generation of maggots in a dog’s corpse, a young woman’s potential for breeding (whether an out-of-wedlock child or maggots or both), and the forming of (erroneous) ideas. Ironically, it is not Polonius’s daughter but Polonius himself who becomes, in Hamlet’s description, a breeder of maggots. In response to King Claudius’s attempts to discover where he has hidden Polonius’s body, Hamlet in effect announces that to the maggot, kings and beggars are the same: ‘Your worm is your only emperor for diet. 281

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We fat all creatures else to fat us and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes to one table. That’s the end’ (4.3.21–4). (C) Moffet is blunt in describing the depredation of maggots: ‘There is no man almost that hath not seen these in Carrion and corrupt flesh, and sometimes in limbs that are dead by the negligence of Chirurgions’ (Topsell 1658: 1122). For the theory of spontaneous generation in Shakespeare’s day, see H. Harris (2002: 1–8). Halpern argues that the constant activity of maggots and worms in HAM serves as a foil to Hamlet’s inaction: while Hamlet hopes for an act that will bring a definitive end and closure to the tragedy around him, ‘the activity of nature proceeds by contrast, to no purpose or goal and with no end in sight’ (2008: 462). MacInnes (2012) reads HAM ’s maggots as linked to the play’s construction of a diseased Denmark. KE magpie, maggot pie, pie. (A) A medium-sized bird (Pica pica) belonging to the crow family. ‘Magpie’ seems to be a contraction of Maggot- or Maggoty-Pie, or Maggot the Pie, names derived from the affectionate pet name ‘Mag’, for Margaret or Margery, in combination with ‘pie’, short for ‘pied’. The magpie is indeed pied, its plumage strikingly white and black, although the feathers on its lower wings and long tail show up in sunlight as iridescent blue-black. Attitudes toward the magpie are sharply divided. As the origin of its name suggests, magpies were in earlier centuries sometimes kept as pets and valued for their intelligence, mischievous thievery and ability to ‘speak’. But magpies were also, and remain, the subject of many superstitions. Moreover, they were long classed as vermin. (After centuries of persecution, the magpie population has now begun to recover.) Folklorists believe that the bird’s pied or hybrid colours may help explain why it was regarded as a bird of ill omen. But its harsh, chattering cry and the fact that it feeds on carrion and on the eggs and chicks of other birds undoubtedly contribute to its reputation. (B) After his encounter with Banquo’s ghost, Macbeth broods about creatures that have been said to reveal the connection between apparently unrelated events, unveiling long hidden evil: ‘Augures, and understood relations, have / By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth / The secret’st man of blood’ (MAC 3.4.122–4). A more extensive group of ominous birds is banished from the wedding of Hippolyta and Theseus in TNK : ‘The crow, the sland’rous cuckoo, nor / The boding raven, nor chough hoar, / Nor chatt’ring ‘pie, / May on our bride-house perch or sing. / Or with them any discord bring’ (1.1.19–23). Another list of ominous birds, including the magpie with its unmelodic call, is invoked by King Henry when in 3H6 he curses the hour in which Richard of York was born: ‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign; / The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; / [. . .] / The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top; / And chatt’ring pies in dismal discords sung’ (5.6.44–5, 47–8). His point is that fowls of ill omen formed a cacophonous choir to warn the world that a monster had been born. 282

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(C) The ancient classical world valued magpies as mimics (Mynott 2018: 98). Their harsh, unmusical chattering also figures in myth: when the daughters of King Pierus challenged the Muses to a singing contest and lost, they were changed to magpies as punishment for their presumption (Mynott 2018: 279–80). Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, looking back on her life, describes herself as ‘yong and ful of ragerye [gaiety], / Stibourn and strong, and joly as a pye’ (Chaucer 1987: 111). See S. Thompson (1955: A23812.1) for folk attitudes toward the bird’s pied colours. Cocker and Mabey (2005: 400–5) and Rowland (1978: 102–5) list some of the superstitions associated with magpies, often expressed in children’s counting songs. KE mallard. A type of duck from the waterfowl family of Anatidae, the mallards known to Shakespeare’s world could have included any of a number of sub-species rather than that now identified by the green plumage on the head of the drake (Anas platyrhynchos). The term ‘mallard’ derives from the Old French malart, referring to any wild drake. The sole reference to a mallard in the plays comes when Antony is fleeing the battle at Actium: Scarus describes how he ‘like a doting mallard, / Leaving the fight in height, flies after her [Cleopatra]’ (ANT 3.10.20–1). The supposed uxoriousness of male birds is here deployed both to describe the sea battle (Antony ‘[c]laps on his seawing’ [3.10.20] or hoists his sails to take ‘flight’ like a sea bird) and to register Antony’s subservience and emasculation, since he is dominated by his love for Cleopatra to the point of abandoning all that has made him a paragon of masculine military ferocity. KR malt-worm. The grain weevil (Sitophylus granarius), which infests malt and stored grain, often used figuratively for frequenters of taverns. In 1H4, Gadshill protests to the chamberlain that he and his fellow highwaymen are not common thieves: ‘I am joined with no foot-landrakers, no long-staff sixpenny strikers, none of these mad mustachio purple-hued malt-worms’, he declares, ‘but with nobility and tranquillity, burgomasters and great oneyers’ (2.1.72–5). The purple (i.e., red) complexion of metaphoric maltworms comes from their drinking; their fierce mustachios come from affectation. Falstaff and Hal, too, associate a red complexion with heavy drinking. The prince singles out Bardolph, ‘whose zeal burns in his nose’ (2H4 2.4.333), and Falstaff adds that Bardolph’s ‘face is Lucifer’s privy kitchen, where he doth nothing but roast maltworms’ (2.4.337–8) – where Lucifer’s fire, that is, singes those who have already singed their faces with drinking. KE mare. (A) A female horse old enough to breed. (B) Mares could represent the dogged determination of the weaker animal, as when Nym feels himself much abused by Pistol in H5 and grumbles, ‘Though patience be a 283

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tired mare, yet she will plod’ (2.1.24–5), meaning he’ll get his revenge in the end. Elsewhere it is the mare’s sexual status that is invoked: the mad jailer’s daughter in love with Palamon in TNK mentions Palamon’s ‘[C]hestnut’ mare (5.2.61) – the animal, she says, is in love with the Duke’s mount which spurns her attentions – aligning herself with the poor rejected animal: ‘He lisps in’s neighing, able to entice / A miller’s mare. He’ll be the death of her’ (5.2.66–7). The inverted gender hierarchy that stems from Antony’s infatuation with Cleopatra is at stake when Enobarbus chides the queen for wanting to be present at Actium: ‘If we should serve with horse and mares together, / The horse were merely lost. The mares would bear / A soldier and his horse’ (ANT 3.7.7–8). In other words, only male horses should be taken to war lest they be distracted by sexual desire and thus defeated by their own folly. This moment resonates with Cleopatra’s earlier envy of Antony’s horse (1.5.22), which bears him as she wishes she might do, making her a mare to Antony’s stallion. Enobarbus’s criticism implies that Cleopatra should aspire to serve merely as a sexual partner to the Roman general rather than as an equal leader in battle. Similarly, Puck’s ditty in MND , sung while he corrects his errors in enchanting the young lovers, merges mares and human love objects: ‘Jack shall have Jill, / Nought shall go ill, / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well’ (3.2.461–3). With a few brutal words, Puck summarizes the way that the sexual desires the play has featured demote the female characters to bestial status, while their male partners are figured as lusting after animals. In VEN , the mare that lures his courser away from Adonis stands as the embodiment of sexual distraction (see 379–384). Yet more lewd wordplay involving mares is featured in 2H4 when Mistress Quickly threatens Falstaff, who has failed to pay for all the food and drink he has consumed in her tavern: ‘He hath put all my substance into that fat belly of his; [to Falstaff] but I will have some of it out again, or I will ride thee a’nights like the mare’ (2.1.73–5). Falstaff responds, ‘I think I am as like to ride the mare if I have any vantage of ground to get up’ (2.1.76–7). He quips that he will more likely ‘ride’ her sexually, but may also be playing with the idea of being ‘hag-ridden’ as in bothered with nightmares. He may even be hinting that he is worried about being hanged for theft (AR3: 220, n. 76), since slang for the gallows was ‘three-legged mare’ (OED 4a). (C) Boehrer finds Puck’s elision of man and mare in MND evidence that marriage was potentially perceived as the yoking of two unequal creatures in a sexual union that could not be fully distinguished from ‘bestial buggery’ (2002: 44–8). About the Enobarbus passage, Ross argues that ‘merely’ (‘the horse were merely lost’) would have sounded to the original audience much like ‘marely’, thus emphasizing the sexual innuendo involved (1980: 386). KR marmoset. Today the name denotes a small, squirrel-like New World monkey (family Callitrichidae) found in South and Central America. In Shakespeare’s day, it was a general name for any small monkey, as it is in Mandeville’s fourteenth-century Travels, in which ‘Marmozets’ (1582: sig. P1r, P4v) is translated by modern editors as 284

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‘little monkeys’ (see, for instance, Mandeville 2012: 88, 97). In Chapman’s 1606 play, Sir Giles Goosecap, Bulloker (a ‘Frenchified’ page) is mistaken for a baboon and demands, ‘Can ye not know a man from a marmoset’? (qtd. in Knowles [2004: 144]), that is, do you not know a man from a monkey? The English word ‘marmoset’ is borrowed from the Middle French marmouset, which originally meant a gargoyle or a grotesque mask (OED ). Offering to share the wonders of his island with Trinculo and Stephano, Caliban promises to show them ‘how / To snare the nimble marmoset’ (TMP 2.2.166–7). The fact that it contains marmosets conveys the exotic nature of Prospero’s island, but whether Caliban proposes to eat the marmoset or turn it into a pet is not clear. KE martlet. (A) The name, thought originally to signify the swift (Apus apus), may also in Shakespeare’s day refer to the barn swallow (Hirundo rustica) or the house martin (Delichon urbicum). The three species resemble each other: all have forked tails and long tapered wings, they feed aerially and they migrate. ‘Martlet’ or ‘marlet’ may also refer to the heraldic, mythologized swallow or swift, said to lack feet and so to be unable to land. (B) The martlet is named in both MAC and MV , but the name seems to signify different birds, judging from the behaviour attributed to each. In MAC , King Duncan and Banquo, catching their first sight of Macbeth’s castle, praise the sweetness and delicacy of its air, which Banquo specifically connects to the martlet: Banquo:

This guest of summer, The temple-haunting martlet, does approve, By his loved mansionry, that the heaven’s breath Smells wooingly here. No jutty frieze, Buttress, nor coin of vantage, but this bird Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle: Where they must breed and haunt, I have observed The air is delicate. (1.6.3–10)

Enter Lady [Macbeth] The audience is aware, as Banquo is not, that his assumption about the castle’s wholesome atmosphere is completely at odds with the murderous ambition of the castle’s owners. Yet his description of the martlet’s resourcefulness in building its nest is accurate and is in keeping with the play’s (and the Macbeths’) concern with succession. Given the bird’s habit of nesting in dark and secluded crannies of outbuildings, it is likely that Banquo’s martlet is a swallow. 285

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In MV , the Prince of Aragon, lingering over the choice of casket that will determine whether he wins Portia’s hand, declares that he will not be like the fool multitude that choose by show, Not learning more than the fond eye doth teach, Which pries not to th’interior, but like the martlet Builds in the weather on the outward wall, Even in the force and road of casualty. I will not choose what many men desire, Because I will not jump with common spirits And rank me with the barbarous multitudes. (2.9.25–32) Here, the martlet seems to be the house martin, which prefers to nest on the exposed outer walls of buildings. Aragon uses it to symbolize the common run of people – in contrast to himself – who lack foresight and judgement. Drakakis (AR3: 274, n. 27), citing Spurgeon (1935: 187–90), notes that there may be a subdued play in the passage on an obsolete sense of ‘martin’ meaning fool or dupe. (C) The notion that the martlet (i.e., the swallow or swift) lacks feet derives from Aristotle’s account of apodes, or footless birds, in his History of Animals (1991: 293 [9.30]). The heraldic martlet, observes Guillim, is ‘painted in Armes without feet’ and serves as a useful reminder to younger sons of the family ‘to trust to their wings of vertue and merit, to raise themselves, and not to [trust] their legges, having little land to put their foot on’ (1638: 232). There has been considerable critical interest in Shakespeare’s martlet. After an exhaustive survey of emblematic usages of the martlet, Daly (1978) concludes that the bird represents a world in which goodness and beneficence reign, the world of Duncan and Banquo, the obverse of Macbeth’s world. Mackenzie (2016), drawing upon Geffrey Whitney’s emblem, ‘Dolus in Suos’ (‘Treachery to his own kind’), agrees, likening Duncan and Banquo to the martlets, free as long as they fly, but netted and killed when they settle. E. Williams (1995) observes that the heraldic, footless martlet points to someone – here Macbeth – who has no footing in ancestral lands. For Lupton (2012), the image of the martlet conjures up the exposed and vulnerable place of hospitality and entertainment in MAC , which (like the Globe itself) brings into one embrace responses that are divided and contradictory. KE mastiff, bandog. (A) One of the largest dogs, the mastiff is a formidable type of guard dog with large head, broad chest and short coat. The terms mastiff and bandog or bandogge are used interchangeably to refer to this type of dog: ‘bandog’ simply refers to a collared and leashed dog, indicating that the dog is usually chained on a property for protection, possibly released only at night to counter intruders. In the ancient world, mastiffs might also have been used as war dogs trained to accompany solders into battle; they were also regularly used for hunting and for baiting bears and bulls. Caius in Of 286

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Englishe Dogges describes the mastiff as ‘violent and valiant, striking cold fear into the hearts of men’ and comments that three against a bear, four against a lion is ‘sufficient’ (1576: 25–6). (B) In H5, mastiffs are a marker of English national identity among the Frenchmen Rambures, Orleans and the Constable: Rambures:

Orleans:

Constable:

That island of England breeds very valiant creatures: their mastiffs are of unmatchable courage. Foolish curs, that run winking into the mouth of a Russian bear, and have their heads crushed like rotten apples [. . .] Just, just; and the men do sympathize with their mastiffs in robustious and rough coming on, leaving their wits with their wives (3.7.140–8)

The stupidity that the French associate with the mastiff and with Englishmen extends to the national preference for beef, linking strong meat and strong animals with strong (if, as the French insist, unsubtle and foolish) soldiers. The English reputation turns out to be in some ways warranted (the English do charge into a battle against insurmountable odds) and also beside the point, since they resoundingly defeat the French. In TRO , the warring Ajax and Achilles are the target of Ulysses’ plot to bring Achilles back to the battle by using Ajax to sting his pride. Nestor approves: ‘Two curs shall tame each other; pride alone / Must tar the mastiffs on, as ’twere their bone’ (1.3.391–2). Again, mastiffs are associated with both ferocity and stupidity, as the senior leaders plot to manipulate their two most capable fighters. Bolingbroke actually mentions Troy in 2H6 when he reassures Eleanor that their conjuring will wait for darkest night: ‘The time of night when Troy was set on fire, / The time when screech-owls cry and ban-dogs howl’ (1.4.17–18). Bandogs are here simply part of the atmosphere appropriate to the kind of witchcraft in which the company engages. When Edgar as Poor Tom refers to mastiffs, he does so to banish the ‘little dogs’ that bedevil Lear, ‘Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim [. . .] Tom will make him weep and wail’ (LR 3.6.60, 65–8). (C) MacInnes (2003) details the use of the mastiff as a reflection of English identity in contrast with the foreign-derived spaniel. KR mermaid. (A) A ‘sea maid’ (from the Old English mere, or sea), these fish‒human hybrids are folkloric, mythological and literary, usually depicted as unnatural creatures that represent violations of basic and distinct categories. In the Old English poem Beowulf, Grendel’s monstrous mother is a ‘sea-wolf’ or mere-woman, while Horace refers to the mermaid in his Ars Poetica as an example of a violent stylistic fusion (1926: 451). Thomas 287

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Browne, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, distinguishes mermaids from ‘syrens’, which he claims were bird–human hybrids, although in The Faerie Queene, Spenser identifies them with the sirens whose music drew travellers at sea (2001: 2.12.30) . Mermaids were associated with evil omens, with the problem of natural categories and with lust. (B) Shakespeare follows Spenser’s example in associating mermaids with song, especially tempting or seductive song. Venus twice compares Adonis’s voice to that of a mermaid (VEN 429, 777), which when he rejects her is full of ‘Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh sounding’ (431). In 3H6, Richard promises to ‘frame [his] face to all occasions’ and ‘drown more sailors than the Mermaid shall’ (3.2.185–6), foreshadowing not just his own future as a destructive king but perhaps also the drowning Clarence later suffers at Richard’s command in R3. Lust is clearly evident in ERR when Antipholus of Syracuse calls Luciana a mermaid and a siren, and pledges to ‘stop [his] ears’ against her song lest he do himself harm (3.2.45–7, 169). Oberon recalls sitting on a ‘promontory’ and hearing ‘a mermaid on a dolphin’s back / Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath / That the rude sea grew civil at her song’ (MND 2.1.149–52); the ‘imperial votaress’ he mentions a few lines later (2.1.163) is a glancing reference to Elizabeth I as – ironically – a siren who tempts others but is impervious to Cupid’s darts. Cleopatra is associated with seductive mermaids when Enobarbus describes her progress down the Nile to greet Antony: ‘Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides, / So many mermaids, tended her i’th’ eyes’, while at the barge’s helm ‘[a] seeming mermaid steers’ (ANT 2.2.216–19). (C) Buhler (2006) argues that the siren’s song was a powerful means of representing poetic anxiety about the honeyed sweetness of poetry and thus its capacity to effeminize through erotic pleasures, while Pedersen (2015) analogizes mermaids’ binarism and category-defying monstrosity to drama itself, which blends multiple modes. Appropriately, then, it is Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most enticing but elusive character, who functions for Pedersen as the quintessential dramatic mermaid: Enobarbus describes the queen on her barge tended by her ‘gentlewomen, like the Nereides, / So many mermaids’, and the barge itself helmed by ‘[a] seeming mermaid’ (2.2.216–17, 219). KR minnow. (A) One of a number of species of tiny freshwater fish (the name minnow derives from Old English mynwe or myne for small fish) of the family Cyprinidae. (B) A minnow’s size is its most significant attribute in the plays. Coriolanus mocks Sicinius as ‘this Triton of the minnows’ in COR (3.1.90) when Sicinius presumes to criticize him. In a series of images involving water, streams and fishing, the Third Queen in TNK uses the slightness and evasiveness of the minnow to emphasize how deep her sorrow lies: ‘he that will fish / For my least minnow, let him lead his line / To catch one at my heart’ (1.1.115–17). The jailer later in the play describes the lesser types who visit his prison as insignificant in comparison with the important individuals he guards: ‘Alas, the prison I keep, though it be for great ones, yet they seldom come; before one salmon, you shall take a number of minnows’ (2.1.2–4). Since minnows were used as bait as well as food, the repetition of their appearance might suggest the various traps 288

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and snares the play lays for its characters, both high and low. Finally, Armado describes Costard in his letter to the King of Navarre in LLL as ‘that base minnow of mirth’ (1.1.240), or a laughably insignificant creature. KR minotaur. (A) Mythological creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man; in some depictions, the reverse is true, and the creature has the head of a man on a bull’s body. The minotaur (the name means bull of Minos) was the child of a liaison between King Minos’s wife Pasiphäe and a snow-white bull sent to the king by Poseidon; when Minos failed to sacrifice the bull to the god, Poseidon punished him by having Pasiphäe lust for the bull. She used a hollow wooden cow built by Daedalus to aid her sexual congress with the monster. Minos imprisoned the monster in a labyrinth also constructed by Daedalus, where he was killed by the Greek hero Theseus. The principal source for the myth in Shakespeare’s time was Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated by Arthur Golding (1567). Ovid reports the tale briefly as follows: Within this Maze did Minos shet the Monster that did beare The shape of man and Bull. And when he twise had fed him there With bloud of Atticke Princes sonnes that given for tribute were, The third time at the ninth yeares end the lot did chaunce to light On Theseus, King Aegaeus sonne: who like a valiant Knight Did overcome the Minotaur: and by the pollicie Of Minos eldest daughter (who had taught him for to tie A clew of Linnen at the doore to guide himselfe thereby) As busie as the turnings were, his way he out did finde, Which never man had done before. And streight he having winde, With Minos daughter sailde away to Dia: where (unkinde And cruell creature that he was) he left hir post alone Upon the shore. (195) (B) Suffolk mentions the minotaur in 1H6 as a lurking danger in his infatuation with Margaret: ‘Thou mayst not wander in that labyrinth: / There Minotaurs and ugly treasons lurk’ (5.2.209–10). Pasiphäe’s sexual desire for the bull is here the paradigm for Suffolk’s own obsession (he becomes Margaret’s lover by 2H6). But in by far the most significant use of the minotaur myth the creature is not directly named: it is present in several aspects throughout MND where Theseus presides over the play’s action. The labyrinthine forest in which the young lovers wander, and the passion Titania conceives 289

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for Bottom, who is in turn a hybrid like the minotaur (albeit a less dangerous and powerful one, given he has the head of an ass), are indirect gestures toward Theseus’s history with the monster. But the play offers some unexpected twists in its many allusions. In Ovid’s account, the hero deserts Ariadne, Minos’s daughter, who helped him defeat the labyrinth and the monster. Ariadne is variously reported by other sources than Ovid to have either killed herself, or else been discovered by Dionysus on the island where Theseus left her and married to the god. While sources may differ on the details of Theseus’s many adventures, they agree on his tendency to abduct women and get into serious trouble involving lust and seduction. He abducts Helen of Troy in one tale, and in others abducts and marries Phaedra, another of Minos’s daughters, who is responsible for the death of his son by the Amazon Hippolyta (or in some versions, Antiope, another Amazon). These escapades haunt the play, especially in the framing event that has Theseus wooing Hippolyta with his sword and winning her love by ‘doing [her] injuries’ (1.1.17). Audiences might recall the myths well enough to recognize that when the three couples at the end head off to their marriage beds, Theseus and his new queen will conceive the ill-fated Hippolytus. The association of Theseus with monsters and murder is further alluded to in Philostrate’s list of entertainments for the wedding feast, which includes ‘ “The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung / By an Athenian eunuch to the harp?” ’ (5.1.44–5). That battle, which Theseus helped to win, involved the unruly centaurs at the wedding feast of Pirithous, King of the Lapiths, who became inebriated and tried to rape the Lapith women. Where Theseus is concerned, then, love is usually associated with abandonment, rape and death, and is thus as monstrous as the minotaur itself. (C) Lamb (1979) analyses in full the many dimensions of the minotaur myth as they appear in MND . KR mite. (A) A tiny arachnid belonging to the Acari group, although the term was used more generally in earlier centuries for any tiny insect. The mite is a destructive parasite, harming plants and animals and products made from them. (B) In his volley of arguments against virginity, Paroles in AWW declares, ‘Virginity breeds mites, much like a cheese, consumes itself to the very paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach’ (1.1.141–3); that is, virginity dies of pride, which was believed to have its seat in the stomach. Cheese does not in fact breed mites, but certain mites feed on the mould that is essential to cheese production. Some cheeses are harmed by mites; others depend upon the action of mites for their distinctive flavour. What may be the tiny pest, but may instead or in addition be a coin worth very little, is invoked in PER. Gower, as the Chorus, prophesies that Pericles’ loss of that which is seemingly good (his prospective bride, Antiochus’s incestuous daughter) will be followed in the future by the gaining or regaining of that which is truly good. ‘I’ll show you’, says Gower, ‘those in troubles reign, / Losing a mite, a mountain gain’ (2.0.7–8). Gower’s prophesy seems to mean that those who maintain their integrity in troubled times will be 290

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rewarded, that they will recover (in a new and more glorious form) what they have lost. His ‘mite’ may refer to the miniscule arachnid. It is more likely, however, that here ‘mite’ means a coin worth about a tenth of a penny. In a well-known story in the New Testament, Jesus observes people giving alms: ‘[M]any riche men cast in muche’, while ‘a certeine poore widowe [. . .] threw in two mites’. She has offered, Jesus says to his disciples, more than all the rest, for the others ‘did cast in of their superfluitie: but she of her povertie did cast in all that she had, even all her living’ (Mk 12.41–3, GNV). The widow, ‘losing’ her mite, gains the inestimable value of Jesus’ praise. (C) Jonson seems to pun on ‘mite’ in The Alchemist, when Face warns Dapper, who is about to meet the Faery Queen (Dol Common in disguise), that he must divest himself of his purse, his ring and his silver seal, for ‘her Grace will send / Her faeries here to search you, therefore deal / Directly with her Highness. If they find / That you conceal a mite, you are undone’ (1982a: 3.5.25–8). Arguably the most famous mite of the early modern period is the mite observed under Robert Hooke’s lens and depicted in his Micrographia (1665: fig. 35), the volume making available to his contemporaries the wonders revealed by the microscope. Hooke cannot resist a pun on ‘mite’, observing with false modesty in his introduction, ‘I have at length cast in my Mite, into the vast Treasury of A Philosophical History’ (sig. g2v). KE mole, mold-warp. (A) Small burrowing mammals of the family Tapidae adapted to living underground. Early modern references to moles or mold-warps might apply to other related animals like shrew-moles that are not wholly subterranean. Topsell insists that moles are not mice, for example, although the two creatures are sometimes confused in classical sources (1658: 388). While moles are not completely blind, their tiny eyes and underground habitat has led to their characterization as sightless, as is evident in the adage ‘Argus abroad, mole at home’ (Argus Panoptes was a mythological giant with 100 eyes; Wilson 1970: 18). Topsell quotes the more familiar saying, ‘Blind as a mole’ (1658: 389; Tilley 1950: M1034). Equally important was the mole’s destructive influence on land and crops: although moles are insectivorous, their tunnels and the small hillocks they throw up as they dig cause damage to plants and root systems, making them a major pest and the object of many recipes for traps and poisons in husbandry manuals. Yet Tusser finds them useful in creating oases of soil in wet pastures where lambs might rest (1580: 111) and they could even aid in loosening compacted soil for farming or gardening. (B) Hamlet’s father’s ghost demands that Hamlet and his companions swear they will remain silent about what they’ve seen on the castle ramparts: when the ghost, whom Hamlet calls the ‘fellow in the cellarage’, moves with the group as Hamlet tries to shift ground, and calls out repeatedly, it leads Hamlet to respond, ‘Well said, old mole, canst work i’th’ earth so fast?’ (HAM 1.5.151, 161). The ghost’s liveliness stands in stark contrast to his buried and decayed corpse, aligning it with the confusing capability of the mole to dwell and remain active without air and light (moles need less oxygen and 291

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so are able to survive at high levels of carbon dioxide). 3H6 uses the image of the molehill’s insignificance in contrast with a mountain (as in the saying, ‘make a mountain out of a molehill’; Tilley 1950: M1035): Queen Margaret puts the defeated York on a molehill – she has Clifford and Northumberland ‘make him stand upon this molehill here / That raught [reached] at mountains with outstretched arms’ (1.4.67–8). The staged spectacle makes concrete York’s fall and gives Margaret the chance to rail at him at length, rebuking his ambition while mocking his current condition. It is ominous that later King Henry removes himself from the battle at Towton to meditate on the vagaries of war, saying, ‘Here on this molehill will I sit me down. / To whom God will, there be the victory’ (2.5.14–15). Henry’s passivity, his indulgence in imagining what a life as a ‘homely swain’ who can ‘sit upon a hill’ (2.5.22–3) would be like rather than fight a war demonstrates both his recognition of the evils of war and his utter unfitness to be king – a mole, as it were, among martial men, hiding from the bright and unforgiving light of political reality. Coriolanus describes his mother’s obeisance when she and Volumnia plead with him to spare Rome: ‘As if Olympus to a molehill should / In supplication nod’ (COR 5.3.30–1). The proverb about the mountain and the molehill is here adapted and exaggerated so that Volumnia is no longer either human or animal – perhaps appropriate to her rather stony character. Hotspur, who is in contrast a vigorous realist, grumbles at the Welsh king Glendower: ‘Sometimes he angers me / With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant’ (1H4 3.1.144– 5). A dose of tolerance for magic and folklore might save Hotspur from alienating his allies, as Mortimer points out in this scene. Elsewhere, moles figure in more political commentary when Pericles rebukes Antiochus for his vice and tyranny which he asserts lead only to the suffering of all those whom he rules: The blind mole casts Copped hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is thronged By man’s oppression, and the poor worm doth die for’t. Kings are earth’s gods; in vice their law’s their will; And, if Jove stray, who dares say Jove doth ill? (PER 1.1.101–5) Pericles’ mole and worm experience injustice as much as do human subjects in a metaphor that levels species distinctions and implicates Antiochus in acts against nature, a not-so-subtle reference to the incest he has committed with his daughter. As blind earth-dwellers, moles are vulnerable and insignificant, but sensitive to the impact of humans on the earth – literally, as is acknowledged in TMP when Caliban, on the way to attack Prospero, advises Stephano and Trinculo to ‘tread softly, that the blind mole may / Not hear a footfall’ (4.1.194–5). Autolycus in WT calls the gullible Clown and Shepherd ‘two moles, these blind ones’ (4.4.841) whom he will lead to the court to see what profit he can make off their knowledge of Perdita’s origin. (C) De Grazia (1999) discusses the role of the mole in HAM at length, noting that both Hegel and Marx cite its appearance in their writing but mistake the nature of its 292

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movement, adapting it to their own political and philosophical ends which require speed, progress and rising toward the light. For de Grazia, the mole as earth-worker in HAM is linked to the same humus or soil that is the basis for human identity, generating a reading of the play that emphasizes its investment in land, soil and dust. Raber (2013) argues for the mole’s role in establishing commonalities between the labour humans undertake on land and that carried out by subterranean populations like moles: as pests, moles are in competition for resources with humans, but their relationship to and claims on land, their property in it alongside their indifference to human property boundaries, could disrupt any notion of human territorial control. KR monster, monstrous. (A) Etymologically derived from a term meaning a marvel or a prodigy, ‘monster’ in Shakespeare’s day signifies a real or imaginary creature, including human beings, regarded as unnatural in physical, moral or spiritual terms. The monster’s unnaturalness usually, although not invariably, produces fear or disgust; sometimes it is taken as a portent. The terms ‘monster’ and ‘monstrous’ occur well over a hundred times in Shakespeare’s works, most frequently in a figurative sense. Ingratitude, death, envy, custom – all these and many more abstractions are called monsters. But so, too, are wives, boy actors and individual characters. This entry will confine itself to those instances in which the monstrous is associated with animals. (B) The characters most often referred to as monsters in Shakespeare’s works are Caliban and Bottom. The former is called a monster over forty times in TMP . What the term might imply has led to a great deal of scholarly speculation. It is widely assumed that the similarity of Caliban’s name to ‘cannibal’ reflects some familiarity with Michel Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Caniballes’ (translated into English by John Florio in 1603). Montaigne, like Shakespeare, is less interested in the consumption of one human being by another than in the nature of civility versus barbarity, the latter more easily found in Europeans’ practice of torture, notes Montaigne, than in the behaviour of those New World inhabitants who ceremonially consume the flesh of their enemies. To Montaigne, cannibals are not monsters. In TMP , Caliban is not a cannibal, but he is a monster, at least in the eyes of most of the other characters in the play. They signal his monstrosity by likening him to or associating him with a series of animals. It is thus not irrelevant that the morally monstrous Sebastian and Antonio, casting around for a fiction to explain why they are sneaking up on Gonzalo and Alonso with drawn swords, invent a story involving monstrous beasts: ‘Even now we heard a hollow burst of bellowing, / Like bulls, or rather lions’ (2.1.312–13), Sebastian hastily explains. ‘O, ’twas a din to fright a monster’s ear’, adds Antonio; ‘Sure it was the roar / Of a whole herd of lions’ (2.1.315–17). The bestial qualities ascribed to Caliban by other characters in TMP do not add up to a coherent image, creating instead a collage of strange parts. Later calling him a ‘tortoise’ (1.2.317) – a label that probably refers to his slowness but may allude to his shape – Prospero states that Sycorax ‘did litter’ Caliban (1.2.282). The verb attributes some 293

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degree of animality to Sycorax, although it may be wholly metaphoric, conveying Prospero’s contempt and disgust. Caliban was born, Prospero continues, ‘[a] freckled whelp, hag-born, not honoured with / A human shape’ (1.2.283–4). ‘Whelp’ does not much clarify the situation, as the term could refer in Shakespeare’s day to any creature from a puppy to a cub to the human offspring of a noxious parent. Nor is Prospero’s reference to Caliban’s less than human ‘shape’ explained. But the point must surely be that in his refusal to acknowledge Caliban’s humanity, Prospero finds justification for enslaving him. The fullest description of Caliban is offered by the intoxicated Stephano and the soon-to-be intoxicated Trinculo, witnesses as unreliable as Prospero. At his first sight of Caliban, Trinculo insists upon the animal–human hybridity that is a feature of Caliban’s monstrosity: ‘What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish, a very ancient and fish-like smell, a kind of – not of the newest – poor John. A strange fish!’ (2.2.24–7). Trinculo’s first urge is commercial: if he took Caliban to England for exhibition, he muses, his fortune would be made: ‘There would this monster make a man; any strange beast there makes a man’ (2.2.29–31). Upon closer inspection of Caliban, Trinculo concludes that he is ‘[l]egged like a man and his fins like arms’ (2.2.32–3), which is to say that Trinculo expects Caliban to have fins and so cannot credit the fact that his arms are, in fact, arms. Seeing the legs of Trinculo and those of the trembling Caliban, which protrude from the gabardine under which they are hiding, the drunken Stephano thinks that he has come upon ‘some monster of the isle, with four legs, who hath got, as I take it, an ague’ (2.2.63–4). Stephano’s first plan is to cure Caliban with liquor and then, with avidity equal to Trinculo’s, to sell him for exhibition. The threat of showing to the public anything deemed monstrous runs through Shakespeare’s plays. Antony, enraged, exclaims against Cleopatra: let her ‘most monster-like be shown / For poor’st diminutives, for dolts’ (ANT 4.12.36–7). Whether by ‘diminutives’ he means that she should be exhibited rather than ‘dwarfs and idiots’ or rather exhibited for a paltry fee is not clear (see AR3: 252, n. 37), but his desire to punish her is unmistakable. Macduff commands Macbeth to yield, promising public humiliation for him: ‘live to be the show and gaze o’th’ time. / We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are, / Painted upon a pole, and underwrit, / “Here may you see the tyrant” ’ (MAC 5.8.24–7). Macduff refers to the practice of advertising a creature to be exhibited by painting its picture on a cloth held between poles before a booth (AR3: 296, n. 26). When Stephano hears another voice, he assumes, oxymoronically, that Caliban is ‘a most delicate monster’ (TMP 2.2.88–9) with four legs and two voices. But when the second mouth calls his name, Stephano changes his mind: ‘This is a devil and no monster’ (2.2.96). He resolves to pour wine into that ‘other mouth’ from which the ‘backward voice’ is emitted (2.2.93, 90), a resolution with undeniably obscene implications. When he realizes that one pair of legs, the ‘lesser legs’, belong to Trinculo, he switches to calling Caliban ‘mooncalf’ (2.2.105). Used figuratively, ‘calf’ in Shakespeare’s day means a dolt or an idiot; ‘mooncalf’ adds to doltishness a sense of the misbegotten or deformed. Trinculo, however, retains the epithet ‘monster’ for Caliban, labelling him ‘a very shallow monster’, ‘[a] very weak monster’, ‘[a] most poor 294

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credulous monster’, although he compliments Caliban for drinking deeply of the bottle: ‘Well drawn, monster, in good sooth’ (2.2.141–4). When Caliban asks Stephano to be his god, Trinculo assumes, perhaps jealous of Caliban’s adoration of Stephano, that Caliban is ‘a most perfidious and drunken monster’ (2.2.147–8), who will steal their liquor when Stephano falls asleep. Trinculo’s barrage of adjectives for Caliban’s monstrosity continues throughout the scene, as when he declares that he could laugh himself ‘to death at this puppy-headed monster. A most scurvy monster’ (2.2.151–2). Vaughan and Vaughan (AR3: 238, n. 151–2) point out that ‘puppy-headed’ led in the eighteenth-century to a vogue for representing Caliban as having spaniel-like ears. They also note that the second edition of the OED defines the adjective as ‘stupid’. The latest revision of the dictionary, however, rejects the metaphorical meaning for a literal one, ‘having the head of a puppy’. But Trinculo may simply be attributing to Caliban the attitudes (head) of a puppy: its naïvety, curiosity and desire to be loved. The adjective ‘scurvy’ signifies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries general worthlessness, but its origin in descriptions of skin diseases causing scabs (or scurf) may have literal implications for Caliban’s appearance. When Stephano insists that the drunken Caliban kiss his foot, Trinculo calls Caliban ‘[a]n abominable monster’ (2.2.155–6), and then, when Caliban calls Stephano a ‘wondrous man’, Trinculo derides him as ‘[a] most ridiculous monster – to make a wonder of a poor drunkard’ (2.2.161–3). Such adjectives comment less on Caliban’s bestiality than on his willing embrace of subservience. The singing in which Caliban celebrates being released (as he thinks) from Prospero’s mastery causes Trinculo to call him ‘[a] howling monster, a drunken monster’ (2.2.175), and ‘howling’, like ‘puppy-headed’, again associates Caliban with dogs (or wolves). Stephano, in contrast, calls Caliban a ‘brave monster’ (2.2.183), a description which Vaughan and Vaughan (AR3: 240, n. 183) find sarcastic. But given the fact that Caliban has switched allegiance from Prospero to Stephano, ‘brave’ may equally well express approval. By the next appearance of the trio, Stephano has fully assumed his new position as master of Caliban, and the term ‘monster’ has been normalized. ‘Servant monster’, Stephano commands, ‘drink to me’ (3.2.3). Trinculo scoffs at the epithet, but Stephano repeats, ‘Drink, servant monster, when I bid thee. Thy eyes are almost set in thy head’ (3.2.7–8). Stephano’s reference to eyes being set refers to Caliban’s advanced state of intoxication, but Trinculo seizes on the expression to question the nature of the monstrous: ‘Where should they [his eyes] be set else? He were a brave monster, indeed, if they were set in his tail’ (3.2.9–10). Vaughan and Vaughan (AR3: 247, n. 10) call attention to the report of a whale beached near Ramsgate in 1574. It was declared to be ‘a monstrous fish’ but less monstrous than it would have been had its eyes been found in its back rather than its head. Perhaps as a nod to this story, the banter between Stephano and Trinculo immediately turns to the sea. ‘My man-monster hath drowned his tongue in sack’ (3.2.11–12), says Stephano, and proceeds to boast that he himself cannot be drowned, as he swam thirty-five leagues from their ship to the shore. What he means by ‘man-monster’ is unclear. Presumably he means that Caliban is part man and part 295

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monster, although his use of ‘monster’ already implies hybridity of human and beast. Stephano concludes his digression on the sea by addressing Caliban: ‘thou shalt be my lieutenant, monster, or my standard’ (3.2.14–15). Drunkenly imagining the two of them as valiant warriors, he continues, ‘We’ll not run, Monsieur Monster’ (3.2.17). Trinculo apparently objects to the increasing bond between Stephano and Caliban, who remarks that Trinculo ‘is not valiant’ (3.2.23). In contrast to Stephano’s affectionate ‘Monsieur Monster’, Trinculo insists that ‘monster’ implies ignorance and bestiality. ‘Thou liest, most ignorant monster’, Trinculo charges Caliban. ‘Why thou deboshed fish, [. . .] Wilt thou tell a monstrous lie, being but half a fish and half a monster?’ (3.2.24, 25, 27–8). Trinculo thus reintroduces the piscine into Caliban’s monstrous hybridity. When at the play’s end Antonio catches his first sight of the drunken trio, he has only to say ‘One of them / Is a plain fish and no doubt marketable’ (5.1.265–6) for audiences to know that he refers to Caliban. A more indirect mention of Caliban in relation to animal–human hybridity occurs when in Act 4 Trinculo and Stephano are distracted by the ‘glistering apparel’ left by Ariel. Caliban, now called simply ‘Monster’ by his companions, as if it is a proper noun, urges them to focus on their plan to kill Prospero and leave the clothes alone. Otherwise, he warns, ‘We shall lose our time, / And all be turned to barnacles, or to apes / With foreheads villainous low’ (4.1.247–9). ‘Barnacles’ most probably refers to the barnacle goose, regarded as a fish rather than a fowl but retaining the goose’s traditional reputation for silliness. Caliban’s fears, that is, reinforce his association with fish. As for ‘apes / With foreheads villainous low’, Vaughan and Vaughan observe that if Caliban is afraid that Prospero will transform him into an ape, then he cannot already look like one (AR3: 282, n. 248). But perhaps what is most striking about Caliban’s warning is his assumption that Prospero will transform him into an animal. It reminds us that Prospero already classifies him as a beast rather than a human being. In MND , animal–human hybridity – in this case, manifest and literal hybridity – is again responsible for the label ‘monster’. Bottom’s transformation into a monster in Act 3 is prefigured in Act 1 by his offer to ‘play Thisbe [. . . and] speak in a monstrous little voice’ (1.2.47–8). This amounts to a cultural oxymoron, since that which is monstrous is usually assumed to be enormous. Snug employs the same implied oxymoron in the performance of Pyramus and Thisbe when he reassures the ladies of the audience, ‘whose gentle hearts do fear / The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor’ (5.1.217–18). In another possible anticipation of Bottom’s transformation, Helena reacts to Demetrius’s rejection of her by fearing that she is ‘as ugly as a bear, / For beasts that meet me run away for fear; / Therefore no marvel though Demetrius / Do, as a monster, fly my presence thus’ (2.2.98–101). Chaudhuri (AR3: 175, n. 101) observes that the construction of Helena’s speech makes it possible to read ‘monster’ as referring to Demetrius, unnatural in his refusal of her love, although her simile makes it more likely that by ‘monster’ she refers to herself. These metaphoric monsters prepare the way for one last metaphoric monster before the moment of Bottom’s translation. Thisbe (Flute) provides Bottom his cue to enter when she praises her lover: ‘As true as truest horse, 296

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that yet would never tire’ (3.1.98). Bottom’s entry makes the simile literal, although the ass replaces the horse. Quince calls the transformation ‘monstrous’ and ‘strange’ (3.1.100) and assumes ‘[w]e are haunted’ (3.1.100) by spirits or demons. Quince is correct: Oberon himself confirms that this is a ‘haunted grove’ (3.2.5) and that he is one of the haunting spirits. The supernatural meets the unnatural when Robin (Puck) announces, ‘My mistress with a monster is in love’ (3.2.6), an effect redoubled when Oberon vows to ‘release [Titania] / From monster’s view’ (3.2.376–7), and Robin warns him that he must act quickly, for dawn approaches, when ghosts and ‘[d]amned spirits’ return ‘to their wormy beds’ (3.2.382, 384). The antlers worn by Falstaff at the conclusion of WIV gives physical expression to the monstrosity that other characters attribute to him (as at 3.2.73, 82). His admission – ‘I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass’ (5.5.119) – seems to link his monstrosity to that of Bottom. But the monstrosity of the latter is externally imposed; Falstaff’s monstrosity arises from his predatory character. Wearing antlers, he embodies the hybridity so often associated with early modern representations of monstrosity. Symbolic hybridity is a feature of what Troilus calls ‘monstruosity in love’ (TRO 3.2.78). To his assurance that there are no monsters ‘[i]n all Cupid’s pageant’ (3.2.71–2), Cressida asks, ‘Nor nothing monstrous neither?’ (3.2.73). Only ‘our undertakings’, he admits: ‘the will is infinite and the execution confined; [. . .] the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit’ (3.2.74, 78–80). Cressida seizes upon this admission that lovers combine appetite and physical limitations, twisting it to imply bravado mixed with timidity: ‘They that have the voice of lions and the act of hares, are they not monsters?’ (3.2.84–6), she asks. The Bastard in JN declares that if the Duke of Austria were at home in his den with his ‘lioness’ (meaning the Duke’s wife but also suggesting a prostitute), ‘I would set an oxhead to your lion’s hide / And make a monster of you’ (2.1.291–3). His complex boast turns the Duke into a triple monster: a hybrid of human and animal, an illegitimate ruler (his lion’s hide signifying rule) and a cuckold (an ox-horned man). ‘A horned man’s a monster, and a beast’, says Othello (OTH 4.1.62). Iago agrees, but suggests that such monstrosity is hardly unnatural, as the condition is so common: ‘There’s many a beast then in a populous city, / And many a civil monster’ (4.1.63–4). In his elliptical advice to Ophelia, Hamlet would seem to agree with Iago: ‘if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them’ (HAM 3.1.137– 9). If being cuckolded is an imagined state rather than a reality, Emilia illuminates the source of the misconception: jealousy ‘is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself’ (3.4.161–2). It is a beast with emerald eyes: ‘O beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock / The meat it feeds on’ (3.3.167–9), warns Iago, the verb ‘feeds’ enforcing its bestial nature. In SHR , the Lord marvels at Christopher Sly’s drunken sleep: ‘O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies!’ (SHR , Ind. 1. 33). What makes Sly a monster in the eyes of the Lord is his renunciation of the intellectual qualities that distinguish humans from animals. Thersites is scathing about the mutely stupid Ajax, who (according to Thersites) lacks the human ability to articulate thought: ‘He’s grown a very land-fish, languageless, a monster’ (TRO 3.3.264–5). 297

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The mob is represented as a multi-headed monster several times in Shakespeare’s plays, as in the Induction of 2H4: ‘Rumour is a pipe’, says Rumour of itself, ‘That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still discordant wav’ring multitude, / Can play upon’ (15, 18–20). Coriolanus calls this monster ‘Hydra’ and its elected officer he calls ‘[t]he horn and noise o’th’ monster’s’ (COR 3.1.94, 96). In classical mythology, Hydra is a serpentine monster with many heads, one of which is immortal. Coriolanus’s attention to the horn of the hydra adds a biblical flavour to the insult, for it alludes to the horned and many-headed Beast of Revelation 13. Calling the people ‘Hydra’ serves Coriolanus as justification for using violence against them, or at the very least for making it unnecessary to attempt rational dialogue with them. The profoundly misanthropic Timon assumes that human beings, in their hypocrisy, greed and ingratitude, are the most monstrous creatures to emerge from the womb of earth. ‘Let it no more bring out ungrateful man’ (TIM 4.3.187), he implores; instead, let earth produce monstrous beasts – ‘tigers, dragons, wolves and bears’ – but also ‘new monsters’ never seen before (4.3.188–9), all of them less monstrous than humankind but in their manifest and conspicuous monstrosity more appropriate for what Timon has come to see as the irredeemable evil of the world. (C) The best-known attempt to categorize and depict monsters in the early modern period is that of the French surgeon Ambroise Paré, whose Des monstres et prodiges (1573) explains monsters as the result of birth defects or of God’s desire to exhibit his glory. Philip Melanchthon and Martin Luther’s Of Two VVoonderful Popish Monsters (1579) reads the birth of two deformed animals (an ass and a calf) as signs of God’s wrath at the Roman Catholic Church. In his translation of The Odyssey (1615), Chapman does not use the term ‘monster’ for the men turned into pigs by Circe (Book 10); Milton does, however, in his reworking of the Circe myth, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (usually called Comus). In Milton’s version, Circe’s son Comus gives his victims animal heads; as human–animal hybrids, they are called a ‘monstrous rout [. . .] heard to howl / Like stabled wolves, or tigers at their prey’ (Milton 1997: 207 [ll. 532– 3]). In Paradise Lost (1667), only Death, the ‘shape [. . .] that shape had none’, is called a ‘monster’ (Milton 1998: 144 [2.667, 675]). For general studies of how the early modern period understood monstrosity, see Daston and Park (1981, 1998), Knoppers and Landes (2004) and W. Williams (2011). Hankins (1947) proposes that Caliban was inspired by explorers’ accounts of monsters and marvels. Draper (1966) attributes Caliban’s fish-like qualities to explorers’ encounters with monstrous aquatic creatures in the waters off the Americas. E. Brown (1998) argues that the four-legged monster discovered by Stephano in TMP alludes to the myth of the centaur. Lupton (2000) discusses the theological and philosophical implications of reading Caliban as an animal. Warner (2000) places Sycorax and Caliban in the tradition of magic and grotesque Circean transformations. Burnett (2002: 125–53) argues that Caliban’s monstrosity is not inspired by colonial exoticism but rather by early modern theatrical practices and fairground exhibitions. Borlik (2013) proposes that the representation of Caliban is in part indebted to Lincolnshire legends of misshapen, malevolent fen 298

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demons; being dispossessed of his island, Caliban, argues Borlik, reflects the plight of fen dwellers displaced by land reclamation projects. Cline (2016) considers the possibilities for performance opened up by the physically indeterminate picture of Caliban drawn by other characters in TMP . Ormerod (1978) argues for reading MND as a version of the myth of Theseus and the minotaur, with the latter metamorphosed into Bottom. KE mouse, dormouse. (A) a small rodent, with a long tail, rounded ears and pointed snout. Most common are the house mouse (mus musculus) or the deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus). The only difference between rats and mice is their size; both belong to the family Muroidea, which also includes hamsters and voles. Topsell describes the ‘hamster-mouse’, along with rats, alpine mice, the dormouse (which belongs to the family Gliridae) and the shrew among other varieties (1658: 392–426). Mice are usually considered vermin in Shakespeare’s world: because of their small size, they easily infest houses and storage areas, and are omnivores, meaning they eat fruit and grains, but also when necessary almost any other foodstuff; they can thus do extensive damage to structures, crops, leather goods, paper and clothing, as well as leave behind their fecal matter and urine. Topsell reports a long list of epithets associated with mice, which includes ‘small, fearful, [. . .] ridiculous [. . .] greedy, wary, [. . .] harmful’ (393), suggesting the low regard in which the animals were held. Catching mice and rats was a common theme in husbandry manuals, where many kinds of traps, gins and poisons are described, probably a good sign that actually catching enough mice to make a difference was an unending and difficult task. (B) Hamlet calls The Murder of Gonzago, the play he has commissioned to expose Claudius as his father’s murderer, ‘The Mousetrap’, when Claudius questions it (HAM 3.2.231), making clear its purpose in reproducing the events of Hamlet Senior’s death. By setting a trap for Claudius, Hamlet aligns him with the various rats that inhabit Denmark; but in making himself a mouse-hunter, he also aligns himself with Claudius, since both plot and spring traps for the other. The idea of a vermin-infested kingdom is present in the play from the outset, when Francisco notes that not a mouse is stirring (1.1.8) and extends through Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, the ‘rat’ behind the arras (3.4.22), and his disgusted description of Claudius calling Gertrude ‘his mouse’ (3.4.181) while fondling her. Rosaline uses this common epithet in a much lighter setting when she calls Katherine ‘mouse’ in LLL (5.2.19), and Feste calls Olivia ‘my mouse of virtue’ in TN (1.5.58–9), all examples of endearments for women that revolve around their small size, their timidity and even their association with the household. Indeed, because of their size, mice are convenient vehicles for ideas about insignificance in many dimensions. Romeo complains that every ‘little mouse, every unworthy thing’ may look at Juliet except himself (ROM 3.3.31). When Fabian describes Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s ‘dormouse valor’ (TN 3.2.18), he means to provoke Sir Andrew to more manly aggression in his pursuit of Olivia and his supposed rivalry with 299

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Cesario by comparing him to a tiny creature (even if, as Topsell notes, it is a reputedly vicious one; 409). Marina claims to be harmless when Leonine threatens her in PER , saying ‘I never killed a mouse nor hurt a fly’ (4.1.74). Falstaff encourages Feeble by calling him ‘most magnanimous mouse’ (2H4 3.2.161), while Shallow confirms him as a recruit to war. In a somewhat different vein, Thersites calls Nestor a ‘stale old mouseeaten dry cheese’ (TRO 5.4.9–10), referring to his age and possibly also his speech (Tilley 1950: M1238 includes the proverb ‘To speak like a mouse in the cheese’, i.e., to mumble). When Coriolanus wants to show his contempt for the rank-and-file soldiers who failed to support him in battle at Coriolus, he calls them mice: ‘The mouse ne’er shunned the cat as they did budge / From rascals worse than they’ (COR 1.6.44–5). Alencon mocks the English for their diet, saying they will ‘look, like drowned mice’ if they don’t have their full rations of porridge and beef (1H6 1.2.12); the reference is proverbial (Tilley 1950: M1137). Snug tries to deflect any fear among his audience in MND when he appears as Lion in Pyramus and Thisbe because he knows that the ladies present fear even the ‘smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor’ (5.1.218), let alone a terrible lion; he earns the encouragement ‘Well moused, Lion’ from Theseus (5.1.262). Appropriately, Puck sweeps up as the lovers head to bed so that ‘[n]ot a mouse / Shall disturb this hallowed house’ (5.1.377–8). The adage ‘the mice will play when the cat’s away’ (Tilley 1950: C175) is echoed in Westmorland’s imagery in H5 when he calls England, from which King Henry is absent while he plans a war in France, an ‘unguarded nest’ to which ‘the weasel Scot / Comes sneaking and so suck her princely eggs, / Playing the mouse in absence of the cat’ (1.2.170–2). The same proverb is recalled by Lucio when describing Angelo’s imposition of Vienna’s draconian laws on fornication: He, to give fear to use and liberty, Which have for long run by the hideous law As mice by lions, hath picked out an act Under whose heavy sentence your brother’s life Falls into forfeit. (MM 1.4.62–6) Cats’ relationship to mice is also reflected in LUC ’s comparison of Tarquin to a ‘foul night-walking cat’ in whose mouth ‘the weak mouse panteth’ (554–5), anticipating his assault on the timorous Lucrece. The Bastard in JN imagines the two warring kings creating a banquet for Death, whose teeth are soldiers rending a carcass like a cat: ‘And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men’ (2.1.354). In Lear’s fevered mind, he extends a piece of cheese to a mouse: ‘Look, look, a mouse: peace, peace, this piece of toasted cheese will do’t’ (LR 4.6.88–9). While his mad ramblings make any certain interpretation impossible, it may be that at this moment Lear is thinking of the minimal (in his mind) requests that his daughters denied him. The play has a small sub-theme involving perspective, in which mice appear, as when Edgar 300

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tries to convince his father that he is atop a cliff at Dover: ‘The fishermen that walk upon the beach / Appear like mice’ (4.6.17–18); and Edgar himself, as Poor Tom, has claimed mice as his companions (3.4.13–35). (C) Oberle (1998) discusses The Mousetrap and both Claudius’s and Hamlet’s snares in HAM , glancing at the possibility that the theatre itself is represented as a kind of mouse trap. Hassel (1999) traces the many mouse references in HAM . KR mule, muleteer. (A) The offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, mules serve as beasts of burden and are consequently animals associated with the peasantry. They thus serve as a marker of human inferiority, even a substitute for lower-class humans altogether. (B) Talbot scornfully calls the French forces in 1H6 ‘base muleteers’ (3.2.67), and Shylock groups mules with slaves, asses and dogs that Venetians ‘use in abject and in slavish parts’ (MV 4.1.91). Meanwhile, in a bit of a counterpoint to Talbot’s characterization, Alençon refers to the starved English forces at Orleans as such great beef and porridge-eaters that they ‘must be dieted like mules’ and have their feed bags tied to their mouths – in other words, the English are fat and bestial and merely ‘piteous’ because they haven’t had excesses of food as they are used to (1H6 1.2.10, 12). Brutus plans to indict Coriolanus by telling the people of Rome that ‘he would / Have made them mules’ (COR 2.1.240–1), meaning gained absolute control over them to exploit them ‘for bearing burdens and sore blows’ (2.1.246). KR mutton. (A) The flesh of a sheep slaughtered for food. Mutton is distinct from lamb in usually referring to the meat of an older animal (hence one that is less tender). As in the case of beef or veal, English borrows a separate word from the Old French (in this case, moton) to refer to the culinary uses of animal meat. (B) Proteus makes a series of sheep jokes at Speed’s expense in TGV , only to have Speed refer to Julia as ‘mutton’ (slang for a loose woman, whose flesh is ‘food’ for lust, OED 4). Proteus asks whether Speed delivered his letter to Julia and Speed responds, ‘Ay, sir. I, a lost mutton, gave your letter to her, a laced mutton, and she, a laced mutton gave me, a lost mutton, nothing for my labour’ (1.1.94–6). In Proteus’s judgement, ‘Here’s too small a pasture for such store of muttons’ (1.1.97–8). Petruccio claims his mutton is burned in order to starve Katherina in SHR (4.1.146), sending it, and all the food at table, away in feigned disgust. Mutton is, in fact, greasy meat, which makes Touchstone’s defence of the sweat of courtier’s hands in comparison to shepherds’ hands, which handle sheep, suspect: ‘And is not the grease of a mutton as wholesome as the sweat of a man?’ (AYL 3.2.53–4). When Lucio says the Duke ‘would eat mutton on Fridays’ (MM 3.1.439), he is literally referring to violating religious laws requiring no meat-eating on Fridays; but what he actually means is that the Duke is willing to visit prostitutes. Costard has a somewhat similar sentiment when he is sentenced to fasting 301

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by the king for having sex with Jaquenetta: he answers back, ‘I had rather pray a month with mutton and porridge’ (LLL 1.1.286–7), not only quipping on his preference for mutton to eat, but extending it to his wish for continued pleasure in women’s sexual favours (here again, mutton means a loose woman). The Hostess, Mistress Quickly, also conflates Lenten laws with sexual behaviour when she defends herself against Falstaff’s chiding ‘for suffering flesh to be eaten in thy house contrary to the law’ (2H4 2.4.348– 9). ‘What’s a joint of mutton or two,’ she answers, ‘in a whole Lent?’ (2.4.351–2). The literal meaning of their exchange has to do with restrictions on meat-eating, but the subtext is all about prostitutes and the sale of sex. Sir Andrew is a little too thick to quite appreciate Sir Toby’s joke in TN – when Andrew says he can ‘cut a caper’, Toby answers ‘And I can cut the mutton to’t’ (1.3.116–17), yet once more alluding to prostitutes as well as sauce for mutton. Shylock uses mutton in a much more traditional way when he tells Bassanio and Antonio that a pound of flesh ‘Is not so estimable, profitable neither, / As flesh of muttons, beeves or goats’ (MV 1.3.162–3). Yet all these instances share in troubling or erasing the assumed distinction between human and animal flesh just as much as Shylock’s treatment of Antonio’s bond does. KR

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N neat. (A) General term for horned cattle – bulls, oxen or cows, all domestic members of the family Bovidae. (B) Leontes in WT seizes on the word ‘neat’, which can also mean clean, while talking to his son Mamillius: ‘What? Hast smutched thy nose? / They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, captain, / We must be neat – not neat, but cleanly, captain’ (1.2.121–3). While wiping his son’s face and musing on the boy’s clear resemblance to himself, Leontes nonetheless turns the moment into an opportunity to further seethe over his conviction that Hermione, who stands nearby in conversation, has slept with Polixenes: ‘And yet the steer, the heifer and the calf / Are all called neat. – Still virginalling / Upon his palm? – How now you wanton calf!’ (1.2.124–6). Leontes’ thought-process in this speech is complex. He uses ‘neat’ as an umbrella term that does not distinguish among genders or ages of cattle, perhaps thinking of the problem that there is no visible evidence of his wife’s suspected infidelity. That in turn prompts comments on her current and visible behaviour toward Polixenes, ‘still virginalling’ or playing with his fingers. While ‘wanton calf’ should refer to Mamillius, Leontes’ distrust of Hermione confuses the issue: wanton may mean joyful or frisky, but it also carries the connotation of sexual looseness. Of course, throughout this scene Leontes has been questioning his son on his parentage, as if his present suspicion of Hermione has retroactive power to shake his belief in his son’s legitimacy. Twice Shakespeare uses neats – leather shoes – as a register for human worth: in JC , the Cobbler claims, ‘As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s leather have gone upon my handiwork’ (1.1.26–7); AR3 glosses this as a reference to the superiority of English cow’s leather (158, n. 26). In TMP , Stephano opines that Caliban would be a suitable gift to ‘any emperor that ever trod on neat’s leather’ (2.2.69). Gratiano defends his volubility to Antonio by saying ‘silence is only commendable / In a neat’s tongue dried and a maid not vendible’ (MV 1.1.111–12). Here, the neat’s tongue is a reference both to the unappetizing dish a dried-out cow tongue would be, and colloquially to impotence, or a ‘withered penis’ (AR3: 181, n. 112). KR newt. (A) A tailed amphibian belonging to the salamander family, three species of which are native to Britain: the smooth (or common) newt (Triturus or Lissotriton vulgaris), the palmate newt (Triturus or Lissotriton helveticus), and the great crested (or warty) newt (Triturus cristatus). The most remarkable feature of the newt is its ability to regenerate amputated limbs and toes. 303

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(B) Like many other amphibians, newts were not well understood in the early modern period and were regarded with loathing and fear. Hence, to convince others that he is mad, Poor Tom (the disguised Edgar) claims to eat amphibians, among them ‘the wall-newt and the water –’ (LR 3.4.126). The wall newt is probably a lizard; ‘the water –’ (that is, the ‘water newt’) is indeed a newt. Edgar’s claim aims at producing revulsion in his hearers, but one genus of native North American newt, the roughskinned newt (Taricha granulosa), is so toxic that eating it is fatal. The newt’s sinister reputation makes ‘[e]ye of newt’ a fitting ingredient for the witches’ cauldron in MAC (4.1.14) and explains why Titania’s fairies sing a lullaby banishing it from her presence: ‘Newts and blindworms, do no wrong, / Come not near our Fairy Queen’ (MND 2.2.11–12). Newts and blindworms, both in fact harmless, are paired again in Timon’s lament that, although mother earth produces food for all, she also ‘[e]ngenders’ noxious creatures such as ‘the black toad and adder blue, / The gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm’ (TIM 4.3.180–1). That the newt is described as ‘gilded’ may allude to the yellow or orange belly of the great crested newt, easily Britain’s showiest amphibian. KE night-crow, night-raven. (A) A bird that cries eerily and discomfortingly at night, its blackness making it invisible in the darkness. The OED suggests that the names may refer, if not to an imaginary bird, to the night-jar or, perhaps following Aristotle, to the owl or the night heron (Nycticorax nycticorax). Whatever bird is meant, the presence of ‘crow’ or ‘raven’ in the name indicates not only that it has a harsh cry but that it foretells catastrophe. (B) In 3H6, the night-crow (here distinguished from the owl) is among the harbingers of doom that accompanied the birth of Richard of York, as the dying King Henry recounts: ‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign; / The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; / Dogs howled; and hideous tempests shook down trees’ (5.6.44–6). Here, non-human creatures unite to warn the world that a human monster has been born. In ADO , Benedick fears that the noise Balthazar makes with his singing predicts disaster – ‘I pray God his bad voice bode not mischief’ (2.3.81) – and then declares that rather than hear Balthazar, he would rather ‘have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it’ (2.2.82–4). (C) Aristotle identifies the night-raven as the ‘eared owl’ or the night heron and describes it as ‘a trickster and mimic’ (1991: 137 [597b]). The nycticorax (‘night’ + ‘crow’) appears in medieval bestiaries, which remark that ‘it loves the darkness more than the light’ (Baxter 1998: 40), making it a symbol for the ignorant or benighted who reject Christ. In The Faerie Queene, ‘[t]he hoars Night-raven, trump of dolefull drere’, appears among other ‘fatall birds’ to dismay and smite Guyon and the Palmer as they travel toward the Bower of Bliss (Spenser 2001: 2.12.36). KE

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nightingale. (A) A migratory thrush (Lucinia megarhynchos) with inconspicuous brown plumage and a song remarkable for its tonal richness and variety. As its name suggests – ‘night’ + ‘gale’ (OE, ‘song’) – the nightingale is mostly nocturnal and tends to be heard rather than seen. Once plentiful and widespread, nightingales are now in serious decline in the UK. In classical mythology, Philomela is transformed into a nightingale after being raped by her brother-in-law, Tereus. The pressure of the myth may be felt when the bird’s song is characterized as plaintive or sad. The myth is probably responsible for the fact that the nightingale is usually regarded as female in the early modern period, although it is the male that sings. Since antiquity, the nightingale has served as a symbol of the poet or bard. (B) In several of Shakespeare’s plays, the beauty of the nightingale’s song is invoked only to be undermined or satirized, most notably in Bottom’s assurance that he can play the part of Lion but not so as to ‘fright the ladies’: ‘I will aggravate my voice so, that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you and ’twere any nightingale’ (MND 1.2.74–5, 76–8), he declares to his fellow actors. As part of his campaign to tame Katherina by, among other things, disorientating her, Petruccio vows to tell her, when she rails at him, that ‘[s]he sings as sweetly as a nightingale’ (SHR 2.1.170). Disguised as a madman, Edgar speaks darkly of himself in the third person: ‘The foul fiend haunts Poor Tom in the voice of a nightingale’ (LR 3.6.29–30). Foakes wonders if Edgar is referring to the Fool, who has just been singing (AR3: 288, n. 29–30). It is perhaps more likely that Edgar is demonstrating his madness by likening the traditionally hoarse or croaking voice of a fiend to the silvery voice of a nightingale. Valentine, in love with Silvia, claims that there is no day unless he can look upon her in the light and ‘no music in the nightingale’ unless he can be near her ‘in the night’ (TGV 3.1.178–9). Portia observes that the goodness of all things is relative: ‘The nightingale, if she should sing by day / When every goose is cackling, would be thought / No better a musician than the wren’ (MV 5.1.104–6). Malvolio, in effect, calls himself a nightingale in TN , when, in answer to Maria’s question, ‘How do you, Malvolio?’ (3.4.32), he answers scornfully: ‘At your request? Yes, nightingales answer daws’ (3.4.33–4). Believing that Olivia loves him, Malvolio regards himself as superior to Maria and so asks why an eloquent nightingale should answer a chattering jackdaw. Maria, of course, knows that Malvolio is the jack. In SHR , the singing of ‘twenty caged nightingales’ (Ind. 2.34) is among the fictitious luxuries that the unnamed Lord lists as being at Christopher Sly’s disposal. When King Edward seeks appropriate comparisons for the voice of the Countess of Salisbury, with whom he is smitten, he begins, ‘Her voice to music, or the nightingale –’ (E3 2.272), and then stops, rejecting both similes. ‘[E]very summer-leaping swain’ compares his mistress’s voice to music, he worries; ‘And why should I speak of the nightingale? / The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong, / And that compared is too satirical’ (2.275–7). To speak of adulterous desires, in short, might raise uncomfortable questions about him in the minds of hearers. The nightingale’s nocturnal habits are invoked in ROM , when Juliet tries to persuade Romeo (and herself) that it is still night: 305

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Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day. It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree. Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. (ROM 3.5.1–5) Romeo echoes her language of birds, but to contradict her: ‘It was the lark, the herald of the morn, / No nightingale’ (3.4.6–7), he says. Weis points out that this ‘duet’ is a traditional aubade, sung by lovers upon their parting at dawn (AR3: 271, n. 1–36). The pomegranate often serves as a symbol of the womb; here, the fact that the nightingale sits on the pomegranate tree associates Juliet with what ought to be, but will not be, a future of fruitful sexuality. Antony cries triumphantly to Cleopatra, when they seem to have won the Battle of Actium, ‘My nightingale, / We have beat them to their beds’ (ANT 4.8.18–19). His epithet for her may allude to their nocturnal revels, although Plutarch, in North’s translation, calls attention to Cleopatra’s ‘marvellous pleasant’ voice (AR3: 243, n.*). Even when she is not named, Philomela’s presence can be felt in representations of the nightingale. In TNK , her presence is indicated by a single word, as the Jailer’s Daughter finishes her song: ‘Oh, for a prick now, like a nightingale, / To put my breast against. I shall sleep like a top else’ (3.4.25–6). In order to stay awake, the nightingale was believed to sing with a ‘prick’ or (phallic) thorn against its breast, symbolic of Tereus’s rape. Then, as now, ‘prick’ is slang for ‘penis’. In TGV , it is the mournfulness of the nightingale that hints at the legacy of Philomela, as the lovelorn Valentine sits ‘alone, unseen of any’ (5.4.4), tuning his ‘distresses and woes’ ‘to the nightingale’s complaining notes’ (5.4.5–6). In PER , it is possible that a reference to ‘the night bird’ means the owl (4.0.27), but mention of the bird’s continual ‘moan’ makes it more likely that the night bird is the nightingale. Gower, as the Chorus, explains that Marina surpasses Cleon’s daughter when she sews or ‘when to th’ lute / She sung, and made the night bird mute / That still records with moan’ (4.0.25–7). Gossett notes that ‘records’ may mean either that the bird sings or that it remembers (AR3: 311, n. 27); both meanings are relevant to the story of Philomela. The point of Gower’s comparison is to emphasize the beauty of Marina’s voice. To say that her song surpasses that of the nightingale would do just that. (C) The story of Philomela’s rape and transformation is told by Ovid in Book 6 of Metamorphoses. Mynott details the symbolic and other roles of the nightingale in classical literature, noting that it is invoked more than any other bird (2018: 49). The usually prosaic Pliny is eloquent in his description of the nightingale’s song (1940: 345–7 [x.43]). Medieval bestiaries represent the nightingale, singing as she sits on her eggs, as a model for poor women, who sing even as they toil to provide bread for their children (White 1954: 139–40). See Rowland (1978: 105–11) for medieval legends, literature and sayings about the nightingale, including ‘listening to the nightingale’ as

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a euphemism for sexual relations. The author of PP [20], identified by Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen as Richard Barnfield (AR3: 415–18), devotes the first eighteen lines of his fifty-six-line poem to the nightingale’s ‘doefull’st ditty’ (AR3: 416). In classical literature, both the cuckoo and the nightingale were regarded as signs of spring (Mynott 2018: 12–14). What seems to be an early modern folk belief holds that one’s fate in love is determined in the spring by whether one first sees a nightingale or a cuckoo; Dekker in The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1979: 79–80) and Milton in Sonnet 1 (1997: 92–3) allude to the belief. In Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Nightingale is the name of a ballad-singer who warns the crowd against pickpockets but in fact works in league with a cutpurse, Ezekiel Edgworth. The ‘prick’ against which the nightingale is said to sleep is interpreted by Browne as a thorn; he wonders if the legend arose because the bird builds its nest in thorny bushes (1981: 1.290). Birkhead (2018: 202) points out that the nightingale was the most popular of the songbirds kept as pets in the seventeenth century. Mabey (1993) provides a study of the natural, literary and cultural history of the nightingale; Cocker and Mabey concentrate on the nature of and reactions to the nightingale’s song (2005: 340–3). Spiegelman (1983: 356–8) argues that Puck in MND provides a model for Keats’s nightingale. KE

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O osprey (aspray). (A) A large brown and white fish-eating bird of prey, the osprey’s categorization is complicated – it resembles owls in having a backward-turning outer toe (which helps it grasp fish), but hunts during the day, thus resembling in its habit other diurnal birds like hawks or falcons. Indeed, Pliny groups them with eagles (NH 10.3.8 [1940: 297–8]), and the birds are sometimes called fish-hawks or sea-hawks. (B) Both references to the bird in the plays emphasize its impressive hunting skills. Aufidius expresses confidence in Coriolanus’s ability to dominate Rome: ‘I think he’ll be to Rome / As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it / By sovereignty of nature’ (COR 4.7.33–5), referring to the folk belief that fish surrendered belly-up to the osprey (the origin of this belief is unclear, since Shakespeare’s reference is often cited as its main source in literature). Likewise, the osprey’s ability to magnetically influence their prey informs the First Queen’s flattering plea to Theseus in TNK , whom she associates with the same power: ‘your actions, / Soon as they move, as ospreys do the fish, / Subdue before they touch’ (1.1.137–9). KR ostrich, estridge. (A) A large flightless bird (Struthio camelus) now found wild only in Sub-Saharan Africa but once native to most of Africa, Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Estridge is usually glossed as an alternative spelling of ostrich, but it may also in Shakespeare’s day signify a goshawk (Accipiter gentilis; see hawk). The traits attributed to the ostrich by early modern Europeans – its speed, flightlessness, ability to digest iron and neglect of (or unflagging attention to) its eggs – were derived from classical and biblical literature and medieval bestiaries, and from depictions in carved stone and stained glass and on maps of Africa. Even in the Middle Ages, however, ostrich plumes were available as expensive rarities, and by the fifteenth century, so too were ostrich eggs. Ornithologically accurate images of the ostrich began to emerge when sixteenthcentury European explorers and naturalists returned from Africa with drawings of the bird. At the Restoration, an ostrich was added to the royal menagerie in Hyde Park. (B) Ostrich plumes figure in 1H4, as Hotspur and the rebels prepare for battle against the forces of Henry IV. Hotspur sarcastically asks the whereabouts of ‘the nimblefooted madcap Prince of Wales, / And his comrades’ (4.1.94–5), to which Sir Richard Vernon replies: All furnished, all in arms, All plumed like ostriches, that with the wind

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Bated like eagles having lately bathed, Glittering in golden coats like images, As full of spirit as the month of May And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer, Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls. (4.1.96–102) Vernon’s simile is unwelcome to Hotspur, who does not want to hear praise of Hal. The simile is also dense. Hal and his comrades in arms are plumed as ostriches are plumed, but more specifically, they are almost certainly plumed with ostrich plumes. The spelling ‘estridge’ occurs in Q, as Kastan (AR3: 286, n. 97) observes, but ostrich plumes rather than goshawk feathers are surely meant here. Moreover, the personal emblem of the Prince of Wales is three ostrich plumes, implying that Vernon recognizes that after a dissolute youth, Hal has at last assumed his rightful role as future king. Finally, Vernon’s simile manages to align waving ostrich plumes with the beating wings of eagles and both with the exuberant leaping of virile young mammals. Having heard Antony, under the influence of his passion for Cleopatra, declare his determination to do battle with Caesar, Enobarbus decides to leave his general.

Figure 7 Ostrich, c. 1500, by Albrecht Dürer, pen and brown ink, watercolour. Photo: Jrg P. Anders. Kupferstichkabinett, Staätliche Museen, Berlin, Germany. Art Resource, NY.

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Enobarbus knows that Antony ought to be afraid to face Caesar’s superior forces; instead, Enobarbus realizes, Antony will ‘outstare the lightning / [. . .] and in that mood / The dove will peck the estridge’ (ANT 3.13.200–2). The ostrich is the largest bird in existence, and Enobarbus may well be referring to the disparity in size between the huge ostrich and the relatively small dove, the latter associated with renewal and faith rather than aggression. Wilders (AR3: 225, n. 202), however, argues that the name in this instance refers to the goshawk, which preys on doves and other smaller birds. For a dove (the bird of peace) to go against its nature and attack a goshawk is to exhibit the selfdestructive madness that Enobarbus finds in Antony’s passion for Cleopatra. The ostrich invoked by Jack Cade in 2H6 is most certainly an ostrich, not a goshawk. The ostrich’s supposed willingness to eat iron means that it was often represented with a horseshoe in its beak. Discovered trespassing in Alexander Iden’s garden, Cade assumes that Iden has come to seize him and collect a bounty for his capture. ‘Ah, villain’, Cade threatens, drawing his sword, ‘thou will betray me and get a thousand crowns of the King by carrying my head to him; but I’ll make thee eat iron like an ostrich, and swallow my sword like a great pin, ere thou and I part’ (4.10.26–9). It is Cade, however, who ends up swallowing his boastful words, for Iden, still uncertain of his identity, kills him. (C) At Job 29.14–18, the ostrich is said to be foolish, because it hides its eggs in the sand and forgets them, but it is also said to be fast enough to outrun a horse. Pliny, too, describes the ostrich’s speed, its valuable eggs and plumes and its ability to digest almost anything (1940: 293 [10.1]). Medieval bestiarists moralize the ostrich: as it forgets its eggs and leaves them to hatch in the sun, just so ought God’s people to forget earthly things and trust in God’s providence (Baxter 1998: 51). Another moralizing tradition arrives at the same conclusion by way of a different route: just as the ostrich keeps her eyes on her eggs until they hatch, so God’s children must keep their eyes on spiritual things (Lloyd 1971: 69). An ostrich egg drinking cup, fashioned around 2600 BCE , was found in a cemetery in Iraq (Mynott 2018: 177). In the Renaissance, ostrich eggs mounted in gold or silver were hung in churches and exhibited as objets d’art, and ostrich tail plumes were valued as decorative additions to headdresses and helmets (Lloyd 1971: 67). In The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe provides a lengthy description of the trappings of Sir Henry Howard’s horse, which are designed to make it look like an ostrich (1985: 317). Ostrich eggs are mentioned among the luxury goods on sale in the New Exchange in Ben Jonson’s 1609 masque, Entertainment at Britain’s Burse. Ostrich tail plumes had long been valued as decorative additions to headdresses and helmets, although early modern Europeans did not fully understand the arrangement or type of feathers on the ostrich’s body (Lloyd 1971: 72–6). Lea and Seaton (1945) analyse Vernon’s metaphoric description of Hal in 1H4 in relation to the passage in Nashe and a poem by Chapman in praise of Raleigh’s voyage to Guiana. Harlow (1966) provides further support for the appropriateness of ostriches in Vernon’s description. Because the ostrich cannot fly, there was some debate about whether it ought to be classified as a beast or a fowl (Guillim 1638: 223). Lutz (1979: 23) directs attention to a 310

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misericord in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon that depicts an ostrich holding a horseshoe in its beak. In his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne (1981: 1.252–5) analyses and criticizes this popular piece of lore, remarking that an ostrich may swallow a piece of iron as a chicken swallows grit, but swallowing is not equivalent to digesting. Greenblatt (1983) argues that in 2H6 Iden’s assertion of legal property rights trumps Cade’s ostrich insult and the threat of violence. Harrawood (2007) comments on Cade’s blurring of eating and warring in 2H6, a confusion based on the ambiguities inherent in the notion of serving. KE otter. (A) An aquatic or semi-aquatic mammal of the family Mustelidae, with a long slim body and short legs with webbed feet. It is this last feature, along with their aquatic habits, that led to confusion among ancient and early modern sources about whether the otter was a fish or a mammal. Topsell insists ‘there is doubt that this beast is of the kinde of Beavers’ (1658: 444), which is in fact incorrect – beavers belong to a completely different mammalian family. However, Topsell also compares them to foxes and cats, engaging with traditions that name the otter a fish by pointing out their resemblances to other land creatures and noting that they must breathe air (445). (B) Falstaff calls Mistress Quickly an otter when she threatens to reveal Falstaff’s insults against Hal in 1H4: when she insists on the truth of her accusations, ‘There’s neither faith nor womanhood in me else,’ Falstaff replies, ‘There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune, nor no more truth in thee than in a drawn fox,’ leading to his point that she is a ‘beast [. . .] Why, an otter’ because ‘[s]he’s neither fish nor flesh; a man knows not where to have her’ (3.3.110–27). This leads to bawdy joking about what it means to ‘have’ her, but the underlying comparison has to do with the problem of categorization – not only is Quickly not an example of ‘true womanhood’, but she is also unclassifiable. (C) Vienne-Guerrin (2016) discusses 1H4’s otter as an insulting comparison (413–14). KR ounce. The name in Shakespeare’s day referred to any medium-sized wild cat; in practice, this usually means the lynx (Felis lynx or Lynx lynx), which inhabits an area from Western Europe to Siberia but became extinct in Britain more than a millennium ago. In 1570, John Caius tried to distinguish between the ounces and the lynx he saw at the Tower of London (1912: 4). The former are extremely wild and come from Mauritania, he reports, and the latter has tufted ears. Raven (1947: 141) speculates that Caius’s ‘ounces’ are cheetahs and that his ‘lynx’ is indeed a lynx. The sole ounce in Shakespeare’s works is a product of Oberon’s imagination. Having dosed Titania’s eyes with a magical herb, he hopes that she will ‘[w]ake when some vile thing is near’ (MND 2.2.38) and fall in love with it, ‘[b]e it ounce or cat or bear, / Pard, or boar with bristled hair’ (2.2.34–5). ‘Vile’ in this context apparently means bestial. The ‘vile thing’ that Titania sees and falls in love with, the ass-headed Bottom, easily surpasses the creatures of Oberon’s imagination. KE 311

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ousel, woosel. (A) The blackbird (Turdus merula), a common British bird with a melodious, warbling call. The Germanic name ‘ousel’ is still in regional use in Britain (OED ). The spelling ‘woosel’ probably indicates an alternative, perhaps rustic, pronunciation. Thomas Elyot in The Castel of Helthe observes that ‘Blacke byrdes or ousyls, Amonge wylde fowle hath the chiefe prayse’, although he refers not to their singing but to their nutritional value (1539: fol. 29b). (B) The otherwise coal-black males have a yellow eye-ring and a bright orange bill, colours to which Bottom seems drawn. In the face of his fellow actors’ fearful reaction to him and unaware of his newly acquired ass’s head, Bottom sings a song to show that he is not fazed by what he takes to be their knavery: ‘The ousel cock so black of hue / With orange-tawny bill, / The throstle with his note so true, / The wren with little quill’ (MND 3.1.121–4). In an earlier scene, Bottom had offered to ‘discharge’ his part in Pyramus and Thisbe wearing ‘your orange-tawny beard’ (1.2.86–7). When in 2H4 Justice Shallow asks Justice Silence about his god-daughter Ellen, Justice Silence replies, ‘Alas, a black woosel, cousin Shallow’ (3.2.8). He apparently means that Ellen is dark-haired, a matter of regret (at least to Justice Silence); in the Petrarchan tradition of love poetry, the mistress has blonde hair. KE

Figure 8 Screech owl, 1508, by Albrecht Dürer, watercolour. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.

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owl, howlet, screech-owl, scritch-owl. (A) Nocturnal birds of the Strigidae or Tytonidae families. What early moderns called screech-owls were likely barn owls (family Tytonidae), the most common bird in Europe and England; they hunt small mammals and have a distinctive call. Owls are adapted to hunting at night or dusk, with superb vision and hearing, silent flight, camouflaging colouration, sharp beak and strong talons. Because they are associated with night and violent death, owls have traditionally been birds of ill omen. Pliny (NH 10.16 [1940: 315]) calls them ‘monsters of the night’ and mentions their ‘funereal’ reputation. Athena, goddess of wisdom, is often depicted accompanied by a small owl, allowing the bird in turn to sometimes represent wisdom and learning. More commonly, however, owls were associated with witchcraft and demonic possession. (B) In LLL , Holofernes and Nathaniel present a dialogue between the cuckoo, bird of spring, and the owl, bird of winter. The character ‘Heims’, probably played by Nathaniel, sings two verses, including this description of winter suffering: When all aloud the wind doth blow And coughing drowns the parson’s saw And birds sit brooding in the snow And Marian’s nose looks red and raw, When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl, Then nightly sings the staring owl: ‘Tu-whit, Towhoo!’ (5.2.909–15) Owls are no more winter birds than they are summer ones, but their haunting cry and nocturnal habits make them more ‘wintry’ in these lines. The Jailer’s Daughter also sings of owls in TNK : ‘There was three fools fell out about an howlet: / The one said it was not an owl, / The other he said nay, / The third he said it was a hawk, / And her bells were cut away’ (3.5.68–72). Potter (AR3: 408) argues that this song about the sea reflects the Daughter’s obsession, but the three fools section seems distinct, possibly from a contemporary ballad. For King Richard III, the owl’s song is hateful. When he is deluged by messengers with evil news about the war, ‘Out on you, owls! Nothing but songs of death,’ he cries as he strikes one of them (R3 4.4.507). Owls function as bad omens elsewhere in Shakespeare’s plays and poems. To express his terror at what he thinks is witchcraft, Dromio of Syracuse exclaims, ‘O, spite of spites, / We talk with goblins, owls and sprites!’ (ERR 2.2.195–6). Tamora calls the glade where she is surprised by Bassianus and Lavinia a ‘barren detested vale’ where ‘nothing breeds / Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven’ (TIT 2.2.93–7). Tarquin creeps into Lucrece’s chamber in ‘the dead of night’ when ‘[n]o noise but owls’ and wolves’ death-boding cries’ can be heard (LUC 162–5) and Adonis tries to leave Venus because the day grows late signalled by the fact that ‘The owl, night’s herald, shrieks’ (VEN 531). Tiny Ariel, meanwhile, hides in a ‘cowslips’ bell [. . .] when owls do cry’ (TMP 5.1.89–90). Oddly, given this dark reputation, Averagus welcomes Innogen to the 313

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brothers’ cave with the words ‘The night to th’owl and morn to th’lark less welcome’ than she is to them (CYM 3.6.91). To Ajax in TRO , Thersites is the ‘vile owl’ (2.1.88), meaning he is both stupid (finds light, or enlightenment, offensive) and screeches or rails, rather than speaking gently. Titania tells her fairies to keep away the ‘clamorous owl’ (MND 2.2.6) and at the play’s conclusion Puck warns of the dangers of night, including the ‘screech-owl, screeching loud’ that helps ‘[p]u[t] the wretch that lies in woe / In remembrance of a shroud’ (5.1.366–8). When Gloucester’s wife in 2H6 dabbles in witchcraft, it is at ‘[t]he time of night when Troy was set on fire, / The time of night when screech-owls cry and bandogs howl, / And spirits walk, and ghosts break up their graves’ (1.4.17–19), and King Henry tells Richard of Gloucester (later King Richard III) that ‘the owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign’ (3H6 5.6.44), once again linking the owl to demons, evil spirits and omens of disaster. MAC , a play full of these things, also has more owls mentioned in it than other plays: at the moment Macbeth goes to murder Duncan, Lady Macbeth notes the call of an owl – ‘it was the owl that shrieked, / The fatal bellman, which gives the stern’st good night’ (2.2.3–4) – while later Ross hears from an old man about an omen: ‘A falcon towering in her pride of place / Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed’ (2.4.12–13). The witches include a ‘howlet’s wing’ in their potion (4.1.17), and Macduff’s wife complains that he has left his family to potential death, whereas even the tiny wren would defend ‘[h]er young ones in her nest, against the owl’ (4.2.11) – again, an omen, since she and her child are about to be murdered at Macbeth’s instruction. Although the play does not make explicit Macbeth’s own identification with the owl, he is in fact the solitary hunter who does his dirty work under cover of night, undetected until too late. The mad Ophelia refers to the legend of a baker’s daughter turned into an owl for refusing bread to Jesus (HAM 4.5.42–3), which may or may not be an allusion to the loss of virginity, even whorishness (because it is a tale of lack of virtue and transformation; see AR3 2006: 377, n. 42–3). (C) Harting (1965) spends some time tracing the owl’s tracks through the plays and related tales (83–97). Tracy (1966) finds Ophelia’s reference in HAM combines the owl’s complex role in mobilizing issues of appearance vs reality, sexual identity and death. For the owl as an insulting animal comparison, see Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 414–15). KR ox. (A) A large cloven-hoofed animal of the family Bovidae; more specifically in early modern parlance, an ox was generally the term for a castrated male, while the word neat was used to refer to all such cattle, male and female. Topsell explains that ‘Oxe, as we say in English, is the most vulgar and ordinary name for Bugils, Bulls, Cows, Buffes, and all great cloven-footed horned beasts; although in proper speech it signifieth a beast gelded or libbed of his stones’ (1658: 53). He also emphasizes the ubiquity of this animal in all countries, along with its role as property, ‘the first riches’ that humans claimed (53). Biblically, oxen do indeed appear primarily as chattel, but also figuratively to convey disobedience or idolatry. The yoke, the equipment that harnessed a team of 314

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oxen, was a familiar image for marriage. Oxen were crucial to English agriculture, both as the labour that propelled the plough (although horses were gradually supplanting them in this role) and as the source of beef, England’s favourite dish. (B) Gremio, the rich old man who has come to woo Bianca in SHR , claims ‘Six score fat oxen’ as one sign of his wealth (2.1.362); but perhaps the most famous use in the play of the animal as an item of property comes when Petruccio calls Katherina ‘my goods, my chattels [. . .] My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything’ (3.2.231–3). Dividing the married pair would thus be tantamount to theft, he goes on to claim – but there are hints in the list of animals Petruccio names that this marriage is not yet fully functional. The Bible specifically prohibits yoking the ox with the ass (Deut. 22.10), allowing Petruccio’s reference to ‘my ox, my ass’ to convey the sense of a mismatched pair. The misogynistic implication is that only when Katherina becomes as docile as an ox will the two get along. Touchstone employs the ox in a related fashion when he insists he will marry Audrey: ‘As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse has his curb and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling’ (AYL 3.3.73– 75). Again, at least intellectually this marriage is an unequal ‘yoking’ (under the ‘bow’ of the yoke); further, Touchstone inverts marriage’s usual representation as a union that elevates both partners by constraining their sexual promiscuity – in this instance, it is constraint, the fool asserts, that makes humans equivalent to animals. Oxen work by plodding slowly towing a heavy plough. According to the OED (2a, b), the animals are themselves interchangeable with the device they pull, emphasizing their lowly status and submission to hardship. Orlando uses the ox as an example of the vile treatment he has suffered at his brother’s hands, saying he has been kept at home in a manner that ‘differs not from the stalling of an ox’ (AYL 1.1.9–10). The shared effort of animal and human, however, is reflected in Titania’s description of the ecological disaster her argument with Oberon has caused: ‘The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain, / The ploughman lost his sweat’ (MND 2.1.93–4). Indulging in a fantasy of pastoral escape from court, Innogen wishes herself a ‘neatherd’s daughter’ (CYM 1.1.150); her actual flight into the Welsh mountains proves far more arduous, even lifethreatening. Worcester ponders the ox’s fate in 1H4 when he expresses suspicion at the king’s offer of leniency to the rebels: ‘[W]e shall feed like oxen at a stall, / The better cherished still the nearer death’ (5.2.14–15). The ox’s inevitable end at the butcher’s shambles serves up a ready-made set of metaphors for war in the histories. 2H6, which features an actual butcher, also turns troops dying on the battlefield into slaughtered oxen: Cade tells Dick, ‘the butcher of Ashford’, that the opposition ‘fell before thee like sheep and oxen, and thou behaved’st thyself as if thou hadst been in thine own slaughterhouse’ (4.3.1–5). Not only does Dick’s lowly occupation suggest how unfit he and his cohort are to rule (butchers were not well regarded in England: the assumption was that their occupation coarsened them and made them violent and corrupt), but the transformation of the crown’s troops into livestock demotes them from the usual metaphors involving the hunt that are applied to war elsewhere. Talbot uses the ox in a similar fashion to 315

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shame the English at Orlèans into yet another attack: ‘[E]ither renew the fight / Or tear the lions out of England’s coat. / [. . .] / Sheep run not half so treacherous from the wolf, / Or horse or oxen from the leopard, / As you fly from your oft-subdued slaves’ (1H6 1.5.27–32). (C) Ray (2002) discusses yoking as an image for marriage that could imply emasculation (because the ox was castrated), or sanction marital abuse, touching on SHR as well as the use of animal analogies in early modern conduct manuals. KR oyster. (A) A general name for several species of bivalve mollusc, family Ostreoidea, found in salt- or brackish water and characteristically having rough, irregular shells. Oysters are now farmed for both food and pearls. Although they are considered a delicacy today, they were cheap and plentiful in Shakespeare’s day and indeed for centuries before. Pearls may sometimes be found even in edible oysters and are created when an irritant such as a grain of sand enters the oyster’s shell and is then coated with layers of nacre, i.e., mother of pearl, the material that makes up the shell lining. This process protects the oyster and eventually produces a pearl. The oyster’s reputation as an aphrodisiac is long-standing, although it was considerably bolstered in the eighteenth century by Casanova’s reports of its effect on stamina. (B) Antony has kissed this ‘orient pearl’, reports Alexas as he presents it to Cleopatra. He then repeats Antony’s speech to her: ‘the firm Roman to great Egypt sends / This treasure of an oyster’ (ANT 1.5.43, 45–6). The adjective ‘orient’ implies that the pearl, like all jewels from the East, is especially fine and lustrous. The fact that in the early modern period oysters were inexpensive and yet might contain treasure is reflected in Touchstone’s simile for the ‘ill-favoured’ virgin, Audrey: ‘Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house, as your pearl in your foul oyster’ (AYL 5.4.58, 59–61). More often, the oyster, if not a figure of fun in itself, is a figure that allows characters to make fun of others or indeed of themselves. Benedict marvels that the soldier Claudio has become a lover and made a fool of himself. Will such a fate befall him, Benedick wonders, given the great power of love. ‘I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster’, he admits, ‘but I’ll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me he shall never make me such a fool’ (ADO 2.3.22–5). McEachern notes that Benedick’s words allude to the stereotype of the melancholy, tight-lipped lover, and also to the notion of being split wide open, in the manner that one pries open an oyster shell (AR3: 244, n. 23–4). Violently extracting riches from the world, that is, stealing, seems to be Pistol’s meaning in WIV , when Falstaff says that he will not lend Pistol any money. ‘Why then, the world’s mine oyster’, responds Pistol, ‘Which I with sword will open’ (2.2.2–3). Shakespeare seems to have coined the famous expression, although it has lost the sense of requiring force to get all that one desires. Richard II is contemptuous of Bolingbroke’s effort (as Richard sees it) to make himself popular with the people. ‘Off goes his bonnet to an oyster-wench’, Richard sneers (R2 1.4.31). An oyster wench was a female street vendor. The existence of several common alternatives, ‘oyster wife’, 316

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‘oyster woman’ and ‘oyster whore’ (OED ), indicate the gendered nature of the trade. In SHR , trying to persuade a merchant from Mantua to pretend to be his father, Tranio insists that he and the merchant even resemble each other. ‘As much as an apple doth an oyster’, remarks Tranio’s clever servant, Biondello (4.2.102–3), a proverbial dissimilarity (see Tilley 1950: A291). Even if nothing else were to distinguish the fruit from the mollusc (and much else does), the apple is smooth-skinned and round, the oyster, roughshelled and irregularly oval. ‘Canst tell how an oyster makes his shell?’ the Fool asks Lear (LR 1.5.25). His point seems to be that it is not necessary to have perfect knowledge of the natural world in order to know that, as creatures need their shells, so humans need their houses, if only to shelter their ‘horns’. There may be an allusion here to the horns of cuckoldry, but the Fool’s overriding point is that Lear has been a fool to give up his ‘house’ (his land and status) to his daughters. (C) The oyster was so commonplace in earlier centuries that ‘oyster’ is the answer to Riddle 77 in the medieval Exeter Book (see Salvador 2004: 401–6). It was so inexpensive that in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the Monk is said to find ‘nat worth an oystre’ the ‘text’ that a monk out of the cloister is like a fish out of water (Chaucer 1988: 25 [Prol. 182]). Chaucer rhymes ‘oyster’ with ‘cloister’; Ben Jonson rhymes ‘oysters’ with ‘roisters’ (rowdy troublemakers) in The Devil Is an Asse (Jonson 1996: 62 [1.1.68– 9]), when Iniquity (the Vice figure) promises to show Pug (the lesser devil) the attractions of Billingsgate. Thirsk (2006) observes that oysters were often added to meat dishes in the early modern period (116); they found favour as a foodstuff among the well-to-do only after the Restoration (155). KE

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P palfrey. (A) A type of horse with a lighter frame and comfortable gaits (some were capable of the amble, a lateral trot gait that is very smooth). As in the case of the courser, jennet and other categories of horses in Shakespeare’s works, ‘palfrey’ does not so much describe a breed of horse as the suitability of the animal to certain uses. The terms palfrey and courser, for instance, could be used interchangeably. Most palfreys had baroque bloodlines, descending from the Spanish and other Southern European breeds, which granted them physical attributes deemed beautiful in horses in the Middle Ages and Renaissance – high arched necks, longer manes and tails, short bodies and showy high-kneed gaits – as well as possibly a genetic predisposition for the ability to amble. In part because of its origins, the palfrey was an expensive animal that served as much for display as for transportation, and was an indicator of wealth and refinement. However, because of the animal’s smooth gaits it was most often considered a suitable mount for women, which allowed it to also serve as a sign of effeminacy. (B) When the French Dauphin in H5 lauds his mount as a ‘prince of palfreys’ (3.7.27), his effusive praise registers with the Constable and Orleans as inappropriate, more suited to a courtly fop than a warrior. The Dauphin not only calls his horse a Pegasus whose ‘hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes’, whose neigh is like the commands of a king and whose ‘countenance enforces homage’ (3.7.17–18, 28–9), he also announces that he ‘once writ a sonnet in his praise’ (3.7.39) and would ‘rather have my horse to [his] mistress’ (3.7.58–9). This dangerous appropriation of the modes of literary worship reserved to human female love objects sets off a series of jokes and double-entendres from the Constable and Orleans, who take the consequent category confusion to absurd lengths by playing on the idea that women are ‘ridden’ in sex, and that the Dauphin’s affection for his palfrey amounts to bestiality. The courser in VEN that abandons Adonis for the temptation of a ‘breeding’ jennet (260) is also called a palfrey, demonstrating the problem noted above of terminological fuzziness, but also possibly emphasizing the subordinate position Adonis finds himself in with regard to the goddess Venus. He laments his horse’s abandonment, ‘I am bereft him so’ (381) he says, and he begs Venus to leave him alone since ‘For all my mind, my thought, my busy care, / Is how to get my palfrey from the mare’ (383–4). In turn, Venus casts the palfrey as more appropriately responding to the natural force of sexual attraction: ‘Thy palfrey, as he should, / Welcomes the warm approach of sweet desire’ (385–6). Like the horse, she argues, Adonis should throw off the ‘[s]ervilely mastered’ (392) yoke that reins in lust and follow his horse to sexual satisfaction. In the struggle to resist the goddess, 318

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however, giving in means surrendering his masculine authority, his self-mastery, and becoming less than the fierce hunter he aspires to be – becoming, that is, more like the horse he rides. Tamora appears before the presumably mad Titus Andronicus dressed as ‘Revenge’ and promises to torment his enemies. He asks her to prove her identity by stabbing Rape and Murder (Chiron and Demetrius, also in costumes), after which he will drive her chariot and ‘Provide thee with two proper palfreys, black as jet’ (TIT 5.2.50). Revenge was often represented at the helm of a chariot; Titus simply offers to provide fine animals to draw it. At the other end of the class spectrum is Jack Cade who, in 2H6, promises that when he is king ‘All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass’ (4.2.63–4). By turning the animal out to graze in Cheapside, Cade indicates that the commercial spaces of London will be returned to the people as grazing land, a reference to the practice of land enclosure that displaced so many in Tudor and Elizabethan England. (C) Raber (2020) discusses the palfrey episode in H5 as a litmus test for critical resistance to heteronormativity; VEN ’s courser episode is the subject of work by Doebler (1988) and Blythe (1995) as well as Raber (2013). KR panther, pard. (A) Either of these names in Shakespeare’s day could signify the leopard (Panthera pardus), but they are more likely to signify a fierce, wily, spotted big cat thought of as vaguely distinct from the leopard. There is little clarity about the issue. Today, ‘panther’ is sometimes applied to (1) melanistic leopards, that is, leopards with the gene that produces a solid black coat (hence ‘black panthers’), in the mistaken belief that they are a distinct species; and (2) certain New World members of the Panthera family, like jaguars, pumas and cougars. (B) There are three references to the panther in TIT , and they are progressively more sinister. In the play’s first scene, the panther is paired with the hart (the male of the deer) when Titus invites the emperor Saturninus to join him in the hunt. Tomorrow, and it please your majesty To hunt the panther and the hart with me, With horn and hound we’ll give your grace bonjour. (1.1.496–8) The hart, as befits the traditional values associated with the Roman Titus, is the classic beast of the royal (Western) hunt. The exotic, dangerous panther is associated with the unRoman and hence barbaric Goths. Most importantly, the panther is a fierce predator and is itself a hunter of deer. The pairing of panther and hart in Titus’s invitation is thus ominous, predicting the role to be played by Tamora’s party, on the one hand, and by the Andronici, on the other. The dark implications of the play’s hunting theme become yet more explicit when the Roman party boasts that Tamora will be able to witness the excellence of their hunting. ‘I have dogs’, Marcus claims, that ‘[w]ill rouse the proudest panther in the chase / And climb the highest promontory top’ (2.1.20–2); Titus adds that he has horses that will 319

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follow the game and run ‘like swallows o’er the plain’ (2.1.24). Marcus and Titus, that is, are more interested in the chase than in the kill. In contrast, Demetrius, who responds to these boastful claims in an aside to his brother, states, ‘we hunt not, we, with horse nor hound, / But hope to pluck a dainty doe to ground’ (2.1.25–6), the doe being Lavinia. The proud Gothic panther has indeed been roused by the Romans. The final allusion to the panther in TIT occurs when Aaron calls Quintus and Martius to follow him: Come on, my lords, the better foot before. Straight will I bring you to the loathsome pit Where I espied the panther fast asleep. (2.2.192–4) The lie is effective, and when Martius, following Aaron, falls into the pit, he sees not the panther but the panther’s kill, Bassianus, ‘berayed in blood / All on a heap, like to a slaughtered lamb’ (2.2.222–3), that is, like a butchered carcass ready for eating, as Noble suggests (2003: 694). In later plays, ‘pard’ is Shakespeare’s preferred name for the animal. In a version of the pairing of panther and hart in TIT , pard and hind (the female of the deer) are paired in TRO , when Cressida vows to be true to Troilus. ‘If I be false’ (3.2.179), she swears, then let me become a byword for faithlessness: When they’ve said ‘As false As air, as water, wind, or sandy earth, As fox to lamb, or wolf to heifer’s calf, Pard to the hind, or stepdame to her son’, Yea, let them say, to stick the heart of falsehood, ‘As false as Cressid’. (3.2.186–91) The accumulation of predators in the passage – fox, wolf, pard, stepdame – overwhelms the puny ‘If’ with which the vow begins, so that Cressida’s name is finally associated with (rather than opposed to) the predatory half of each pair. The pard’s appearance rather than its ferocity is at issue in several plays. After having drugged Titania, Oberon hopes that she will take for her true love whatever ‘vile thing’ she first sees when she awakes, ‘Be it ounce or cat or bear, / Pard, or boar with bristled hair’ (MND 2.2.38, 34–3). ‘Vile’ here refers not to moral status but to physical repulsiveness. In Jaques’s disquisition on the seven ages of man in AYL , the pard features in the fourth age: then a soldier, Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel, Seeking the bubble reputation Even in the cannon’s mouth [. . .] (2.7.150–4)

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Although there is no evidence of beards in either written or visual early modern portraits of the panther, ‘bearded’ may allude to the whiskers that are a feature of all feline physiognomy. It is perhaps more likely that ‘bearded like the pard’ exemplifies the kind of ‘strange oaths’ that Jaques attributes to soldiers. The bearded pard has additional albeit oblique relevance to soldiers by way of the verb ‘to beard’, which means to confront boldly or insolently. In TMP , the pard’s spots comes into play when Prospero orders Ariel to punish Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano: Go,charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them Than pard or cat o’ mountain. (4.1.258–61) The red marks or bruises inflicted by Prospero’s airy attendants leads Gooder (1983: 17) to see their pinching of Caliban and his companions as analogous to bear-baiting. (C) On the basis of the Latin Vulgate version of Hosea 5.14, in which God says that he will be a ‘panthera’ to Ephraim (i.e., to the Israelites), medieval bestiaries construct an allegory in which the panther is a figure for the true Christ. It is said to sleep for three days and then to awake, emitting a sweet breath with its roar. Its breath attracts all animals except the dragon (a figure for Satan), which runs away in fear (see Baxter 1998: 49–50; W. Clark 2006: 123–4). The popularity of English translations of the Bible in Protestant England (and the consequent fading of the Vulgate) may explain why the tradition of the Christ-like panther is lost in the early modern period: English versions of Hosea 5.14 translate the Hebrew kephir as ‘lion’ rather than ‘panther’. Topsell (1658: 447) tentatively suggests that ‘panther’, ‘pardal’, ‘leopard’ and ‘libbard’ name ‘one beast’, but he admits that ‘it is grown a difficult thing [. . .] to define it perfectly’. He ends by claiming that ‘[i]t is apparent [. . .] that the Panther is the name of the greater Pardal, and the Leopard of the lesser’, a conclusion that is not in fact apparent (449). For Spenser, panther and pardal seem to be different animals: to demonstrate his strength, Satyrane is said to constrain ‘wyld beastes in yron yokes [. . .] / The spotted Panther, and the tusked Bore, / The Pardale swift, and the Tigre cruell’ (2001: 1.6.26). Marx (1992) places Jaques’s description of the soldier, ‘bearded like the pard’, in the context of what he argues is the tension in Shakespeare’s works between Renaissance military culture and pacifism. W. Fisher (2001) discusses the ways in which Renaissance beards signal masculinity. KE parasite. (A) In Shakespeare’s day, the word parasite referred exclusively to human beings, but its meaning has changed over time until in its current usage it almost always refers to non-human creatures, mainly insects. ‘Parasite’ literally translates as ‘the one who eats beside’ (from the Greek and Latin, para = next to or adjacent to, and sitos = pertaining to food). According to the OED a parasite is ‘A person who lives at the 321

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expense of another, or of society in general’ (1a), but from the eighteenth century on, the word has a biological meaning as ‘An organism that lives on, in, or with an organism of another species, obtaining food, shelter, or other benefit; (now) spec. one that obtains nutrients at the expense of the host organism, which it may directly or indirectly harm’ (2a). This linguistic shift in which a term used exclusively for human behaviour comes to refer as well (or instead) to non-humans works exactly contrary to the more common case when words used for animals end up applied to humans, which the bulk of this volume’s entries demonstrate (see slug for a similar rare example). Human exceptionalist views seem to resist the application of ideas and language associated exclusively with humans to describe other creatures, although the reverse – the appropriation of language and images that derive from animals to illustrate human qualities – is so frequent in everyday speech. (B) We find the original meaning of parasite at work in WT , when Polixenes describes his son as ‘My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all’ (1.2.167). But the term usually has more negative connotations, as when Coriolanus chides Cominius and the Roman crowd, saying, ‘When steel grows soft / As the parasite’s silk, let him [the parasite] be made / An ovator for th’wars (COR 1.9.44–6), or when King Richard’s queen calls hope ‘a flatterer, / A parasite, a keeper-back of Death’ (R2 2.2.69–70). Timon uses it most literally when he ‘feasts’ those who have joined him in banqueting in the past, but who refused to aid him when he was in need: he calls his guests ‘[m]ost smiling, smooth, detested parasites, / Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears – / You fools of fortune, trencherfriends’ (TIM 3.7.93–5). These paradoxical creatures (affable wolves, meek bears) reveal the almost unthinkable nature of the bestial betrayal Timon thinks his friends have committed against him. (C) Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 424) considers the term parasite as an insult, although entirely as it applies to human beings not animals. KR parmaceti. Spermaceti, a waxy substance produced in the head of sperm whales and other cetaceans, once used in medicines and candles and still used in cosmetics and perfumes. When King Henry IV accuses him of refusing to hand over his prisoners, Hotspur seeks to justify himself by blaming the messenger (at great length). While I was still ‘smarting with my wounds being cold’ (1H4 1.3.49), says Hotspur, a fastidious and perfumed lord approached him to ask for the prisoners, chattering ‘like a waiting gentlewoman’ about things of which he had no experience: ‘guns, and drums, and wounds’ (1.3.55–6). When the lord tells him that ‘ “the sovereignest thing on earth” / Was “parmaceti” for an inward bruise’ (1.3.57–8), Hotspur in his ‘grief’ and ‘impatience’ admits that he ‘answered indirectly’ (1.3.51, 66), no doubt a euphemism for spurning the lord’s request to hand over his prisoners. KE parrot. (A) The order of Psittaciformes includes several families of brightly-coloured tropical or semi-tropical bird species; all have strong, curved beaks and upright posture, 322

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and some are capable of imitating human speech. The birds were introduced to Europe by Alexander the Great after his ventures into India and became popular as pets and as curiosities because of their apparent ability to speak human languages. This facility made them into objects of fascination, but also allowed them to serve as symbols of foolishness or mindlessness. Pliny reports that parrots become more voluble when drunk on wine (NH 10.58 [1940: 367–8]), which tends to work against the reason– language link, but the birds were also special favourites of the medieval popes and kings. Thomas of Cantimpré’s thirteenth-century De Rerum Natura recounts the tale of a parrot who prophesied Charlemagne’s rise to become emperor (see Boehrer 2010: 76). In Shakespeare’s world, however, parrots were most often the vehicles for mockery of those who lacked social, and thus presumably intellectual, status. (B) Benedick calls Beatrice a ‘parrot-teacher’ (ADO 1.1.132), an insult suggesting she is only capable of the kind of repetition that conditions a parrot to imitate speech. Lorenzo matches wits with Lancelot in MV , mocking the clown for the uneven exchange: ‘I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none only but parrots’ (3.5.40–2). Likewise, in ERR , Dromio of Ephesus uses the parrot as an example of nonsense speech (4.4.43–4). When the disguised Rosalind in AYL promises to be a perfect substitute target for Orlando’s courtship, she says she will be ‘more clamorous than a parrot against rain’ (4.1.141), or in other words will foolishly protest even the weather. Bemoaning his drunken behaviour in OTH , Cassio laments, ‘Drunk? and speak parrot? and squabble? swagger? swear?’ (2.3.275–6). His words resonate with Pliny’s claim about the bird’s ability to get drunk, as well as deploring his drunken – and thus bestial – babbling and swaggering. Thersites compares Patroclus to a parrot in TRO , as usual turning the comparison against one of Greece’s heroes. Patroclus is hungry for information about Cressida and so, Thersites says, ‘The parrot will not do more for an almond than he for a commodious drab’ (5.2.200–1). A drab here refers to a whore, which is what Thersites calls Cressida, now partnered with Diomedes instead of Troilus. Prince Hal amuses himself by turning the drawer, Francis, into a tongue-tied fool in 1H4: while Poins is instructed to call Francis repeatedly from inside the tavern, Prince Hal sits outside conversing with him, asking why he does not run away from his long indenture (a serious crime for an apprentice), quizzing him on the price of sugar, and speaking nonsense. Poor Francis is so confused by the two draws on his attention that in the end he is rendered speechless. Alone afterwards, Prince Hal remarks, ‘That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman! (2.4.96–7). That Hal is able to reduce a tavern boy to the linguistic level of a parrot should not surprise anyone – Hal brags that he ‘can drink with any tinker in his own language’ (2.4.17–18) and is a playful, if sometimes cruel, companion to the tavern-dwellers. But the episode demonstrates the connection early moderns regularly made between access to language and access to reason: to be human, one must have both. Animals and lowerclass humans often are depicted as potentially having neither. Of course, a parrot has plenty of language, as the poet John Skelton might argue: his Speke, Parrot (1525) is a 323

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satire on Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, a rising figure at King Henry VIII’s court, his religion and his politics. The long poem in several sections purports to be the ramblings – jumbled, yet somehow slyly significant – of a parrot who has saved up snippets that reflect a humanist education, along with topical references to court figures. Skelton finesses the question of the parrot’s ability to reason, which was often raised in connection with its access to language. Popular ideas about parrots suggest that they might well be less prone to all-too-human confusion at the hands of a playful prince like Hal than is poor Francis. Early modern audiences undoubtedly laughed at this kind of scene, but it seems rather an unnerving reminder that the dividing line between rational and irrational, parrot and human, is more of a moving target than audiences might otherwise wish to believe. In 2H4, the prince again jokes about parrots, this time watching Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet with Poins: ‘Look whe’er the withered elder hath not his poll clawed like a parrot’ (2.4.261–2) he says, pointing out that the aging knight is having his hair mussed by Doll (with a play on the typical parrot’s name, ‘Poll’; see AR3: 272, n. 262). (C) Harting (1965) catalogues examples of parrots in the plays; Boehrer (2002: 99– 132) describes the arc of the parrot’s reputation, from wonder of nature to foolish satire, which he elaborates in later work (2010: 74–106) in relation to the religious context that has parrots associated with Catholicism’s investment in prophecy and the miraculous. Vienne-Guerrin (2016) considers ‘parrot’ as an insult (425). KR peacock. (A) Males of the peafowl family (the Indian peafowl Pavo cristatus, also known as the common or blue peafowl) are known for their huge, mainly blue fan-like tails that sport brightly-coloured spots and iridescent colours. Peahens lack the spectacular tail, which is used by males in courtship displays. Peafowl are large ground-dwelling birds, although they can fly if necessary; the male’s loud cry is distinctive and is used to warn of predators. The bird was introduced throughout Europe very early and was probably widespread by the early Middle Ages – its feathers were found in the ninth-century Gokstad burial mound of a Viking warrior in Norway. The bird was also popular elsewhere in Europe and England simply as a kind of garden ornament. Because of its tail, the peacock was and is commonly invoked to depict a preening fop, reflected in the proverbial reference to being ‘proud as a peacock’ (Tilley 1950: P157). (B) Thersites describes Ajax as a peacock when the hero struts around the battlefield waiting to fight Hector: ‘Why, ‘a stalks up and down like a peacock’ (TRO 3.3.253). Likewise, Joan Puzel (Joan of Arc) boastfully dismisses the English commander Talbot, ‘Let frantic Talbot triumph for a while, / And like a peacock sweep along his tail; / We’ll pull his plumes and take away his train’ (1H6 3.3.5–7). Dromio of Syracuse alludes to the proverb involving the peacock’s pride when he says of his Antipholus, ‘ “Fly pride”, says the peacock’ (ERR 4.3.81). Hamlet uses the ambiguous term ‘pajock’, which may mean peacock, when he reacts to Claudius’s sudden departure from the ‘The Murder of 324

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Gonzago’: Hamlet tells Horatio, ‘This realm dismantled was / Of Jove himself, and now reigns here / A very, very pajock’ (HAM 3.2.274–6), describing the decline from Hamlet’s father to the beastly Claudius. As AR3 notes (318, n. 276), if a pajock is a peacock, then Hamlet likely glances at the fable of the birds that choose a peacock for a king rather than an eagle until the bird is exposed as a coward by the magpie (Perry Index 219). In H5, Williams mentions the peacock’s feathers used to make fans (4.1.199), while TMP ’s wedding masque refers to Juno’s peacocks, her sacred birds, which pull her carriage (4.1.74). (C) Boehrer (2010) discusses the confusion of the peacock with the turkey caused by the application of Old World species categories to New World creatures (133–63). KR pearl. (A) The iridescent nugget, usually white or gray, formed from layers of calcium carbonate, or nacre, aggregated around a tiny piece of grit or sand that irritates the soft interior of a mollusk, most often an oyster. Pearls were valuable gems much prized in early modern Europe: they were associated with the fabulous riches of the Orient, where divers braved dangerous depths to retrieve the rare pearls from oyster beds in the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea. In part because of its colour and luminosity, the pearl was associated with purity and virginity – it was, as a result, one of the favourite jewellery items of Queen Elizabeth I, who is depicted in multiple portraits wearing large drop pearls and strands of matched pearls. In antiquity, Pliny’s NH (9.54.107 [1940: 235]) describes the genesis of pearls from oysters opening their shells to dew that ‘impregnates’ them. He also tells the tale of Cleopatra’s wager with Marc Antony that she can provide the more expensive feast: after a lavish banquet, she drops one of her large pearl earrings in a cup of wine or vinegar where it dissolves, and she drinks it, winning the bet (9.58). The New Testament includes reference to the kingdom of Heaven as a ‘pearl of great price’ (Mt. 13.45–6, KJV); and in Mt. 7.6, Christians are exhorted not to demean the gifts of heaven, throwing them like ‘pearls before swine’. (B) Women are compared to pearls, echoing indirectly the biblical proverb in which the value of a virtuous woman is ‘above rubies’ (Prov. 31.10, KJV), with the added emphasis on the pearl’s rarity and symbolic connection to purity. Thus, when Othello recounts his sins at the end of OTH , he laments that he, ‘Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe’ (5.2.345–6). The pearl’s Eastern origin helps highlight the exoticizing that takes over in this speech, in which the assimilated ‘Venetian’ Othello is divided from and antagonist to the ‘Indian’ or unassimilated Othello who has betrayed his adopted nation and its standards. Troilus likewise says of Cressida, ‘Her bed is India; there she lies, a pearl’ (TRO 1.1.96), while Helen of Troy is ‘a pearl / Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships’ (2.2.81–2). Valentine says of Silvia in TGV that he is ‘as rich in having such a jewel / As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl’ (2.4.167–8). When the Princess in LLL asks Berowne ‘Will you have me or your pearl again’ (5.2.458), indicating a gift he conferred at the masked ball, she is not only correcting his and the king’s mistaken impression that the men’s disguises in 325

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the previous act were successful in tricking the women, but is also asking whether Berowne truly values Rosaline (who wore the pearl while masked) enough to let go of his ego and pique – or, in other words, whether Rosaline’s value is in fact above pearls. Men too can be compared to pearls, as we see in TGV when Proteus comments, ‘But pearls are fair, and the old saying is, / “Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies’ eyes” ’ (5.2.11–12). Black here means swarthy or less than fair, and the proverb Proteus quotes suggests that even plain or ugly men are lovely to those who love them – that is, there’s no accounting for women’s tastes, as Lucius would agree when he describes Aaron as ‘the pearl that pleased your empress’ eye’ (TIT 5.1.42). Whether either of these uses is related to the prized black pearls that oysters occasionally created is debatable, but such jewels were exceedingly rare. Elizabeth I appropriated a parure (a set of matching jewellery) of just such black pearls from her fellow monarch Mary, Queen of Scots, which she wears in the famous Armada portrait. Because of their origin in oysters, their association with the dangers of diving for treasure and their connection with global trade, pearls can represent the blessings or the threat of the sea and sea travel. In R3, Clarence reports an ominous dream of drowning that includes the image of ‘heaps of pearl’ at the bottom of the sea (1.4.26) among other evidence of shipwreck and death. The remarkable nature of the oyster’s transformation of a grain of sand into a jewel is reflected in Ariel’s song to Ferdinand, telling him of his father’s supposed fate: Full fathom five they father lies, Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes, Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. (TMP 1.2.397–402) Pearls are part of the transformative power of the ocean, the ‘sea-change’ that metaphorically extends to all who have been stranded on the island. Ariel’s song promises that Alonso has become, like coral, something indeterminate, something new, but unprecedented. Pearls were a common metaphor for tears. King Richard tells Queen Elizabeth in R3, ‘drops of tears that you have shed / Shall come again, transformed to orient pearl’ (4.4.321–2) and Proteus refers to ‘[a] sea of melting pearl, which some call tears’ (TGV 3.1.222). The Gentleman in LR who reports on Cordelia’s reaction to the report of Lear’s condition describes her tears parting from her eyes ‘[a]s pearls from diamonds’ (4.3.22). In SON 34, the tears shed by the beloved remedy a betrayal: ‘Ah, but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds, / And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds’ (34.13–14). And Lucrece sheds ‘brinish pearl from her bright eyes’ (LUC 1213), while Venus’ tears are ‘prisoned in her eyes like pearls in glass’ (VEN 980). But pearl is also the term used in early modern medicine for cataracts (Sokol 2003: 41–2), suggesting that what Ariel’s song in TMP may also mean is that Alonso’s vision, which has been 326

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impaired, will be remedied by humility and loss. Indeed, pearls were themselves considered a form of medicine: Nicholas Culpeper summarizes their uses in his chapter on lapidary medicine in his School of Physick (1655): they ‘help trembling in Old men [. . .] preserve the body sound and restore lost health’ (275). Thus, when Cleopatra hears Antony has sent her the gift of a pearl, she is as interested in the idea that its bearer Alexas has been in Antony’s presence enough to be gilded with the ‘tinct’ of healing aura (ANT 1.5.39) as she is in the pearl itself. And when Claudius gives Hamlet a cup of wine to drink during his duel with Laertes at the conclusion of HAM , he adds to it a pearl, which might in fact be poison, but which he characterizes as a restorative: ‘Hamlet, this pearl is thine: / Here’s to thy health’ (5.2.264–5). On the other hand, Falstaff’s ditty in 2H4 mocks Doll Tearsheet for accusing him of stealing ‘ “Your brooches, pearls and ouches!” ’ (2.4.50), but may also refer to the boils, pimples and other blemishes associated with disease – Doll is, he insinuates, a carrier of sexually transmitted diseases (AR3: 253, n. 50). Like tears, dew takes the shape of drops, and can thus be pearl-like, as it is in MND when Lysander calls it ‘liquid pearl’ or when a fairy says she must ‘hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear’, or when Oberon notes dew swelling on flower buds ‘like round and orient pearls’ (1.1.211; 2.1.15; 4.1.53). The link to nature’s sustenance is slightly different when PP mediates on the death that drains a rose with the image of ‘Bright orient pearl, alack too timely shaded’ (10.3). Of course, pearls can also simply be a sign of wealth, as when Gremio boasts of his riches in SHR (2.1.357) or adapted from biblical references to describe mundane things, as when Holofernes calls Costard’s quip ‘pearl enough for a swine’ (LLL 4.2.86–7). The pearls Quickly associates with the Order of the Garter that spell out ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ (WIV 5.5.69) reflect the value(s) of the order and its motto. What Macduff means when he notes that the new king Malcolm is ‘compassed with thy kingdom’s pearl’ (MAC 5.9.22) is that the king is surrounded with, in effect, the best of Scotland’s subjects, who have triumphed over the tyrant Macbeth. The problem of determining value from external beauty informs Touchstone’s estimation of Audrey: ‘Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house, as your pearl in your foul oyster’ (AYL 5.4.59– 61). Of course, Audrey may also simply be plain, chaste – and otherwise without enduring value, despite Touchstone’s aphorism. (C) Sokol (2003: 30–48) argues that Ariel’s song in TMP reflects advances in knowledge during Shakespeare’s time that allow the playwright to case Alonso’s condition as a kind of disease requiring the remedy of Prospero’s magical intervention. White (1972) and Nardo (1985) offer perspectives on the pearl in the wine glass in HAM , while Seaman (1968) connects Shakespeare’s treatment of Desdemona to the tradition of the biblical merchant, the medieval Pearl poem and Christian grace. KR Pegasus. (A) A mythic winged horse, offspring of the god Poseidon and Medusa; the latter gave birth to Pegasus when she was beheaded by Perseus and her blood mingled 327

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with ocean foam. The Greek hero Bellerophon captured Pegasus and defeated the Chimera on him. (B) In 1H4, Vernon describes Prince Hal mounting his horse in glowing terms to the envious Hotspur, ‘As if an angel dropped down from the clouds / To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus / And witch the world with noble horsemanship’ (4.1.107–9). Vernon makes Hal a mythic figure in his own right, a Bellerophon whose horsemanship (and by extension, his noble right to rule) is superior to that of mere mortals. The Dauphin lauds his horse in H5 as ‘le cheval volant, the Pegasus, qui a les narines de feu’ (3.7.14–15) – that is, his mount is a flying horse with fiery nostrils. While Vernon elevates Prince Hal, the Dauphin makes himself ridiculous with the excessive elevation of his horse. KR pelican. (A) A large waterfowl (Pelecanus onocrotalus, the Great White Pelican) with a long, powerful beak and distinctive throat-pouch. The pelican as it was known to early modern England was enveloped in lore inherited from classical and biblical antiquity and the allegorical tradition that produced the medieval bestiaries. The most important of the legends associated with the pelican holds that as her chicks grow older and stronger, they attack her; she then strikes and kills them. But after three days, she repents and pierces her breast with her beak so that she can revive them with her blood. The self-sacrificial pelican is a figure of Christ and was adopted as an emblem by rulers and clerics who could claim to sacrifice themselves for the good of their people. The ‘pelican in its piety’, as it is usually called, is depicted with bowed neck, its beak on its breast, from which drops of blood are visible. The image is ubiquitous in medieval and early modern visual representations, from church windows and sculpture to jewellery, prints and paintings. Queen Elizabeth wears a pelican jewel in a portrait of 1575, probably by Nicholas Hilliard; the so-called Pelican Portrait is now at the Walker Gallery, Liverpool. When travellers and explorers began in the mid- and late sixteenth century to bring back eyewitness accounts and drawings of Pelecanus onocrotalus, the clash between the pelican of legend and the actual bird became glaringly apparent. (B) Two of the four pelicans found in Shakespeare’s plays emphasize not the selfsacrificing parent but the terrible ingratitude of the children. John of Gaunt, replying scornfully to the threat of beheading by his nephew, Richard II, invokes the pelican in relation to their shared bloodline: O, spare me not, my brother Edward’s son, For that I was his father Edward’s son. That blood already, like the pelican, Hast thou tapped out and drunkenly caroused. (R2 2.1.124–7) According to Gaunt, Richard resembles the pelican’s murderous offspring rather than the loving parent that is the model for a monarch. ‘Tapped out’ refers to the action of a 328

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tapster, implying that Richard has ungratefully forgotten that he was given life by the blood of his grandfather, Edward III, and has instead drunk his blood, that is, murdered another son of Edward III, Richard’s uncle, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester. Encountering the disguised Edgar on the storm-ravaged heath, King Lear in his madness assumes that nothing except ‘unkind daughters’ could have reduced Poor Tom to his wretched state, ‘unkind’ meaning both inhumane and inhuman (LR 3.4.70). Lear has just asked himself how his own daughters could have shut him out of their houses on this terrible night: ‘Oh, Regan, Goneril, / Your old, kind father, whose frank heart gave you all –’ (3.4.19– 20). Kindness is indeed the issue: Lear is learning that children’s inhumaneness is quintessentially human. ‘Is it the fashion’, he demands, ‘that discarded fathers / Should have thus little mercy on their flesh?’ (3.4.71–2). Then, in an extraordinary volta, he admits that his children’s treatment of him is appropriate: ‘Judicious punishment, ’twas this flesh begot / Those pelican daughters’ (3.4.73–4). Even while condemning his daughters’ cruelty, he admits that he is responsible for their being – and perhaps that filial ingratitude is built into the very structure of procreation. The pelican metaphor in HAM uncomfortably mixes the themes of bloody selfsacrifice and bloody revenge, when Laertes vows vengeance against his father’s murderers. As for his father’s ‘good friends’, Laertes declares – and ‘good friends’ encompasses Claudius as well as Laertes’s family – ‘thus wide I’ll ope my arms / And like the kind life-rendering pelican / Repast them with my blood’ (4.5.144–6). This possibly inadvertent offer of self-sacrifice is seized upon by Claudius, who completes Laertes’s half-line: ‘Why, now you speak / Like a good child and a true gentleman’ (4.5.146–7). The king, in short, turns the metaphor to his own purposes, so that it is the pelican’s offspring who offers to sacrifice his life for his friends, and upon Claudius’s urging, Laertes challenges Hamlet to a duel. A reference to the pelican in E3 raises questions related to the play’s contested authorship. (See Proudfoot and Bennett, AR3: 49–89, for a thorough discussion of Shakespeare as a reviser of an earlier play.) The pelican appears in a tiny, discrete scene, when Prince Edward shows his father a shield upon which a pelican is depicted. ‘What picture’s this?’ asks King Edward. Prince Edward replies: A pelican, my lord, Wounding her bosom with her crooked beak, That so her nest of young ones might be fed With drops of blood that issue from her heart: The motto ‘Sic et vos, and so should you’. (8.109–13) Many scholars believe that the scene was meant to be deleted; others argue for its inclusion but place it at different points in the play. The motto quoted by the prince is taken from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Therefore whatsoever ye wolde that men shulde do to you, even so do ye to them’ (Mt. 7.12, GNV). The exact relevance of the pelican and the motto to Edward III and his son may now be impossible to reconstruct. But 329

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there is general relevance in the fact that the relationship between father and son is troubled. The placement of the scene in AR3 asks us to assume that the pelican shield conveys the prince’s message of reproach to the king, who should have been a more loving father. Immediately before the shield is presented, the king, having been warned that the prince is in danger of being killed in battle, refuses to send troops to rescue him. If he dies, then he will receive eternal praise, says Edward; if he vanquishes his foes and lives, he will prove that he is worthy to inherit the crown. The prince does indeed survive and prove himself worthy, although he does not inherit the throne, for he dies before his father dies. But perhaps more puzzling than the relevance of the pelican is the prince’s detailed explanation of the symbol, motivated by the king’s even more puzzling ignorance of it. Does the heavy-handed inclusion of this information suggest an author who assumes that his audience will not be comfortable with the pelican convention? The contrast between the handling of the pelican emblem in E3 with Shakespeare’s creative and radical treatment of it elsewhere – treatment which assumes an appreciative audience – may suggest that this tiny scene has not been touched by Shakespeare’s revising hand. (C) Fossil remains of the Dalmatian Pelican (Pelecanus crispus) from the Iron Age have been found in Britain (Cocker and Mabey 2005: 40). According to Aristotle and Pliny, the pelican is a waterfowl, and Pliny (whose name for the bird is ‘onocrotalus’) adds that it is insatiable (1940: 376 [10.66]). Latin and English translations of the Bible, on the other hand, portray the pelican as a solitary, desert-dwelling bird, a notion derived from Psalm 102.6, in which the psalmist describes himself as ‘like a pelicane of the wildernes’ (GNV). An image of the pelican in its piety appears on the title page of the first edition of the Authorized King James Bible of 1611. (Modern versions of the Bible translate the Heb. qaath as ‘owl’.) For ‘the pelican in its piety’ in medieval bestiaries, see Baxter (1998: 40) and Clark (2006: 177–8). In Jonson’s The Alchemist, Face impresses Sir Epicure Mammon with an abundance of virtually incomprehensible alchemical terms, among them ‘pelican’, a glass vessel with a long neck curved so that it re-enters the vessel at the bottom, thus allowing the contents to recirculate (1982a: 2.3.78). See K. Edwards (2008) for sixteenth-century naturalists’ attempts to grapple with the pelican as differently represented in ancient sources, medieval tradition and eye-witness reports. Topsell (1972: 30–9), who calls the pelican ‘Alcatraz’, mixes naturalistic description of its physiology, habitat and behaviour with exaggerated accounts of the capacity of its throat pouch. In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne criticizes the traditional depiction of the pelican piercing its breast (1981: 1.167–9). In The Princely Pellican (1649), an anonymous writer presents extracts from the prison meditations of Charles I, treating the king as a martyr for his people. In English translations of his First Defense of the English People (1651), Milton calls his opponent, Salmasius, a pelican (1953–82: 4.428). In the original Latin, however, the name Milton uses is ‘onocrotalus’ (1931–8: 7.280), which identifies Salmasius with Pliny’s greedy, voracious fowl and sarcastically dismisses any possibility that he is pious or charitable enough to sacrifice himself. Liebler (2007) considers the violence inherent in the 330

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ingratitude of Lear’s ‘pelican daughters’. Vanrigh (2010) argues that the pelican in E3 should be seen as an emblem of martyrdom in the context of the late 1590s, when a Catholic minority was caught between religious loyalty to the Roman Church and political loyalty to a Protestant queen. KE Phaëton. (A) The name means ‘shining one’. In mythology, Phaëton was the son of Apollo, the sun god (also Helios or Phoebus in the Greek sources), who pulled the sun across the sky with his chariot and team of wild, powerful horses. Phaëton demanded to drive his father’s chariot for a day. Unable to control the chariot’s horses, he was struck down by Jupiter (Zeus in the Greek) lest he incinerate the earth. Shakespeare’s likely source for the tale would have been Ovid’s Metamorphoses, although accounts also exist in Plato’s Timaeus and other classical texts. Phaëton’s story is used to illustrate the dangers of foolish pride – Apollo warns Phaëton that his horses are too strong even for Jupiter to control; but lurking in the tale is an alternate story about parentage, since it is to prove his fatherhood to Phaëton that Apollo permits his son to take the chariot. In Ovid’s version the horses careen out of control because they cannot feel Apollo’s weight on the reins and so believe the chariot is empty (Metamorphoses 1567: 18). These aspects suggest that the Sun-god’s reflection in his son is insufficient to assure the child of his identity or confer equal talents and power. (B) When the Duke in TGV finds Valentine’s letter to Silvia, he employs the image of Phaëton for both strains of meaning: ‘Why, Phaëton, for thou art Merops’ son, / Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car, / And with thy daring folly burn the world?’ (3.1.153–5). The Duke berates Valentine for presuming to aspire to his daughter, predicting a tragic fall. Not only does the Duke condemn Valentine as prideful and unworthy, but he includes reference to Merops perhaps as a reminder of Phaëton’s – and equally, Valentine’s – dubious origins: Phaëton was fathered by the god on Clymene, Merops’ wife, but Apollo only belatedly acknowledged his paternity. Since the myth concerns ideas about legitimate inheritance and the skills associated with leadership, it features in both 3H6 and R2. In the former play, Clifford confronts York who is like ‘Phaëton [. . .] tumbled down from his car’ (1.4.33). Later in the same play, Clifford again thinks of Phaëton when wounded, this time applying the comparison to Henry: ‘O Phoebus, hadst thou never given consent / That Phaëton should check thy fiery steeds, / Thy burning car never had scorched the earth!’ (2.6.11–13). Clifford blames Henry, who did not have the strength of his own father Henry V to control the Yorkists, and so is responsible for the rebellion that has led to the current war and Clifford’s impending death. In R2, King Richard is called by Bolingbroke to descend to the castle court, and responds, ‘Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaëton, / Wanting the manage of unruly jades’ (3.3.178–9). Richard positions himself as the ‘son’ who ‘glisters’ (or shines, glitters) like the Sun, but is not able to control the Sun-chariot’s formidable horses. This image is part of a network of allusions and representations in the second tetralogy that links monarchical rule to good horsemanship. Richard here undoes his own right to 331

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rule by admitting that unlike Bolingbroke he has not been able to rein in either his own passions or those of his subjects and so is now suffering a fall. Meanwhile, Bolingbroke (the better horseman who ultimately usurps even Richard’s beloved horse Barbary) rises to become more sun/son-like instead. (C) Watson (1984) discusses this network of sun imagery, including the significance of Phaëton references, in the second tetralogy. KR Philomel, Philomela. (A) In classical Greek myths, Philomel and her sister Procne were Greek princesses. Procne married Tereus, King of Thrace; during a visit to that country to see Procne, Philomel was raped by Tereus, who then cut out her tongue when she threatened to reveal his crime. Philomel weaves the story of her violation into a piece of tapestry and sends it to Procne. Ovid writes in the Metamorphoses that Procne is struck dumb herself by the sight of the tapestry: ‘She pondered it in silence and her tongue / could find no words to utter her despair; – / her grief and frenzy were too great for tears’ (6: 582–4). Procne takes revenge by killing her son with Tereus, boiling him and serving him to his father; only after the meal does she present Tereus with the boy’s severed head. Procne and Philomel flee Tereus, but are almost caught by him, saved at the last instant by the gods who transform Procne into a swallow and Philomel into a nightingale. Both because of her tapestry-weaving and because the nightingale is a songbird, Philomel is often a figure for artistic creativity as well as assaulted chastity. The nightingale has a complex, lilting song of chirps and trills – they are capable of making nearly ten times as many types of sounds as other birds, and the part of their brain responsible for sound is larger than it is in other birds. (B) Shakespeare uses the myth of Philomel in several ways. One of the fairies in MND simply uses Philomel as a substitute for the nightingale, singing ‘Philomel, with melody, / Sing in our sweet lullaby’ (2.2.13–14). The song, though, does reflect the threats the forest offers to the unwary, which seems to justify this allusion, especially since it is in the next moments that Oberon doses Titania with the love juice, leading her to fall in love with Bottom. Likewise, SON 102 seems more interested in Philomel as the nightingale who sings in summer rather than autumn (7), as is true of the speaker in PP who longs for the sun to rise: ‘While Philomela sits and sings, I sit and mark, / And wish her lays were tuned like the lark’ (14.17–18). LUC , however, casts Lucrece as a new Philomel. In Ovid, the abused sister accuses her attacker: [. . .] why dost thou from murdering me refrain? Would God thou had it done before this wicked rape. From hence Then should my soul most blessedly have gone without offence.

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But if the Gods do see this deed, and if the Gods I say Be ought, and in this wicked world bear any kind of sway And if with me all other things decay not, sure the day Will come that for this wickedness full dearly thou shalt pay. Yea I myself receiving shame thy doings will bewray. And if I may have power to come abroad, them blaze I will In open face of all the world. Or if thou keep me still As prisoner in these woods, my voice the very woods shall fill, And make the stones to understand. (Metamorphoses 1567: 6: 512–23) In the same fashion, albeit in Tarquin’s absence, Lucrece rants against her ravisher, lamenting the circumstances that allowed him to rape her, but deciding at least in the moment not to reveal her rape to her husband Collatine: ‘By this, lamenting Philomel had ended / The well-tuned warble of her nightly sorrow’ (LUC 1079–80). While these lines might simply refer to the passing of night into morning (the nightingale was believed to only sing at night), their ambiguous pronoun (who is the ‘her’ that warbles – the bird or the woman?) makes Lucrece a Roman version of the Greek princess. Later, still grieving the loss of her chastity, Lucrece directly addresses Philomel: ‘Come Philomel, that sing’st of ravishment, / Make thy sad grove in my dishevelled hair’ (1128–9). Thus, Shakespeare brings together psychic pain, music and by extension his own poetic voice, hinting that it is the first that is fundamental to the latter two. In CYM , another play about a woman whose chastity is threatened, Innogen has actually been reading the tale of Philomel when Iachimo creeps into her room as she sleeps. Iachimo enters, saying, ‘Our Tarquin thus / Did softly press the rushes ere he wakened / The chastity he wounded’ (2.2.12–14). However, he is invading Innogen’s room only to find something he can use to convince Posthumus that she has been unfaithful, and so in a perverse sense his identification with an actual rapist is a bit of grotesque fantasy ego-boosting. While in Innogen’s chamber, Iachimo finds her book: ‘She hath been reading late / The tale of Tereus: here the leaf’s turned down / Where Philomel gave up’ (2.2.44–6). The fact that Iachimo focuses on ‘the tale of Tereus’ (the rapist’s story, not the victim’s) and characterizes Philomel’s actions as ‘giving up’ also reveals his twisted nature. In TNK , Theseus refers to ‘two emulous Philomels’ (5.3.124) that he has heard trying to out-sing one another; in this case, the two Philomels are oddly, according to the logic of Theseus’s example, Palamon and Arcite, although two sisters also appear in the play (Hippolyta and Emilia, the latter in love with both young knights). Theseus’s point is

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that two nightingales cannot best one another, just as the two kinsmen are equals despite Palamon’s loss. Indeed, Emilia wishes ‘Were they metamorphosed / Both into one!’ (5.3.84–5) so that they need not contend for her hand. But the play in which Philomel’s story is both structuring principle and explicit influence is TIT , where Lavinia’s rape by Chiron and Demetrius goes one step further than Tereus’ of Philomel: they not only cut out her tongue, but also cut off her hands, denying her the access to the weaving that Philomel had to tell her story. Marcus, finding his mutilated niece, remarks on this: But sure some Tereus hath deflowered thee And, lest thou shouldst detect him, cut thy tongue. [. . .] Fair Philomela, why she but lost her tongue, And in a tedious sampler sewed her mind; But, lovely niece, that mean is cut from thee. A craftier Tereus, cousin, hast thou met, And he hath cut those pretty fingers off, That could have better sewed than Philomel. (2.3.26–7, 38–43) Lavinia is only able to convey the names of her rapists after pursuing young Lucius who is reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which she finds the tale of Philomel (4.1.47–9). Taking his cue from Ovid, Shakespeare has Titus kill Chiron and Demetrius, bake them in a pie and serve them to their mother Tamora as punishment to all three for their destruction of his family. Titus’s actions, like Procne’s in the myth, are designed to appal precisely because they violate the distinction between human and animal that ensures only the latter can become food. (C) Thompson (1978) reads references to Ovid’s Philomel in TIT and CYM comparatively, emphasizing the way Innogen’s scene with Cloten’s body reproduces Marcus’s speech after discovering Lavinia. Newman (1994) argues that it is the difference between Ovid and Shakespeare that accounts for Lucrece’s agency in LUC . Lugo (2007) argues that Shakespeare embraces the grotesque, gory elements in the Philomel tale in TIT ; Weber (2015) sees in TIT Shakespeare’s implication of his own artistry in the destructive logic of the Philomel tale. Waldron considers the non-human agency of metaphor itself in the relationship between TIT and Ovid. KR phoenix. (A) Mythological bird that regenerates cyclically, with each phoenix emerging from the ashes of its parent; only one phoenix exists at a time. Since the bird was associated with the sun, its death is often depicted as an explosion of flames. Classical accounts of the phoenix trace its geographical origins to Egypt; Pliny calls it a bird of Arabia (NH 10.2.3 [1940: 293]) which he says sports vivid multicoloured plumage. It is variously represented as the size of an eagle or a much larger bird. The phoenix was 334

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adopted as part of Christian iconography, representing the death and resurrection of Christ. Queen Elizabeth had her portrait painted by Nicholas Hilliard in 1575 wearing a jewelled phoenix pendant: since the phoenix was self-perpetuating, it could stand for chastity, as well as longevity (Pliny notes it is reputed to live for 540 years; NH 10.2.2.4 [1940: 295]), both aspects symbolically present in the portrait. (B) Cranmer presents the infant Elizabeth to King Henry in H8 with a speech that invokes the phoenix: [. . .] as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new create another heir As great in admiration as herself, So shall she leave her blessedness to one, When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness, Who from the sacred ashes of her honour Shall star-like rise as great in fame as she was And so stand fixed. (5.4.39–47) With this speech, Shakespeare magnifies Elizabeth’s reputation while affirming that King James I is the rightful heir of the peaceful and prosperous nation she has secured for him. Sir William Lucy, learning of Talbot and the other English nobles’ heroic deaths in 1H6, promises ‘from their ashes shall be reared / A phoenix that shall make all France afeard’ (4.4.204–5), and in 3H6, York, taken prisoner by the Queen and her company, promises ‘My ashes, as the phoenix, may bring forth / A bird that will revenge upon you all’ (1.4.35–6). Both implicate the phoenix in scenarios of revenge, hinting that in politics and war old battles are never ended, but endlessly self-renew. In very different fashion, ERR names the house of Antipholus of Ephesus ‘the Phoenix’ (1.2.75, 88; 2.2.11), signalling the comedy’s ultimate resurrection of Egeus’s family after it was divided and scattered following a shipwreck. Antonio’s ship in TN turns out to be named the Phoenix (5.1.57), a fact that is revealed at the moment the captain is about to be pardoned and most of the characters joined in marital harmony. The phoenix’s capacity for regeneration seems linked to its appearance in the list of ‘loves’ that Helen imagines Bertram will find in Paris: ‘A phoenix, a captain, and an enemy, / A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign’ (AWW 1.1.166–7). In contrast, the senator in TIM thinks that as others call in the money he owes, Timon will be stripped of his feathers so that he can’t be resurrected from his debts: ‘When every feather sticks in his own wing, / Lord Timon will be left a naked gull / Which flashes now a phoenix’ (2.1.30–2). In SON 19, the speaker catalogues Time’s terrible effect on living things, including ‘burn[ing] the long-lived Phoenix in her blood’ (4), against which he sets both his love and his verse; the phoenix here raises the stakes of time’s depredations, given its 500-year lifespan. Antonio uses the phoenix as a register for the impossible in TMP , saying, in reaction to the ethereal visions Prospero conjures, that he thinks them merely 335

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a puppet show: ‘Now I will believe [. . .] that in Arabia / There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix / At this hour reigning there’ (3.3.21–4). In TNK , Emilia associates the bird with perfumes (possibly because of its exotic origin) when she describes Flavina picking flowers to hold in her bosom ‘where phoenix-like / They died in perfume’ (1.3.70–1). In PHT , a verse published in Robert Chester’s poetry collection Love’s Martyr (1601), Shakespeare creates an extended allegory that features a (female) phoenix and a (male) turtledove whose love unites them, but who are ‘fled’, taking ‘constancy’ with them (22–3): So they loved as love in twain Had the essence but in one Two distincts, division none; Number there in love was slain. (25–8) The turtledove’s fidelity to his ‘queen’ (31) and the two birds’ impossible unity is lamented in this funeral elegy, which scholarship has variously proposed represents the nature of the Trinity in Roman Catholicism, neo-Platonic philosophy, mysticism, or (because of the gender of the two birds and the timing of the poem) Queen Elizabeth and her subject Sir John Salusbury, to whom the collection is dedicated (Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen AR3: 91–123). Shakespeare associates the phoenix with Arabia, where the bird supposedly dwelt according to Pliny: in ANT , Agrippa exclaims, ‘O Antony! O thou Arabian bird!’ (3.2.12), arguing with Enobarbus that Antony is superior to Caesar perhaps because he has survived near-death in his previous adventures. And in CYM , Iachimo is worried that Innogen will be as chaste as she is beautiful, a singular creature, ‘alone th’Arabian bird’ (1.6.17); if so, that will ensure he loses his bet with Posthumus regarding her virtue. (C) Bates (1955), Bradbrook (1955) and Garber (1984) discuss the bird imagery in PHT , including the allegorical role of the phoenix; Bishop (2009) finds PHT ’s birds are the vehicles for a metaphysics of personhood and character. KR pigeon. (A) Columba livia domestica is the domestic pigeon, a bird of the family Columbidae, which includes the dove. Pigeons were raised for food, both flesh and eggs; they were kept in dovecotes or dove-houses, common outbuildings on farms and estates. They were also hunted in the wild. (B) One of the pigeon’s most important functions was as a messenger – in TIT , Titus is eager to know whether he has received any letters via the pigeons the clown brings in a basket. Since it is the gods that Titus has been addressing with his messages attached to arrows, his hopes are unlikely to be answered. What is more, although the scene clearly has both the clown and Titus thinking of the pigeons as messengers – the clown 336

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quips that he is only the ‘carrier’ of his pigeons, ‘nothing else’ (4.3.86–7) – it is as likely that they are meant to be eaten, since he is taking them to use as a legal settlement. The clown then brings Saturninus Titus’s letter with his pigeons, angering the emperor and ending up sent to be hung. Hamlet touches on a bit of pigeon lore when he accuses himself of being ‘pigeon-livered’ and lacking the gall to kill Claudius (HAM 2.2.512): pigeons were thought to lack a gall bladder, and thus not to produce bile, the humour that produced anger. Celia and Rosalind likewise use the image of the bird feeding its young in their witty exchange: Celia: Rosalind: Celia: Rosalind:

Here comes Monsieur Le Beau. With his mouth full of news. Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young. Then shall we be news-crammed. (AYL 1.2.90–4)

Like doves, pigeons were associated with domestic happiness and love, so Touchstone jokes, ‘As the ox hath his bow, sir, the horse his curb and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling’ (3.3.73–5). The chain of animals here bestializes marriage, emphasizing its use merely as a means to avert sin by limiting sexual partners – thus, humans are like curbed, yoked, belled creatures. Of Boyet, a courtier to the Princess of France, Berowne remarks, ‘This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons peas / And utters it again when God doth please’ (LLL 5.2.315–16). Pigeons are mentioned in place of the doves that pull Venus’s chariot when Salarino describes the haste young men make to marry: ‘O, ten times faster Venus’ pigeons fly / To seal love’s bonds new made than they are wont / To keep obliged faith unfortified’ (MV 2.6.6–8). The shift in terminology may suggest that young men are naïve like pigeons, another word for simpleton (AR3: 256, n. 6), or it may simply emphathize with young men who dote on their loves more than older ones. Finally, there are the pigeons that are just food, as in 2H4 when Justice Shallow considers the culinary treats he will prepare for Falstaff: ‘Some pigeons, Davy, a couple of short-legged hens, a joint of mutton, and any pretty little tiny kickshaws, tell William Cook’ (5.1.24–6). In STM , Williamson and his wife Doll are irate that foreigners in the Lombard (French) community are taking advantage of them both by failing to pay for pigeons and for seizing chaste married women (1.17, 1.68–76), thus linking English control over foodstuffs with the theme of marital happiness. (C) Mandeville (1900: 79) describes the use of pigeons (culvers) as messengers bearing letters in the medieval Middle East. Fitzpatrick (2011: 331–2) discusses pigeons (and doves) as food in the Renaissance. KR pike. A large carnivorous fish, genus Esox, common in England and Northern Europe. Falstaff mentions the pike as a predator in 2H4 when he describes his grudge against 337

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Justice Shallow: ‘If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see not reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him’ (3.2.329–30). Falstaff here is analogous to the old pike who has the right to use his teeth (pike had large ones) to snap at Shallow. KR polecat (poulcat), fitchew. (A) A small mammal of the family Mustelidae, relative of the weasel and ferret as well as the otter, stoat and mink. The polecat, like its relatives, has a long body and shorter legs; polecats are generally black and brown with facial markings in white. Polecats are larger and stockier than some of their fellow mustelid species and are known for the ‘strong stinking savour’ (Topsell 1658: 172) from the secretions with which they mark their territory. Indeed, the name might be a corruption of ‘foulcat’. Polecats were known as vigorous predators on domestic species like chickens, and hunted both for that reason and for their luxurious pelts (although Topsell remarks that the skins were less prized because considered foul; 1658: 172). (B) Either of the animal’s names are most often used as insults or objects of disgust. When William tries to demonstrate his education in WIV , Mistress Quickly misunderstands his ‘Pulcher’ (beautiful) as ‘Polecats’, saying ‘[t]here are fairer things than polecats (4.1.23–4); later, Ford beats Falstaff, disguised as the Old Woman of Brentford, out of doors, calling him ‘you rag, you baggage, you polecat, you runnion’ (4.2.175). Mad Lear obsesses over Goneril and Regan’s betrayal, raging to Gloucester that though they were legitimately conceived they might as well have been bastards: ‘The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to’t with a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are centaurs, though women all above’ (LR 4.6.120–2). Here, fitchew is slang for a prostitute. In OTH , Iago invites Cassio to mock Bianca, his mistress and a courtesan, while Othello watches and imagines Cassio speaks of Desdemona. When Bianca herself arrives, Cassio remarks, ‘ ’Tis such another fitchew; marry, a perfumed one’ (4.1.145–6), alluding to both the animal’s strong odour and to its status as a code word for whore. (C) Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 437–8) discusses the animal’s use as an insult. KR pork. (A) The uncured meat of swine; pork derives from the French porc, as do other terms like beef or mutton used to refer to the meat of an animal rather than the animal itself. Pork was, and still is, one of the most widely consumed meats in the world; in Renaissance England and Europe, the animal’s popularity was partly due to the ease with which pigs breed and feed. They produce frequent large litters and consume – often scavenge – nearly anything. Pork was thus available to poorer households. The meat was taboo for Jews and Muslims (and for some sects of Christianity), and so represented a ready marker of religious difference. The animal’s omnivorousness, however, also made it an object of disgust even among those for whom its meat was acceptable. Pigs ‘eat also flesh’, notes Edward Topsell, ‘And it is found that Swine have 338

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not abstained from the flesh of men and children’ (1607: 667). Thomas Cogan in his The Haven of Health (1584) also worries that ‘the flesh of swine hath such a likeness unto man’s flesh both in savour and taste that some have eaten mans flesh in steede of pork’ (116). These fears could overlap with the blood libel, stories of Jewish sacrifices of Christians, especially children or babies, that were used to instigate violent antiSemitism: Jews’ dietary laws prohibiting pork thus made them targets for those who believed (paradoxically) that they consumed the bodies of Christians as part of their rituals. (B) The word pork is used only three times, all in MV , in relation to Jewish dietary laws. When Bassanio invites Shylock, who has just agreed to give him the money he wants Antonio to borrow for him, to continue their discussion over dinner, Shylock answers: Yes, to smell pork, to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into. I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you and so following. But I will not eat with you, drink with you nor pray with you. (1.3.30–4) Shylock claims that Jesus, referred to in early texts as a Nazarite, was a magician who could raise demons in the bodies of humans and animals; he thus interprets Mt. 8.28–4, in which Jesus casts devils into the bodies of swine who then drown in the sea, as evidence not of the divinity of Christ, but of Jesus’s sorcerous ability. This moment introduces a scene that is packed with allusions to the distinctions Christians and Jews draw between them, while at the same time introducing ideas about how much Shylock can be considered ‘kind’ or ‘kin’, ‘gentle’ or ‘gentile’. Antonio calls Shylock a devil (1.3.94), while Shylock greets Antonio as ‘the last man in our mouths’ (1.3.56) and argues for the value of interest by citing the example of Laban’s sheep (1.3.72–86) to defend ‘breeding’ money. Thus the reference to Jewish dietary laws regarding pork contributes to a number of the play’s themes and images: the circulation of the blood libel, associating Shylock with demonism and ritual slaughter and consumption of (Christian) human flesh; Christian rejection of usury, in which money is ‘bred’ out of nothing, seizing the prerogative of God; Christian conversion narratives and practices seeking to invite and incorporate new believers; and above all, the Jewish community’s – and Shylock’s – resistance to that kind of assimilation. Later in the play, the clown Lancelet Gobbo and Shylock’s daughter Jessica debate exactly the question of conversion. Jessica schemes to marry Lorenzo, and become a Christian, to escape her father’s strict control. Lancelet complains, ‘[W]e were Christians enow before, e’en as many as could well live one by another. This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs: If we grow all to be pork eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money’ (3.5.19–23). Perhaps inspired by his own underfed condition in Shylock’s service, the clown imagines a scarcity of bacon driven by Jewish 339

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conversions. The clown may see the world askew, but this insight is not without value: Jessica and Lorenzo’s marriage depends upon her father’s money being returned to wider circulation among Christians, both in her initial theft of Shylock’s jewels and ducats, as well as in the eventual seizure of his wealth and its gift to Lorenzo. When we see the married lovers together in Act 4, they trade tales of love gone horribly wrong: Troilus and Cressida, Dido and Aeneas, Pyramus and Thisbe, Medea and Jason – there could hardly be a worse roster of comparisons for their own circumstances. Turning Jessica into a pork-eater may not raise the price of pork, but it certainly puts her at risk, extracting her from her community and throwing her on the mercies of the proven intolerance of the play’s Christians. Meanwhile, Shylock’s forced conversion makes him yet another potential pork-eater, but not one likely to dine in commensal harmony anywhere in Venice. The lurking cannibalism in the play that is associated with pigs and pork cannot be ascribed only to Venice’s Jews when the city consumes and digests two Jews and their wealth in this fashion. (C) Malcolmson and Mastoris (1998) give a history of pigs in England that includes material on raising the animal for food. Fitzpatrick (2008) discusses Jewish dietary laws in Shakespeare and Marlowe. Goldstein (2013: 67–92; 2014) treats in depth the issues of diet, cannibalism and ethics in MV . KR porpentine, porcupine. (A) The porcupine, a large rodent having various arrangements of quills or spines on its body, tail and legs, depending on the genus. The porcupine most familiar to early modern Europeans is the crested porcupine (Hystrix cristata), which inhabits Southern Europe as well as parts of Africa, India and Asia. New World porcupines (family Erethizontidea), which were just becoming known in Europe in Shakespeare’s day, have many features in common with Old World porcupines (family Hystricidae). But the former are arboreal, the latter, largely terrestrial. The porcupine was said by classical writers to shoot its quills at an aggressor, as if they were arrows, but in fact the quills are pulled out of the porcupine when an aggressor comes too close and is pierced by them. The quills can then cause infections that may lead to death. (B) With some irony, the house of a courtesan in ERR is named the Porpentine (mentioned at 3.1.116, 3.2.172, 4.1.49 and 5.1.222, 276), to which Antipholus of Ephesus resorts to escape his prickly wife. Cartwright notes that Shakespeare would likely have known a Bankside inn (possibly a brothel) called the Porpentine (AR3: 210, n. 116). In a violent and hostile exchange in TRO , Ajax demands that Thersites tell him about the recent proclamation announcing a lottery to choose a Greek warrior to fight Hector. Thersites retorts, ‘Thou art proclaimed a fool, I think’ (2.1.23). The epithet in Ajax’s furious reply – ‘Do not, porcupine, do not. My fingers itch’ (2.1.24) – is apt; Thersites is the most satirically sharp-witted character of the play. As Joseph Hall observes, ‘The Satyre should be like the Porcupine, / That shoots sharp quilles out at each angry line’ (1598: 70). The porcupine’s quills are put to different metaphoric use in HAM , when the Ghost warns Hamlet that he could tell a tale that 340

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Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part And each particular hair to stand on end Like quills upon the fearful porpentine – (1.5.16–20) The Ghost speaks more truly than he realizes: the porcupine’s quills and spines are in fact an evolutionary adaptation of hair. Rather than ‘fearful’, Q1 and F have ‘fretful’, or ill-tempered, a qualifier perhaps more in keeping with the mistaken sense in the period that the porcupine is aggressive. The most vivid evocation of the porcupine in Shakespeare’s works occurs in 2H6, when York describes the new recruit to his cause, the ‘headstrong Kentishman, / John Cade of Ashford’ (3.1.355–6): In Ireland have I seen this stubborn Cade Oppose himself against a troop of kerns, And fought so long till that his thighs with darts Were almost like a sharp-quilled porpentine; And in the end, being rescued, I have seen Him caper upright like a wild Morisco, Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells. (3.1.359–65) Here Cade, a metaphoric porcupine, is the recipient rather than the donor of quills, and instead of being wounded by them, he is described by York as turning them into the props of a triumphant and warlike morris dance. Knowles (AR3: 253, n. 364) suggests that Will Kemp, famous for his morris dancing, played Cade. (C) Pliny is the source for the notion that the porcupine can shoot its quills as if they were arrows (1940: 89 [8.53]). For the House of Orléan’s adoption and eventual discarding of the porcupine as the French royal emblem between 1394 and 1515, see Hochner (2004). Marlowe includes a porcupine in Edward II (1594) as Gaveston expresses his contempt for a poor man who curses him: he is like a goose, says Gaveston, threatening to shoot his quills as if he were a porcupine (1997: 1.1.38–40). Momus, the god of satirical ridicule, enters wearing a wreath with ‘a porcupine in the forefront’ in Carew’s 1634 masque, Coelum Britannicum (1995: 97). Topsell (1658: 457) mentions the porcupine’s ‘ranck’ smell and lists what it likes to eat (apples, roots, tree bark and snails), which suggests that he had seen a living porcupine. Its quills may be used for toothpicks, he adds (458). Arab (2005: 7) observes that York’s description of Cade, who can dance even when wounded by arrows, emphasizes his almost superhuman physical strength, an attribute too often forgotten when rebel bodies are subsumed under the category of the Bahktinian carnivalesque. For Wolfson (2009: 766), the Ghost’s comparison of Hamlet’s hair to the porcupine’s quills comes close to inserting a comical

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element into the sublime. In a discussion of madness and subjectivity in Renaissance drama, Coddon (1989: 64–5) notes that the predicted effect on Hamlet’s hair, should the Ghost tell all he knows, is actually realized in Act 3, Scene 4, when Hamlet enters Gertrude’s closet. Shannon (2013: 145–6) points out that Conrad Gesner’s 1551 woodcut of the porcupine pays scrupulous attention to the variety and arrangement of quills on its body. KE porpoise, porpas. (A) A marine mammal (Phocoena phocoena) related to the dolphin, having a blunt snout and small dorsal fin. Its presence in the sea was regarded as the sign of an approaching tempest. (B) There is only one mention of the porpoise in Shakespeare’s works, when in PER three fishermen talk about the storm-battered ship they have just seen go down. Did I not say as much, asks the third Fisherman, ‘when I saw the porpoise, how he bounced and tumbled? They say they’re half fish, half flesh. A plague on them, they ne’er come but I look to be washed’ (2.1.23–6). (C) Tilley (1950: P483) reports the proverb, ‘The porpoise (dolphin) plays before a storm’. Mentz (2012) argues that the porpoise’s hybrid status, ‘half fish, half flesh’, unsettles the distinction between such normal categories as sea and land; hence its uncanny ability to predict weather. The porpoise’s name derives from L. porcus + piscis (‘pig-fish’) and indeed is called ‘Porcpisce’ in Jonson’s Eastward Ho! (1605: sig. E2v). The superstitious Sir Politic Would-be in Jonson’s Volpone has heard that ‘three porpoises [were] seen above the [London] Bridge’ (1999b: 2.1.40), a sighting that he finds portentous although he cannot say what it portends. Jonson may be alluding to a story reported in Stow’s Annales, that in 1606 ‘a great Porpus was taken alive at Westham’ (1615: 880; qtd. in Jonson 1999b: 133, n. 40, 46–7). KE prawn. (A) A decapod (ten-legged) crustacean resembling a shrimp but with slightly different physical attributes and which prefers brackish water to the saltwater where shrimp live. However, it is unclear whether early moderns made any distinction between the two species. (B) Hostess Mistress Quickly mentions a dish of prawns in 2H4 while accusing Falstaff of eating her ‘out of house and home’ (2.1.72), proposing marriage and kissing her, and taking money from her: ‘Did not goodwife Keech [. . .] come in then [. . .] to borrow a mess of vinegar, telling us she had a good dish of prawns, whereby thou didst desire to eat some, whereby I told thee they were ill for a green wound?’ she demands of the knight (2.1.92–7). Prawns here seem simply another sign of Falstaff’s unlimited appetite for all things, whether belonging to him or not. KR

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purr. (A) The low rumbling sound a cat makes when content. (B) The OED lists AWW as the first instance of this word: ‘Here is a purr of Fortune’s, sir, or of Fortune’s cat’ says the clown Lavatch, describing Lafew (5.2.18). Bevington (AR3: 408, n. 20) suggests the term is a ‘multiple pun’ that could include a male child, a piece of dung or the name for the jack in a card game. However, in LR , Edgar, pretending to be Poor Tom whom Lear appoints judge for his mock trial, babbles a rhyme about sheep and ends ‘Purr, the cat is grey’ (3.6.45). In this instance, Purr may be the name of a devil in Harsnett (Foakes AR3: 289, n. 45), but the context invokes the proverbial expression ‘In the dark, all cats are grey’ (Heywood 1546: B2r: ‘When all candles bee out all cattes be gray’), making it likely that Edgar is blending the idea of cats’ association with demons with a comment that hints at Lear’s self-blindness.

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Q quail. (A) A tiny game bird (Coturnix coturnix) resembling the much larger partridge. The early modern period inherited a number of tales about the quail from classical antiquity, among them, that quails are subject to the falling sickness (epilepsy) and that they feed on poisonous seeds. ‘Quail’ is also early modern slang for a prostitute, which may reflect the quail’s reputation for being lustful. (B) Thersites almost certainly means prostitutes when he says of Agamemnon that he is ‘an honest fellow enough, and one that loves quails, but he has not so much brain as earwax’ (TRO 5.1.50–2). Admitting to himself that his daemon is overpowered by Caesar’s, just as the Soothsayer had warned, Antony reflects on Caesar’s invariable success when the two of them engage in competition: ‘If we draw lots, he speeds; / His cocks do win the battle still of mine / When it is all to naught, and his quails ever / Beat mine, inhooped, at odds’ (ANT 2.3.34–7). Cock fights continue up to the present; not so ‘quail-tapping’ (ortygokopia), to which Antony may refer. Ortygokopia involved tapping the head of an opponent’s quail; if the quail then ran away, the tapper won the bet; if it remained where it stood, the quail’s owner would win the bet (Mynott 2018: 161). Cocks were ‘inhooped’, that is, kept in an enclosed area, while quails were usually placed on a board to leave them free to flee. Antony seems to mean that even if his quails were prevented from running away, he nonetheless would lose the bet, as if Caesar’s daemon is so powerful that it influences even the behaviour of animals. The verb ‘to quail’ – as in, most memorably, Pyramus’s cry to the Fates to ‘Quail, crush, conclude, and quell’ (MND 5.1.280) – is not related to the name of the bird. (C) Because they were thought to eat poisonous seeds, Romans, states Pliny (1940: 337 [10.33]), do not eat quails. Brachiano in John Webster’s The White Devil (1612) repeats this piece of lore, declaring that ‘your quails feed on poison’ (1978: 5.3.90–1), and decides against eating them. In fact, quails were sold in the early sixteenth century for the same price – threepence – as ducks or rabbits (Cocker and Mabey 2005: 168), indicating that they were valued as food. KE quill. (A) The shaft of a bird’s feather; alternatively, the hollow spines on a porcupine. Quills had a number of practical uses in the early modern world: they were turned into the plectrums for strumming musical instruments; they provided a straw-like tube to serve as a pipe; and when cut, split and hardened, they were used as writing instruments.

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(B) Considering the importance of this last function to Shakespeare’s work, quills make surprisingly few appearances in the plays and poems. SON 83 uses quill as a synecdoche for ‘a commonplace style of writing’ (AR3: 276, n. 7), while SON 85 refers to the ‘golden quill’ that other poets have used to record praises for the sonnet’s addressee, in contrast to the speaker’s less elaborate, but deeply felt admiration (3). Lucrece takes up the pen to record her thoughts after Tarquin has raped her, ‘hovering o’er the paper with her quill’ (LUC 1297), and petitioners in 2H6 plan to deliver their ‘supplications in the quill’ (1.3.3), meaning all at once. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells Hamlet that if he were to recount his experiences after death, the story would cause the listener’s hair to stand on end ‘[l]ike quills upon the fearful porpentine [porcupine]’ (HAM 1.5.20). Bach (2018: 43–50) discusses at length the use of bird quills for writing in the period. KR

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R ram. (A) Adult male sheep (a castrated ram is called a wether). (B) The term generally implies the animal’s use for breeding, and given the ram’s large horns, can extend to the spectre of cuckoldry, which Touchstone makes explicit in AYL when he catalogues the sins of the country: ‘That is another simple sin in you: to bring the ewes and the rams together and to offer to get your living by the copulation of cattle,’ he tells Corin, ‘to betray a she-lamb of a twelvemonth to a crooked-pated old cuckoldly ram’ (3.2.75–9). The speaker in PP 17 refers to his rams failing to ‘speed’ or flourish, linked to the fact that his ewes ‘breed not’ (17.1–2) – and indeed the poem goes on to blame all the other failures and lapses around him on the object of his unrequited love. Shylock introduces the story of Laban’s sheep to prove that making (or breeding) something out of nothing is simply good biblical husbandry: Jacob manipulated the generation of his ewes so that when they mated with his rams they produced pied lambs, which his wager with Laban guaranteed would belong to Jacob (MV 1.3.73–86). Antonio makes the connection, ‘is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ (1.3.91). While this reference to rams may not directly convey anxieties about racial difference, the potential for miscegenation lurks in the image of Jacob’s multicoloured flock and clearly informs Venice’s fears regarding Jews – and indeed, Jessica’s marriage bears out the potential reality of those fears. More direct is Iago’s description, intended to rouse Brabantio to horror and rage, of Othello: ‘an old black ram / Is tupping [Brabantio’s] white ewe’ (OTH 1.1.87–8). Here, the ram’s horns represent both its sexual virility and a version of that cuckoldry we saw in AYL – except that in this case, it is the father whose daughter is being stolen. Rams are the sign of Aries in the zodiac, which is how Marcus uses them in TIT when Titus and the Andronici shoot arrows into Saturninus’s court. When one of the arrows breaks something, the two joke that one of the clan has shot a horn off Taurus, who ‘gave Aries such a knock / That down fell both the Ram’s horns in the court’ (4.3.71–2). Florizell compares his courtship of Perdita to that of the gods who took on animal form to woo human women: he cites the case of Jupiter who became a bull and Neptune, who became ‘[a] ram and bleated’ (WT 4.4.29). In fact, Neptune changed himself into a ram and Theophane into a sheep to prevent others from having her. (C) Perrello (2017) connects OTH ’s fears of animality (and rams) to related fears about being overwhelmed by the transformative power of technology. KR 346

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rat. (A) A rodent belonging to the family Murinae, considerably larger than the mouse, which belongs to the same family. There are over 500 species of Old World rats and mice, but the omnivorous and ubiquitous brown rat (Rattus norvegicus), also called the common or Norway rat, is probably the rat that would have been most familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Like mice, rats are commensal with human beings, that is, they ‘share the table’ with people, spreading disease and damaging crops and property. Although most medical historians attribute the spread of plague (Yersinia pestis) to the fleas carried by the black rat (Rattus rattus), there is no mention in early modern texts of unusually large numbers of rats, ill or otherwise, during plague years. (B) For the most part, rats in Shakespeare’s works are assumed to be vile and noisome pests to be exterminated if possible. Thus, designating categories of people as ‘rats’ implies that their lives are negligible and worthless. Twice in COR the common people are called rats. First Menenius rebukes them for their sedition: ‘Rome and her rats are at the point of battle; / The one side must have bale’ (1.1.157–8). ‘Bale’, meaning injury or harm, has been seen by some editors as a misprint for ‘bane’ (AR3: 163, n. 158). Either term is appropriate, since in Menenius’s mind it is clear that the ‘rats’ will suffer severely, even to the point of death, in the event of civil war. His contempt for the people is surpassed only by that of Coriolanus. When news arrives that war with the Volsces is imminent, Coriolanus declares, ‘I am glad on’t. Then we shall ha’ means to vent / Our musty superfluity’ (1.1.220–1). His metaphor treats the rabble as grain mouldering in useless piles that Rome can get rid of by means of war. He then adapts the metaphor and turns the people into the vermin that eat the grain. Rescinding a Senator’s order to disperse the people, he says, ‘Nay, let them follow. / The Volsces have much corn. Take these rats thither / To gnaw their garners’ (1.1.243–5). Richard III, attempting to inspire his troops on the eve of battle, disparages Bolingbroke’s soldiers as ‘famished beggars’ (R3 5.3.329), who, ‘For want of means, poor rats, had hanged themselves’ (5.3.331). ‘Poor rats’ comes close to being an oxymoron: there may be a kind of pity in the expression, but there is also a sneer. If using the plural ‘rats’ for a group of people expresses contempt for them, using the singular ‘rat’ for a specific character raises the threat, or justifies the use, of violence. Asked why he insists on having his pound of ‘carrion flesh [rather] than to receive / Three thousand ducats’ (MV 4.1.40–1), Shylock refuses to answer but suggests that it is simply ‘my humour’ (4.2.42), or mood. Then he asks a chilling rhetorical question: ‘What if my house be troubled with a rat, / And I be pleased to give ten thousand ducats / To have it baned?’ (4.1.43–5). His ostensible point is that how he spends his money is his own business. But in the context of the bond, the question’s metaphorical import is clear: Shylock is saying that he has as much legal right to kill Antonio as he has to kill a rat in his house. Hamlet uses the epithet ‘rat’ as he kills Polonius: ‘How now! A rat! Dead for a ducat, dead!’ (HAM 3.4.22). Gertrude repeats Hamlet’s words when she tells Claudius what he has done: ‘In his lawless fit, / Behind the arras hearing something stir, / Whips out his rapier, cries “A rat, a rat!” / And in this brainish apprehension kills / The 347

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unseen good old man’ (4.1.8–12). The queen’s account is not quite accurate. Hamlet has not heard ‘something stir’; he has heard Polonius cry, ‘What ho! Help!’ (3.4.21). Perhaps Hamlet’s calling the king’s old counsellor a rat is so shocking that Gertrude can only understand it as ‘brainish apprehension’, that is, delusion, or perhaps she cannot admit the truth to Claudius that Hamlet deliberately and knowingly killed the old counsellor. In CYM , the confession that seals the Queen’s posthumous reputation as an evil stepmother is her admission to Cornelius that she intended to poison Innogen. He reports her words: ‘ “If Pisanio / Have”, said she, “given his mistress that confection / Which I gave him for cordial, she is served / As I would serve a rat” ’ (5.5.244–7). The word ‘rat’ points to the pun hiding in the Queen’s talk of serving: serving Innogen, i.e., giving her a cordial to drink, is the means to serve her, i.e., treat her, as vermin. The rhetorical violence (with its potential for actual violence) inherent in regarding another as a rat manifests itself in several of the plays as a preoccupation with ratsbane. The shepherd who claims to be the father of Joan (of Arc) curses his daughter comprehensively, wishing that ‘the milk, / Thy mother gave thee when thou suck’st her breast / Had been a little ratsbane for thy sake’ (1H6 5.3.27–9). In order to perform madness convincingly, Edgar in LR lists the ways in which ‘the foul fiend’ (3.4.50–1) has tormented him. Among them, the fiend has ‘set ratsbane by his porridge’ (3.4.54), presumably as a temptation to suicide. In MM , Claudio reflects on the self-destruction that follows dissolute and incontinent behaviour: ‘Our natures do pursue, / Like rats that ravin down their proper bane, / A thirsty evil, and when we drink, we die’ (MM 1.2.120–2). Claudio’s simile relies on the fact that the arsenic in ratsbane causes excessive thirst; death follows the rat’s extreme overconsumption of water. So, Claudio implies, lack of restraint (which mimics freedom) leads inevitably to death. As the narrator of The Faerie Queene remarks of Sir Calidore, the man who fails to control his desire feeds ‘on the bayt of his owne bane’ (Spenser 2001: 6.9.34). Falstaff includes a reference to ratsbane as he characteristically dramatizes his woes. In a diatribe against ‘security’, that is, legal guarantees against defaulting on a debt, he declares, ‘I had as lief they would put ratsbane in my mouth as offer to stop it with security’ (2H4 1.2.42–3). Based no doubt on human beings’ long and intimate knowledge of rats, a grim appreciation of their survival skills and even at times a certain dark humour are apparent in references to them in some of the plays. So unseaworthy was the ‘rotten carcass of a butt’ in which he and Miranda were put to sea, Prospero exclaims, that ‘the very rats / Instinctively have quit it’ (TMP 1.2.146, 147–8). Justice Shallow, hearing about the coming ‘fray’ between Doctor Caius and Sir Hugh, is nostalgic for his own youthful prowess: ‘I have seen the time, with my long sword, I would have made you [i.e., any] four tall fellows skip like rats’ (WIV 2.1.204–6). He refers perhaps to rats’ running and jumping about when they are trying to escape being killed. Although he owns several merchant vessels, Antonio’s ‘means are in supposition’, observes Shylock (MV 1.3.16), for ships are vulnerable to attack: ‘there be land rats, and water rats, water thieves, and land thieves – I mean pirates – and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks’ 348

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(1.3.21–3). As Drakakis observes (AR3: 204, n. 21–2), Shylock often explains his own metaphors, as he does here: rats are thieves and, more specifically, pirates – or pi-rats, for Shylock, as John Russell Brown suggests, is punning (AR2: 23, n. 22). When Rosalind comes upon trees decorated with verses praising her, she exclaims, ‘I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember’ (AYL 3.2.172–3). Pythagoras taught the transmigration of souls; Dusinberre (AR3: 249, n. 172–3, 173), admitting that this is one of Rosalind’s ‘most obscure’ jokes, suggests that ‘Irish rat’ and ‘berhymed’ allude to Ben Jonson’s declaration, after his Poetaster (1602) had received harsh reviews, that he could rhyme his detractors to death as the Irish do their rats. Mercutio slyly needles Tybalt, whom he calls ‘Prince of Cats’ (ROM 2.4.19) and ‘King of Cats’ (3.1.76), with a more derogatory epithet: ‘Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk?’ (3.1.74). Shortly afterwards, the dying Mercutio seizes upon the monstrous fact that an apparently insignificant wound may take a human life: ‘Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, a cat, to scratch a man to death!’ (ROM 3.1.102–3). Mercutio’s words are echoed in Lear’s anguished question to the dead Cordelia, ‘Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life / And thou no breath at all?’ (LR 5.3.305–6). In a few passages in Shakespeare’s works, the rat is not worthless and contemptible but something much worse. Edgar in the character of Poor Tom twice claims to violate the (Western) taboo against eating rats: ‘in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages [. . .] [Poor Tom] swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog’ (LR 3.4.128). The conjunction of ‘old’ and ‘ditch-dog’ implies that he speaks of eating rotten carcasses. Tom repeats the claim to have eaten rats in his brief verse, ‘But mice and rats and such small deer / Have been Tom’s food for seven long year’ (3.4.134–5). ‘Deer’ in this context has the obsolete meaning of ‘animal’. The First Witch in MAC announces that she will go to Aleppo to find the husband of the sailor’s wife who had refused to hand over her chestnuts: ‘in a sieve I’ll thither sail, / And like a rat without a tail, / I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do’ (1.3.8–10). Despite the use of ‘like’ in the chant, as though she is providing a simile, Clark and Mason (AR3: 137, n. 9) report that witches were believed to be able to turn themselves into tailless rats. Perhaps the most politically sinister allusion to the rat in Shakespeare’s works occurs in Kent’s condemnation of the courtier Oswald, whom Kent regards as a slave, that is, a sycophant and yes-man who never tries to check his master’s unhealthy inclinations. ‘Such smiling rogues as these’, Kent declares, ‘Like rats oft bite the holy cords atwain / Which are too intrince t’unloose’ (LR 2.2.71–3). Servants like Oswald, Kent charges, destroy the intricate and complicated balance between respect and honest criticism that makes human community possible. (C) It is possible that Jonson recalls Kent’s accusation when in The Staple of News (1625) the character Fitton is called ‘a court rat’, an epithet that identifies him as ambitious and self-serving to the detriment of others (1988: 4.4.143). Rats and mice are not distinguished in classical antiquity; whether they are distinguished in the Bible is not clear. The mouse (Heb. akbar) is listed among unclean animals at Lev. 11.29. The anaqah mentioned at Lev. 11.30 is translated ‘rat’ in the Geneva Bible, but ‘hedgehog’ in the Bishops Bible, ‘ferret’ in the King James Version, and ‘gecko’ in most 349

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modern translations. In Europe, the distinction between rats and mice was made from at least the ninth century (see Zinsser 1965: 143–4). For a summary of debates about the rat–flea–human transmission of plague, see Naphy and Spicer (2000). Gadd (1997) points out that the French town of Arras was famously associated with rats in the early modern period, which partially explains Hamlet’s cry, ‘A rat, a rat’, as he stabs Polonius, hidden behind the arras. Pfister (2009) discusses Coriolanus’s animal epithets for the rabble (‘rats’) in terms not of class distinctions but of ontological uncertainty about humans, animals and monsters. L. Cole (2010) argues that rats and witches are culturally homologous in the early modern period: both were seen as agents of pestilence, a concept that embraces disease, putrid air, famine and animal infestations. Streete (2018) argues that Claudio’s simile, ‘Like rats that ravin down their proper bane’, reworks a passage from Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, performed a few months before MM . KE raven. (A) The largest member of the crow family (Corvus corax), present throughout the northern hemisphere. Due to its black feathers, hoarse cry and preference for eating carrion (including human bodies, especially the eyes), the raven has been regarded since antiquity as a bird of ill omen, a portent of calamity, illness and death. This ominous reputation, however, exists alongside widespread acknowledgement of the raven’s intelligence and resourcefulness. Early modern city dwellers valued ravens as scavengers and street cleaners. The legend that England will not fall as long as there are ravens in the Tower of London emerged only in the twentieth century. (B) The most rhetorically useful feature of the Shakespearean raven is its blackness. Longing for her new husband to come to her, Juliet soliloquizes, ‘come, Romeo, come, thou day in night, / For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night / Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back’ (ROM 3.2.17–19). ‘Day in night’ and white upon black are images locating Juliet’s language in the tradition of Petrarchan poetry, typically employed by the (male) lover to express the emotional turmoil of being in love. Here, however, the usually silent mistress herself employs Petrarchan conventions. Several lines later, when she learns that her husband has killed her cousin, Juliet’s language relies on paradoxes that perfectly capture the terrible mingling of love and hate. She calls Romeo ‘[b]eautiful tyrant, fiend angelical, / Dove-feathered raven, wolvish-ravening lamb’ (3.2.75–6). She might have called him a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Instead, she calls him a lamb who ravens like a wolf. Her expression avoids both the cliché and the implication that Romeo is fierce and hypocritical by nature, for a ravening lamb acts against its nature. ‘Ravening’, moreover, plays on an assumed etymological connection to ‘raven’, further diminishing the impact of ‘wolvish’. It is apparent, in short, that Juliet’s love for Romeo has already won out over her hatred of what he has done. In TN , the image of the dove-feathered raven is applied to Oliva. Angry that she loves Cesario, Orsino vows that he will in some unspecified way sacrifice ‘the lamb that I do love [i.e., Cesario] / To spite a raven’s heart within a dove’ (TN 5.1.126–7). He uses 350

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Petrarchan paradox here to condemn his would-be mistress. Because she loves another, he reasons, her beauty must be a cover for cruelty. Under the influence of Puck’s drug, Lysander declares that he no longer cares for Hermia, a brunette, but is now in love with the blonde Helena: ‘Who will not change a raven for a dove?’ (MND 2.2.118), he asks. His question is wholly rhetorical: in the Petrarchan tradition, the ideal mistress is invariably blonde. But the different cultural connotations of ‘dove’ and ‘raven’ besmirch Hermia’s character as well as her complexion. In 2H6, Queen Margaret demands, in response to the king’s protestation that Gloucester is as harmless as a dove, ‘Seems he a dove? His feathers are but borrowed, / For he’s disposed as the hateful raven. Is he a lamb? His skin is surely lent him, / For he’s inclined as is the ravenous wolves’ (3.1.75–6). Just as the etymological connection between ‘raven’ and ‘ravening’ reinforces Juliet’s anguish, so that between ‘raven’ and ‘ravenous’ reinforces Margaret’s fear. The charge of borrowing the feathers of a more colourful bird, for purposes of deception, self-aggrandizement, or plagiarism, goes back to antiquity, to Aesop’s fable about a crow dressed in the feathers of other birds (Aesop 2002: 157) and to one of Horace’s epistles, in which he compares the poet Celsus to a crow in stolen feathers (1926: 273 [1.3.18–20]). Shakespeare himself is accused by a contemporary of being a ‘crow, beautified’ with others’ feathers (Greene 1592a: sig. F2v). The speaker of SON 127 insists that ‘black’ now counts as ‘fair’, playing with the fact that ‘fair’ means both beautiful and blonde. Moreover, he adds, fairness has acquired the reputation of falseness. ‘Therefore’, the speaker declares, ‘my mistress’ eyes are raven black’ (9). ‘Therefore’ is surprising. Has the speaker chosen his mistress because she has dark eyes? Has she herself chosen her dark eyes? Does his verbal portrait simply endow her with dark eyes? ‘Raven black’ introduces further uncertainty. Is it meant to be high praise, since black is the new fair? Or is it meant to be a warning, since ravens bode ill? These ambiguities are not resolved. When he overhears Dumaine praise Katherine’s amber-coloured hair – so beautiful, says Dumaine, that it makes amber (i.e., fossilised resin) look ‘foul’ – Berowne plays on the homophone ‘foul/fowl’ and comments, ‘An amber-coloured raven was well-noted’ (LLL 4.3.85). His wit is aimed at Dumaine’s besotted readiness to see his ‘dark lady’ as fair. In TNK , Palamon’s raven-coloured hair may hint at his ultimate victory. He is said by the messenger to have fire in his eyes and to look like an angry lion, but it is his hair that receives most attention: ‘His hair hangs long behind him, black and shining / Like ravens’ wings’ (TNK 4.2.83–4), reports the messenger. The colour of Palamon’s hair links him subtly to Arcite’s horse – ‘a black one, owing / Not a hair-worth of white’ (5.4.50–1) – which is responsible for his rider’s death, a death that ultimately allows Palamon to marry Emilia. The blackness of the raven is put to more sinister uses in relation to Aaron the Moor in TIT. When they accidentally intrude upon Tamora’s tryst with Aaron, Lavinia says to Bassianus, ‘I pray you, let us hence, / And let her joy her raven-coloured love’ (2.2.82–3). Here the evil reputation of the raven is fully marshalled to express Lavinia’s scorn both for Tamora’s adultery and for her choice of lover. Her invocation of the raven reverberates in the scene, first when Tamora invents a story to tell Chiron and Demetrius. Lavinia and 351

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Bassianus enticed me here to this ghastly place in order to harm me, she lies – here, where ‘never shines the sun’, where ‘nothing breeds / Unless the nightly owl or fatal raven’ (2.2.96–7). The ominous raven appears again when Lavinia begs Chiron (who, she prays, does not share his mother’s cruelty) to intercede with Tamora to show pity. To Chiron’s sarcastic ‘What, wouldst thou have me prove myself a bastard?’ (2.2.148), Lavinia replies, ‘ ’Tis true, the raven doth not hatch a lark’ (2.2.149), thus insulting Tamora even as she pleads for mercy. Lavinia then recalls or, rather, embroiders another tale about ravens: ‘Some say that ravens foster forlorn children / The whilst their own birds famish in their nests. / O be to me, though thy hard heart say no, / Nothing so kind, but something pitiful’ (2.2.153–6). In her desperate attempt to save her life, Lavinia exaggerates the kindness (i.e., charity) of the ravens that fed the prophet Elijah (1 Kgs 17), even as she plays on another meaning of ‘kind’ (i.e., the inherent nature of a category of creature). If you cannot act in kind with ravens and show kindness, she pleads, then at least show pity. What may be seen as the raven sequence in TIT is completed when Titus hears from Aaron that the emperor has agreed to accept Titus’s own right hand in exchange for the life of his sons. With terrible irony, Titus thanks Aaron, apparently alluding to his enemy’s skin colour: ‘O gentle Aaron! / Did ever raven sing so like a lark / That gives sweet tidings of the sun’s uprise?’ (3.1.158–60). Thinking not of Aaron’s raven-coloured skin but of his raven’s heart might have taught Titus to distrust the Moor’s sweet tidings. The raven’s much-lauded foretelling of dire events is tinged with irony in several plays. When she hears the ‘great news’ that Duncan is coming to their castle for the night, Lady Macbeth observes in soliloquy, ‘The raven himself is hoarse / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my battlements’ (MAC 1.5.38–40). The raven does not so much prophesy as confirm a murder that Lady Macbeth has already imagined. In HAM , as the players present the ‘Mousetrap’, the prince urges Lucianus to action: ‘Come, “the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge” ’ (HAM 3.2.246–7). Hamlet is paraphrasing a line from The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1591), which Shakespeare’s company had in repertoire (AR3: 315, n. 247). In the scene from which the line is taken, Richard III is haunted on the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field by creatures and ghosts calling for revenge. Hamlet’s choice of quotation from the earlier play reveals that his staging ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ – which is not itself about revenge – plays a part in his plans for revenge against Claudius. By ‘the croaking raven’, that is, Hamlet may refer to himself. In OTH , tormented by Iago’s reminder that the strawberry-embroidered handkerchief is now in Michael Cassio’s possession, Othello cries, ‘O, it comes o’er my memory / As doth the raven o’er the infectious house / Boding to all’ (OTH 4.1.20–2). He seems to mean that the raven’s presence, like Iago’s reminder, points to coming misery. In fact, it is not the raven’s presence but the ‘infectious house’ itself that points to what experience has shown to be true, that plague spreads from one household to another, just as Iago’s ‘reminder’ serves to reinforce the effect of the fiction with which he has already corrupted Othello. Infection, in short, is already doing the work that the raven seems to foretell. 352

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In other plays, doubts about the raven’s prophetic powers are less subtly expressed. The song sung at Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding in TNK invites all melodious and fair birds to come and bless the bride and bridegroom. In contrast, The crow, the sland’rous cuckoo, nor The boding raven, nor chough hoar, Nor chatt’ring ’pie, May on our bride-house perch or sing, Or with them any discord bring, But from it fly. (1.1.19–24) Here, ‘boding raven’, like ‘chattering magpie’, is a clichéd epithet with little imaginative charge. In contrast, the birds of ill-omen invoked by Henry VI when he denounces Richard of Gloucester are freshly imagined, and chilling. When you were born, Henry charges, The night-crow cried, aboding luckless time; Dogs howled; and hideous tempests shook down trees; The raven rooked her on the chimney’s top; And chatt’ring pies in dismal discords sung. (3H6 5.6.45–8) The verbs in this passage vividly convey a sense of impending doom. ‘Aboding’ belongs not to the raven but to the mysterious night-crow, and ‘aboding’, that is, ‘boding’, has as its object ‘luckless time’. The raven itself does not bode but rooks, or rucks, meaning that it huddles in misery. In TRO , Thersites empties ‘bode’ of fearsomeness, using it in a darkly comic manner. If he were to encounter Diomedes, Thersites declares, ‘I would croak like a raven; I would bode, I would bode’ (TRO 5.2.197–8). ‘Bode’ suggests that he wishes to induce superstitious fear in Diomedes, for he is certainly incapable of inducing physical fear in the mighty soldier. In a tone as ironically understated as Thersites’, Ulysses earlier in the play notes that when Ajax criticizes Achilles for being unsociable, it is as if ‘[t]he raven chides blackness’ (2.3.208), or the pot calls the kettle black. Hotspur voices scepticism about any creature having knowledge of coming events when he admits that Glendower angers him by talking ‘of a dragon and a finless fish, / A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven, / A couching lion and a ramping cat’ (1H4 3.1.147–9). A moulten raven is one that has moulted, and what it signifies is not clear; Hotspur regards it, in any case, as merely ‘a deal of skimble-skamble stuff’ (3.1.150). The gathering of ravens and other corvids at the scene of a battle, a phenomenon noted since antiquity (see Mynott 2018: 173–4), is not a portent but a sure sign that there will be plentiful feasting for carrion-eaters. In JC , Cassius comments superstitiously on the departure of the eagles that had accompanied the army.

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And in their steads do ravens, crows and kites Fly o’er our heads and downward look on us As we were sickly prey: their shadows seem A canopy most fatal, under which Our army lies, ready to give up the ghost. (5.1.84–8) Whether ravens do in fact gather before a battle is debatable, although the Bastard in JN suggests that if they do, they are awaiting rather than foretelling what experience has taught is inevitable. Foreign and domestic opportunists who hope to seize power after the death of the king, says the Bastard, wait ‘[a]s doth a raven on a sick-fallen beast’ (4 3.153). The queens who beseech Theseus to declare war on Creon in TNK describe in horrifying detail what has happened to the bodies of their lords: they ‘endure / The beaks of ravens, talons of the kites / And pecks of crows, in the foul fields of Thebes’, so that the stench of rotting corpses ‘infects the winds’ (TNK 1.1.40–2, 46). In E3, on the eve of battle, the French Prince Philip reports to his father that ‘[a] flight of ugly ravens / Do croak and hover o’er our soldiers’ heads’ – so many, that they have ‘made at noon a night unnatural’ (13.28–9, 34). This omen has terrified the soldiers, Philip warns. They are right, as Spenser’s Cymochles puts it in The Faerie Queene, to fear being ‘entombed in the raven or the kight’ (2001: 2.8.16). King John admits in an aside that he now remembers that Prince Charles had reported the prophecy of an ‘aged hermit’: ‘ “When feathered fowl shall make thine army tremble [. . .] that shall be the hapless, dreadful day” ’ (JN 11.67–8, 71). But playing on the assumed linguistic kinship of ‘raven’ and ‘ravenous’, the king orders Philip to encourage the soldiers by offering them an alternative interpretation of the ravens’ behaviour. ‘Tell them’, he commands, the ravens, seeing them in arms, So many fair against a famished few, Come but to dine upon their handiwork And prey upon the carrion that they kill, For when we see a horse laid down to die, Although not dead, the ravenous birds Sit watching the departure of his life; Even so these ravens for the carcasses Of those poor English that are marked to die Hover about, and if they [the ravens] cry to us, ’Tis but for meat that we must kill for them. (13.42–52) The ravens’ prediction of battlefield dead is not at issue; the question is merely which side will furnish the most lavish banquet for the foul fowls. In marked contrast to the raven as a devourer of the dead is its biblical representation as a nourisher of the forlorn and destitute. Antigonus, having been commanded by Leontes to expose the infant Perdita, prays, ‘Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens / To 354

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be thy nurses’ (WT 2.3.184–5), just as God instructed the ravens to feed Elijah. Pistol alludes to the raven’s care for its chicks when the aging Falstaff declares that he will do whatever is necessary to fill his purse. ‘Young ravens must have food’, responds Pistol with more than a little irony (WIV 1.3.32). Melchiori (AR3: 147, n. 32) finds in Pistol’s reply an allusion to Psalm 147.9 (The Lord ‘giveth to beastes their fode: and to the yong ravens that crye’, GNV) and to the proverb, ‘Small birds must have meat’ (Tilley 1950: B397). In AYL , Psalm 147.9 is merged with Luke 12.24 (‘Consider the ravens: for they nether sowe nor reape [. . .] yet God fedeth them’, GNV), when Adam offers his life’s savings to Orlando and throws himself on God’s mercy: ‘He that doth the ravens feed, / Yea, providently caters for the sparrows, / Be comfort to my age’ (AYL 2.3.43–5). Other features of the raven less renowned than its blackness, prophetic insight and carrion-eating receive passing comment in Shakespeare’s works. Lucrece grieves for a future ‘[c]ancelled’ (LUC 934) by Tarquin’s rape and asks why Time has not undertaken its legitimate duties, as, for instance, ‘To pluck the quills from ancient ravens’ wings’ (949). Early modern emblem books, as ancient Egyptians had done (Rowland 1978: 148), represent the raven as a symbol of longevity. There may be a naturalistic basis for this symbolism; ravens are indeed long-lived birds. It is said, for instance, that one of the ravens in the Tower of London lived over forty years (Cocker and Maber 2005: 428). Lucrece means that Time’s proper job is to oversee the slow denuding of the body as it ages. In one of his many creative imprecations, Caliban curses Prospero and Miranda: ‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed / With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen / Drop on you both’ (1.2.322–4). Why a raven’s feather? Vaughan and Vaughan (AR3: 189, n. 258) observe that ‘Sycorax’ incorporates the raven’s name, corax; moreover, two of the classical witches (Circe and Medea) on whom Sycorax may be modelled were said to be from Colchis, homeland of the Coraxi tribe. As Iachimo hides in a trunk in Innogen’s bedroom, he prays for morning to come quickly: ‘Swift, swift, you dragons of the night, that dawning / May bare the raven’s eye. I lodge in fear’ (CYM 2.2.48–9). Dragons were said in classical antiquity to draw the carriage of the moon goddess, Cynthia, across the sky. Wayne (AR3: 203, n. 48–9) finds some evidence that ravens were supposed to sleep with their faces towards the east, so that the rising sun would wake them. The point here is that Iachimo’s invocation of the dawn is both rhetorically complex and sinister, appropriate for his dark and complicated plan to defame Innogen. The figurative raven’s croak in 2H6 sucks vitality from the hearer. When Henry VI swoons, having heard from Suffolk that Gloucester is dead, Suffolk offers consoling words: ‘Comfort, my sovereign! Gracious Henry, comfort!’ (2H6 3.2.38). Henry reacts with fury, knowing that Suffolk is Gloucester’s enemy. ‘What, doth my Lord of Suffolk comfort me? / Came he right now to sing a raven’s note, / Whose dismal tune bereft my vital powers’? (3.2.39–41). Henry means that Suffolk’s ‘tune’, like the raven’s, signifies not comfort but discomfort, reminding the king not only of Gloucester’s death, but rendering the king himself death-like in his grief. The raven has a ghostly presence in several of the history plays in the form of the name ‘Ravenspur’ or ‘Ravenspurgh’, now called Spurn Head. It is mentioned at 3H6 4.7.8; R2 2.1.296, 2.2.51, 2.3.9, 31, 35; and 1H4 1.3.245, 3.2.95 and 4.3.77. A great 355

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deal of confusion has surrounded Shakespeare’s ‘Ravenspur/gh’, which was long misidentified with the village seaport of Ravenser or Ravenser Odd, lost to the sea in the Middle Ages. However, it is now clear that ‘Ravenspur’ is not the village seaport but the spit of land in the Humber estuary on which Henry Bolingbroke landed to begin his quest for the English throne. (The ‘spurn’ in the modern name, probably from OE spora, spura, means ‘spur’.) The raven element in the name is probably due to the importance of the raven in Norse mythology. (C) Classical cultures admired the raven for its mimicry and its ability to foretell events, for which it was considered the bird of Apollo (Mynott 2018: 147–8, 255–6; Shemesh 2018: 206; Aelian 1958–9: 1.69 [1.48]). Unlike the dove, the raven sent out by Noah after the Flood does not return (Gen. 8.6–7), and as punishment, according to Jewish folklore, its originally white feathers were turned black (Rowland 1978: 145–6). Tilley records the proverb, ‘The croaking raven bodes misfortune (death)’ (1950: R33). In The Jew of Malta, as he curses the Christians who are tormenting him, Barabas compares himself to ‘the sad presaging raven that tolls / The sick man’s passport in her hollow beak, / And in the shadow of the silent night / Doth shake contagion from her sable wings’ (Marlowe 1994: 2.1.1–4). In The Ravens Almanacke (1609a), however, Dekker mocks what he sees as superstitious belief in presages of the future. For the role of ravens and kites as scavengers and cleansers of early modern towns, see Thomas (1983: 274). Harting (1871: 99–109) surveys references to ravens in Shakespeare’s works. Cocker and Mabey (2005: 423–8) provide a rich account of the raven’s long and intimate relationship with human communities in Britain. The fact that there are over 400 place names in Britain that incorporate ‘raven’ – many of them of Norse derivation – attests to the duration of that relationship. The raven (hrafen) was sacred to Odin; and the Vikings carried a raven banner on their warships, or, as Stow puts it in a marginal annotation, ‘The Ensigne of the Danes was a Raven’ (1580: 123). Moore (2002) provides a descriptive list and analysis of British place names associated with ravens. See Monsarrat (1998) for discussion of Shakespeare’s ‘Ravenspurgh’. Estill (2012) argues in favour of a seventeenth-century emendation changing ‘the raven rooked’ to ‘the raven croaked’ in 3H6. D. Brown (2019) argues that Lavinia’s reference to ravens fostering children assumes the black family is ‘natural but non-human’ (116). KE rhinoceros. (A) A general name (meaning ‘nose horn’) for any of the five species of large, herbivorous mammals belonging to the ancient family Rhinocerotidae. The two African species, the black rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis) and the white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simu), have two horns; Indian, Javan and Sumatran rhinoceroses have one horn. All species now face extinction in the wild. Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have taken their notion of what the beast looked like from a widely copied woodcut of 1515 by Albrecht Dürer, who had never seen a living rhinoceros. The woodcut makes the rhinoceros appear to be armour-plated and helped put an end to claims that it was the unicorn of legend. 356

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Figure 9 Rhinoceros, 1515, by Albrecht Dürer, woodcut. Creative Commons: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albrecht_D%C3%BCrer_-_The_Rhinoceros_-_1993.9_-_Cleveland_ Museum_of_Art.tif.

(B) The influence of Dürer’s famous image is reflected in the sole reference to the rhinoceros in Shakespeare’s works. It appears in a list of fierce animals summoned by Macbeth as he confronts the appaling presence of Banquo’s ghost: Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, The armed rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger, Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble. [. . .] (MAC 3.4.98–101) The adjective ‘armed’ has the now obsolete sense of being fitted with armour, as in Spenser’s description in The Faerie Queene of ‘[a] faithlesse Sarazin all armed to point’ (2001: 1.2.13). He would have faced, undaunted, the most terrible beasts known to humankind, Macbeth exclaims, but the ghost that only he can see reduces him to the trembling state of ‘[t]he baby of a girl’ (3.4.104). (C) Uncertainty in Shakespeare’s day about the relationship between the unicorn and the rhinoceros and other monoceroses or one-horned beasts mentioned in classical literature 357

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endured for centuries. Pliny and Aristotle seem to know of the Indian or Sumatran rhinoceros, which has one nose horn, but in one of his epigrams, Martial mentions the rhinoceros’s two horns. (This disagreement may be responsible for Dürer’s inclusion of a tiny second horn between the shoulders of his rhinoceros.) See K. Edwards (2008b) for the untangling in the early modern period of the complicated terminology and descriptions of the rhinoceros inherited from the ancient world. In the Bible, Hebrew reem, usually now translated as ‘ox’, ‘ram’ or ‘bull’, was translated as ‘unicorn’ in most early modern Bibles, most notably at Job 39.9–10. Dürer’s woodcut was based on the drawing of a live rhinoceros made by the printer Valentine Ferdinand, who had seen the beast in Lisbon before it was shipped to Rome as a present for the Pope. (It did not reach Rome; it drowned en route.) Dürer’s rendering was preferred long after images based on actual rhinoceroses became available. For the woodcut and its long afterlife, see F. Cole (1973) and Eisler (1991: 269–74). Topsell (1658: 460) calls the rhinoceros ‘the second wonder in nature’ (after the elephant), and despite its ‘outward shape, quantity and greatness’, praises it for its ‘disposition and mildeness’. A live rhinoceros was not brought to England until 1684; John Evelyn describes it as looking like ‘a huge enormous Swine’, but he confirms Dürer’s representation of its ‘lappets of stiff skin [. . .] like a Target [shield] of coate of maile, loricated [plated] like armour’ (1955: 4.390). KE robin, ruddock. (A) The robin (Erithacus rubecula), also called robin redbreast, is a small bird of the Muscicapidoe family (flycatchers) with mostly brown or gray plumage and orange face and chest feathers. Because of its red breast, the bird is sometimes called a ruddock or ruddy. English folklore associates the bird’s red breast with Christian themes: either the bird was touched by Christ’s blood while comforting him on the cross, or it was burned while aiding souls in Purgatory (de Vries 1974: 388). The robin was also believed to cover the faces of the dead with moss or flowers (de Vries 1974: 389). (B) Hotspur in 1H4 refers to the bird when teasing his wife about refusing to sing, saying that it’s a good thing she won’t or she’d ‘turn tailor or be redbreast teacher’ (3.1.255–6), meaning having her sing would encourage her to imagine herself talented enough to teach a bird. Speed knows Valentine is in love because he ‘relish[es] a lovesong, like a robin redbreast’ (TGV 2.1.18), referring to the fact that the robin’s song is heard mainly while the birds are mating in spring. When Belarius’s sons think they have found Innogen, who is disguised as Fidele, dead, they call her a ‘bird’ (CYM 4.2.196) and Arviragus promises to strew her grave with flowers like a robin: ‘The ruddock would / With charitable bill [. . .] bring thee all this, / Yea and furred moss besides’ (4.2.223–7). KR roe. (A) A common species of deer, Capreolus capreolus, with branching antlers like a hart, but much smaller. Roe deer-skin leather, used for making gloves, was especially soft, and known as cheverel or cheveril, from the French chevreuil. (B) Thus a ‘cheverel conscience’ is soft and pliable (H8 2.3.32), and easily turned inside out (TN 3.1.12; ROM 2.4.81–2). The deer itself was known for its speed when 358

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hunted: Topsell comments several times on its ‘fleetness’ and ‘quickness’ (1658: 91). The Lord’s servants in the Induction of SHR tell Sly his greyhounds are ‘fleeter than the roe’ (Ind. 2.46), and Adonis is weakened by Venus ‘like the fleet-foot roe that’s tired with chasing’ (VEN 561). The implicit effeminization of Adonis in this comparison is compounded when the goddess advises him not to chase the boar, but to hunt ‘the roe which no encounter dare’ (676). KR roe, caviar. (A) The eggs and/or sperm of a fish: the term could refer to generative parts of the female (hard roe) or the male (soft roe). (B) Mercutio describes Romeo as being ‘[w]ithout his roe, like a dried herring. O flesh, flesh, how are thou fishified!’ (ROM 2.4.37–8). A herring was proverbially called lean after spawning (Tilley 1950: H447); thus Mercutio assumes Romeo has been having sex all night with Rosaline, leaving him spent and empty of seed. Thersites deplores the ‘transformation of Jupiter’, or Menelaus, from ‘bull’ to an ass by being cuckolded: he would, he insists, rather be a ‘herring without a roe’ than Menelaus (TRO 5.1.52, 53, 60). Caviar is the roe of the sturgeon, a delicacy at English banquets since the Middle Ages. Hamlet mentions that he once saw the First Player give a speech that was ‘caviare to the general’ (HAM 2.2.374–5), meaning it was not fully appreciated by the ordinary folk who saw it. The spelling of the word varies, printed either as seen here or as ‘caviary’ since the pronunciation would have divided the word into four syllables. KR rook. (A) The bird Corvus frugilegus is a member of the corvid family, in essence a crow with the same glossy black plumage but with white feathers on its face. Unlike crows, which are solitary, rooks flock in groups, nesting in the tops of trees; groups of nests are called rookeries. (B) Holofernes as Ver includes rooks in his song of spring, ‘When turtles tread and rooks and daws, / And maidens bleach their summer smocks, / The cuckoo then, on every tree, / Mocks married men’ (LLL 5.2.893–6). The courting behaviour of rooks might be behind their appearance here, given the sexual meaning of these lines: male rooks sometimes mob a female to steal her from her chosen mate. The rooks that appear in MAC are noted as part of ill omens: Macbeth mentions them as birds used in augury (3.4.123), and when he invokes the night as he awaits the murder of Banquo, ‘Light thickens / And the crow makes wing to th’rooky wood’ (3.2.51–2). Crows seek respite in the rookeries of their more gregarious cousins when ‘seeling night’ (3.2.47) cloaks the world. Dewhirst (2016) reads the crow here as a figure for Macbeth who is headed to wreak destruction on the ‘nests’ of rooks, that is, Banquo’s and Macduff’s families.

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S sable. (A) A member of the marten family (Martes zibellina), inhabiting the coniferous forests of northern Eurasia. The animal was valued for its thick brown fur, which was an important product in the trade between Britain and Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The sable appears in Shakespeare’s works only in references to its luxurious fur. It may also have a more ghostly presence in the adjective ‘sable’, meaning ‘black’, a term from heraldry that quickly passed into more general usage. (B) When Ophelia corrects Hamlet – his father died not in the last two hours but four months ago – Hamlet declares, ‘So long? Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables!’ (HAM 3.2.122–3). According to the OED ’s (not yet fully updated) entry, this is the first recorded use of ‘sables’ meaning mourning clothes. The import of Hamlet’s statement, however, is disputed. Thompson and Taylor (AR3: 305, n. 120–1) suggest that he is being sarcastic: since it has been so long since his father died, he will now wear furs, markers of royalty, and the Devil can have his mourning clothes. But mourning clothes and a suit of sable may not be alternatives; Bevington (2014: 1124, n. 128) suggests that a suit trimmed in sable fur would be appropriate for mourning. A more straightforward use of ‘sable’ in reference to the animal’s fur occurs earlier in the play. As he questions Horatio about the Ghost’s appearance, Hamlet asks, ‘His beard was grizzled, no?’ (1.2.38). Horatio’s confirming metaphor, ‘A sable silvered’ (1.2.240), transforms the mundane and very human ‘grizzled’ beard (or even the sinister ‘grisly’ beard of the Folio) into something precious and beautiful. In contrast, the phrase ‘sable curls all silvered o’er with white’ (SON 12: 9), in the speaker’s list of signs of ageing, hints that glossy, living black has been bleached into sterility. As part of his murderous campaign to persuade Laertes to propose a duel with Hamlet, Claudius implies that Laertes’s reputation with the rapier has aroused Hamlet’s envy: Laertes’s skill, says Claudius with notable circumlocution, is ‘A very ribbon in the cap of youth. / Yet needful too, for youth no less becomes / The light and careless livery that it wears / Than settled age his sables and his weeds / Importing health and graveness’ (4.7.76–80). Claudius seems to mean that Laertes’s skill with the rapier is as much an ornament to his youth as expensive, fur-trimmed robes are ornaments to those who are older and graver. ‘Sable’ as the heraldic term for black occurs in the description of Pyrrhus in the Player’s speech, quoted by Hamlet: The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble

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When he lay couched in th’ominous horse, Hath now this dread and black complexion smeared With heraldry more dismal, head to foot. (HAM 2.2.390–4) The lines are saturated with references to darkness. Pyrrhus’s sable armour appears black even in the darkness of the wooden horse, but the blood smeared on his body is blacker still, both physically and symbolically. In keeping with ‘the poem’s concern with chivalry’, note Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen (LUC , AR3: 256, n. 204–10), Lucrece uses the language of heraldry to declare her shame and her refusal to hide it: ‘My sable ground of sin I will not paint / To hide the truth of this false night’s abuses. / My tongue shall utter all’ (1074–6). The ground is the solid-coloured background of a shield upon which are painted emblems of the family or group. Lucrece’s symbolic coat of arms, she means, will be wholly black, unrelieved by identifying emblems. Gower’s description of Pericles’s ship, with its ‘banners sable, trimmed with rich expense’ (PER 5.0.19), exploits the formal and ceremonial connotations that ‘sable’ inherits from its heraldic origin, while ‘trimmed with rich expense’, probably referring to the ‘royal insignia’ painted on the sails (AR3: 366, n. 19), evokes the use of expensive sable fur for trimming garments. Gower asks the audience to imagine that this black-sailed ship belongs to ‘heavy Pericles’, that is, grieving or melancholy Pericles. The crow, whose ‘gender’ (or offspring) are ‘sable’ like their parent, is given a place in the funeral procession of PHT (19). Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen observe (AR3: 423, n. 18–19) that the heraldic associations of ‘sable’ make the crow’s presence appropriate for the formal mourning described in the poem. ‘Sable’ anticipates grieving of a different sort in LUC : Tarquin’s lust for Lucrece is well hidden until ‘sable Night, mother of dread and fear, / Upon the world dim darkness doth display’ (117–18). ‘Sable’ is also associated with emotional heaviness in LLL , albeit in a comic mode, when Armado describes himself in his letter as being ‘besieged with sable-coloured melancholy [. . .] the black oppressing humour’ (1.1.226–7). (C) Whether the heraldic term ‘sable’ derives from the name of the animal is uncertain, despite the common assumption (OED ). Guillim (1638: 19) declares that ‘sable is of the Latin word Sabulum, which signifieth [. . .] sand or gravel, in respect of the heavy and earthy substance, wherein it aboundeth above all others’. Writing in 1555 about Northern Europe and Asia, Olaus Magnus (1658: 184–5) reports that the sable uses its tail as a squirrel does, that it has extremely sharp teeth and a fierce bite despite its small size, that its fur is thicker than that of the marten and that ‘[i]t is a most lascivious Creature, and very foul in his Natural Copulation’. Topsell’s account of the sable is taken from that of Magnus, although he adds that ‘honourable Matrons, ancient Noble men and their Wives do likewise use two or three of these to wear about their necks; for it is certain that a garment of these skins is much dearer then cloth of Gold’ (1658: 585). For the early modern fur trade, see R. Fisher (1943). See Veale (1966: 133–55) for the extraordinary number of sables, ermines and other animals that were

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slaughtered to provide fur-trimming and lining for royal garments. Borlik (2020: 194–5) observes that the early modern practice of using ‘sable’ as a synonym for ‘black’ hides the violence that hunting inflicted on the creature; he also argues that, although there is no evidence in existing inventories, early modern acting companies must have had furtrimmed gowns for actors playing monarchs. KE salamander. (A) An amphibian with a lizard-like appearance – short legs, long body and tail, often with spots or other markings. Early modern salamanders were counted as lizards, although Topsell suggests that they should rather be deemed worms (1658: 747). Salamanders are associated with fire; Pliny describes them as exceedingly cold, so cold they can put out a fire (NH 10.86.188 [1940: 413]), while other sources say they are not destroyed by fire (Topsell 1658: 748). (B) Falstaff tells Bardoll ‘I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire’ and says he has ‘maintained this salamander of yours with fire any time this two-and-thirty years’ (1H4 3.3.31, 46–7). Falstaff refers to Bardoll’s hot red nose in the midst of his fiery red face. KR salmon. (A) An anadromous fish (that is, able to live in both salt and fresh water) found in cold waters throughout the northern hemisphere, although the Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is the only salmon native to Britain. Salmons spend most of their life in the sea and return to freshwater streams to breed. Because they do not swim in the Mediterranean, the salmon was known to the Greeks and Romans only through reports of a great fish in the Rhine or in Aquitaine. While not precisely a luxury food, salmon was relatively expensive before the development of modern techniques of salmon-farming in the midtwentieth century. Today salmon is one of the most economically important fish in the world. (B) The jailer in TNK alludes to the costliness of salmon when he laments to his daughter that he may not be able to leave her much at his death. His prison, he says, is ‘for great ones, yet they seldom come; before one salmon, you shall take a number of minnows’ (2.1.3–4). Typically, prisoners paid the keeper fees (and bribes) for necessities and conveniences (AR3: 219, n. 4); the wealthier the prisoner, the more lavishly the keeper would be paid. The jailer means that such wealthy prisoners are rare. In order to prove that Henry V is as great as Alexander ‘the pig’ (i.e., the big, the great), the Welsh Fluellen in H5 insists that the river Wye at Monmouth (where Henry was born) is as great as the unknown river in Macedonia where Alexander the Great was born. As Fluellen observes, the rivers are as ‘alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both’ (4.7.30–1). If not salmon, there are at least trout belonging to the family Salmonidae in many Macedonian rivers (Davies, Shelley et al. 2004: 112). When Desdemona, jesting with Iago, asks him what praise he could ‘bestow on a deserving woman’ (OTH 2.1.144–5), he replies, ‘She that in wisdom never was so frail / To change 362

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the cod’s head for the salmon’s tail’ (2.1.154–5). The sexual charge of Iago’s quip is unmistakable, for ‘cod’s head’ (related to ‘codpiece’) is slang for penis, and ‘salmon’s tail’, for female genitalia (AR3: 340, n. 2.1.55). But the exact meaning of Iago’s proverblike saying is unclear. The general sense – in keeping with Iago’s typically misogynistic language – seems to be that a deserving woman is not so foolish as to grab at a richer, fuller position in life (the delicious salmon’s tail) and knows that her rightful place is an inferior one (the virtually inedible cod’s head). (C) For knowledge of the salmon in classical antiquity, see Pliny (1940: 193, 209 [9.17, 32]). A monopoly on its production explains why salmon was among the most expensive fish in early modern Britain (Spencer 2002: 135, 153). Guillim (1628: 235) remarks that ‘watery Animals’ are ‘of lesse esteeme in Coate-Armour’ than mammals, but he nonetheless illustrates a shield with ‘three Salmons Hauriant’, that is, with heads raised, as if lifting themselves above the water (239). Engler (1984) investigates Iago’s twisting of traditional proverbial material in ‘cod’s head [. . .] salmon’s tail’. Honigmann (AR3: 340, n. 2.1.55) devotes a ‘longer note’ to Othello’s quip. KE satyr. (A) A mythical hybrid of human and goat, familiar through depictions in classical literature and art. As followers of Dionysus, satyrs are famous for drunkenness and lechery. They are said to inhabit forests or desolate places, which helps explain their presence in early modern translations of the Bible, in which they are among the wild creatures haunting the ruined landscapes foretold by the prophet Isaiah. (B) Satyrs are mentioned only twice in Shakespeare’s plays. During the sheep-shearing festival in WT , a servant informs the Shepherd, ‘Master, there is three carters, three shepherds, three neatherds, three swineherds that have made themselves all men of hair. They call themselves saultiers, and they have a dance which the wenches say is a gallimaufry of gambols’ (4.4.329–33). ‘Saultiers’ are tumblers, and ‘a gallimaufry of gambols’ is a jumble of leaps and capers. What the servant means by ‘men of hair’ is explained by the stage direction that follows: ‘The Servant admits twelve rustic Dancers dressed as satyrs, who dance to music’ (4.4.347). In his introduction to WT , Pitcher observes that Shakespeare lifted the satyrs’ dance (and its music) from Ben Jonson’s masque, Oberon, performed in 1611 (AR3: 70–1). Shakespeare adapts Jonson’s satyrs – who are lascivious and disorderly and must be tamed by Oberon (Prince Henry) – and transforms them into ‘good men’, ‘four threes of herdsmen’ dressed in animal skins (4.4.345, 341). Hamlet compares his uncle, Claudius, to his dead father, who was ‘So excellent a king, that was to this / Hyperion to a satyr’ (HAM 1.2.139–40). His father, to Hamlet, was like the god of the sun in comparison to his uncle, the epitome of lustful, drunken bestiality. (C) The Hebrew word sa’ir (‘hairy one’, ‘goat’) at Isaiah 13.21 and 34.14 is now usually translated as ‘goat-demon’ rather than ‘satyr’ (see K. Edwards 2015: 74–9). Pliny mentions an ape called ‘satyrus’ (1940: 151 [8.80]), and early modern writers occasionally use ‘satyr’ as a general word for ape. Nicolaes Tulp uses the name ‘Indian satyr’ for what we now call the orangutan (1641: 274). Satyrs were also 363

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connected with satyre, i.e., satire, through an assumed etymology (OED ; see Schmidt 2013: 15). Thus, George Wither asks Charles I to look with favour on his poem, ‘To the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie. A Satyre’: ‘Can my hopes (fixt in thee great King) be dead? / Or thou those Satyres hate thy Forrests bred?’ (1620: sig. A6v), that is, can you hate the satyrs/satires that your own forests bred? D. Williams (1996: 180) observes that the other well-known human–animal hybrid of classical mythology, the centaur, is involved in tragic or heroic stories, while stories involving satyrs ‘are consistently trivial and vulgar’. In The Faerie Queene, Hellenore leaves her impotent old husband Malbecco and lives in the forest with a herd of satyrs. Spying on her, Malbecco sees her ‘[e]mbraced of a Satyre rough and rude, / Who all the night did minde his ioyous play: / Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day’ (Spenser 2001: 3.10.48). In Book 1, however, Spenser represents satyrs as simple, naïve creatures who fall easily into idolatry (2001: 1.6.19). KE scamel. What, exactly, a scamel is remains impossible to determine: the OED notes that the term is obsolete and its meaning ‘unclear’. Other than a nineteenth-century mention that is influenced by Shakespeare, the OED cites only Caliban’s comment in TMP : ‘I’ll bring thee / Young scamels from the rock’ (2.2.168–9), he promises Stephano and Trinculo. Scholars have offered a number of possibilities: the creature is associated with rocks, and so might be a crustacean or a small fish (assuming the word derives from the French squamelle for ‘scaly’). The term might be a corruption of the term stannel, or hawk, although that seems unlikely since the creature in question is being promised as food. Furness’s footnote to the line in the 1892 New Variorum edition discusses in detail the many possible sources of the term and its many avian, piscine and other candidates (138–40), including limpets (called scams in some areas of the country), sea-malls or seamews (gulls). Furness prefers the idea of a bird intended by the term, since as he points out, who would seek ‘young’ limpets (1892: 139)? If the creature involved is a ‘sea-mew’, then the scene may allude to William Strachey’s account of the Bermuda shipwreck which may have influenced Shakespeare’s work. The True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates (printed in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes [1625: bk 4, ch. 6]) recounts the 1609 storm that destroyed the Sea Venture on Bermuda’s rocks, where the survivors encountered many birds, among them web-footed, russet-and-white coloured ones the size of ‘sea-mews’ that hovered overhead making a ‘strange, hollow, and harsh howling’ (1740). KR scorpion. (A) An arachnid that is easily recognizable by its upwardly curling tail, tipped with a stinger, and its large, grasping pincers. The scorpion is carnivorous and venomous. There are nearly 2,000 species of scorpion, most of which live in hot, dry climates or deserts. Early modern England knew the scorpion through classical and biblical 364

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literature and the bestiary tradition, all of which associate it with danger from fatal or near-fatal stings. A small, shy scorpion (Euscorpius flavicaudis) now inhabits the dockyards of London, probably brought to England by ship in the eighteenth century. (B) The scorpions that appear in Shakespeare’s works are purely metaphoric. Fearing what Banquo guesses about his murder of Duncan, and also fearing that Banquo’s line, through Fleance, will ultimately inherit the throne, Macbeth admits his torment (though not its cause) to Lady Macbeth: ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife’ (MAC 3.2.37). His words translate into the psychic realm the intense physical pain associated with the scorpion’s sting. Confronted with the truth about his late queen, King Cymbeline hears from Cornelius that she had confessed how much she hated Innogen: ‘Your daughter, whom she bore in hand to love / With such integrity, she did confess / Was as a scorpion to her sight’ (CYM 5.5.43–5). In 2H6, Queen Margaret bemoans the fact that she came to England only to be ignored by her husband. Even the ‘awkward wind’ pushing her ship back toward France seemed to warn against her journey (3.2.83). She imagines what the ‘well-forewarning wind’ is saying: ‘ “Seek not a scorpion’s nest, / Nor set no footing on this unkind shore” ’ (3.2.85–7). Calling the metonymical shore ‘unkind’ is to call it inhumane. According to Pliny, the female scorpion tries to devour her offspring as soon as they are born; they in turn try to kill her. A similar story is told about young vipers, so that a scorpion’s nest, like a nest of vipers, implies the utter perversion of community, for its members seek only to destroy each other. (C) Pliny calls scorpions ‘a horrible plague’ and a ‘curse of Africa’; he observes that they are particularly dangerous to women; and he reports the attempts of parents and offspring to kill each other (1940: 485–6 [11.30]). Unlike Italy, Greece is infested with venomous scorpions; the Romans borrowed the symbolic scorpion from the Greeks for martial purposes, naming one kind of catapult ‘the scorpion’ (Baatz 2006), while the 3rd Roman legion (of Cyrene/Libya) used the scorpion as their battle emblem (Hünemörder 2006). In Deuteronomy, Moses reminds the Israelites that God led them through their forty-year sojourn ‘in the great and terrible wildernes (wherein were firy serpe[n]ts, and scorpions, and drought)’ (8.15, GNV). For Euscorpius flavicaudis, see Marren and Mabey (2010: 119). In The Merchant’s Tale, Chaucer likens Fortune ‘to the scorpion so deceyvable, / That flaterest with thyn heed whan thou wolt stynge’ (1987: 164 [ll.2058– 9]). In his book on heraldry, Guillim states that a shield depicting three scorpions illustrates equity, for the oil of scorpions was said to alleviate their sting, and ‘it is a rule of Equity, that where the wrong is offered, there the amends should be made’ (1638: 215). Topsell notes the scorpion’s ‘crafty disposition [. . .] And the great subtilty and malice that it is indued withall in nature’ (1658: 754). His entry (750–7), which appears in the volume on serpents, takes most of its information from Pliny and other ancient sources, including the scorpion’s association with basil (753), a persistent piece of lore which Browne in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) dismisses (1981: 1.157). In what seems to be an allusion to Macbeth’s scorpion-tortured mind, Milton’s Samson in Samson Agonistes describes his despair: ‘Thoughts my tormentors armed with deadly stings / Mangle my apprehensive tenderest parts’ (1997: 379 [ll. 623–4]). Biggin (1965) 365

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traces the literary tradition in which the scorpion is symbolic of deceit and hypocrisy and argues that is therefore appropriate for Macbeth’s fearful mind. KE sea-monster. (A) A name for any huge, dangerous and mysterious animal, actual or imaginary, living in the ocean, only ever partially glimpsed and about which not much is known. Sea-monsters haunt the literature of biblical and classical antiquity, and a range of fanciful sea-monsters is depicted on medieval and early modern maps of the world. Some of these are recognizable, if distorted, versions of creatures such as whales, narwhales, walruses, sharks and giant squid; some are products of the imagination aided by stories and legends. (B) While in an agony of love and fear Portia watches Bassanio moving toward the caskets to make his choice, she alludes to the sea-monster from which Hercules (Alcides) rescued Hesione, a story told in Book 11 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Now he goes With no less presence, but with much more love, Than young Alcides, when he did redeem The virgin tribute paid by howling Troy To the sea-monster. [. . .] (MV 3.2 53–7) I am the virgin to be sacrificed, laments Portia, praying that her Hercules, who is motivated by love rather than a desire for reward, will be successful. In Ovid’s story, the ‘virgin tribute’ was demanded by Poseidon for the perceived ingratitude of the king of Troy. Goneril’s ingratitude appals King Lear, who may allude to the story of Hercules and Hesione when he condemns his daughter: ‘Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster’ (LR 1.4.251– 3). In Lear’s enraged version of the story, the child is not the victim but the perpetrator of violence and is more truly monstrous than the sea-monster. In a passage found in Q1 but not in F, Albany, who is horrified at Goneril’s treatment of her father, fears that unless heaven puts an end to ‘these vile offences’ (4.2.48), a kind of moral cannibalism will overtake human beings’ relations with each other: ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep’ (4.2.50–1), he warns. Innogen, too, uses symbolic sea-monsters to hint at a sort of political and economic cannibalism, as she considers the untutored nobility of Arviragus and Guiderius: ‘Th’imperious seas breeds monsters; for the dish, / Poor tributary rivers as sweet fish’ (CYM 4.2.35–6). She may mean that humble local rivers provide food as delightful as that provided by the majestic oceans; she may also mean that the imperial monsters of the court demand tribute of, that is, devour, the country. (C) In the KJV, sea-monsters’ care for their young is contrasted with the inability of God’s desolate people to care for their children (Lam. 4.3); the Geneva version has ‘dragons’ instead of ‘sea-monsters’. Pliny devotes a chapter to sea-monsters in his 366

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Natural History (1940: 169–71 [9.4]). For studies of sea-monsters in classical antiquity and their role in myths, see Ogden (2013: 116–47) and Irby (2021: 145–56). For illustrations and discussions of the sea-monsters depicted on medieval and Renaissance maps, see Van Duzer (2013). Topsell’s chapter on ‘Sea-serpents’ is largely concerned with serpentine sea-monsters (1658: 759–61). Wilson (1950: 19–20) reads Albany’s warning in LR as a version of the proverb that big fish eat little fish. R. Lewis (2018) argues instead that Albany’s warning envisages creatures whose ‘appetitive monstrosity’ is so profound that ‘they finally consume themselves’ (79). He finds support for his theory in the account of the swamfysck – a sea-monster that eats its own body – in Olaus Magnus’s Compendious History (1558: 234). The whole of Book 21 of Compendious History, as Lewis notes, is devoted to sea-monsters. Van Duzer regards the depiction of sea-monsters on Magnus’s nautical charts (published in 1539) to be ‘[t]he most important and influential sea-monsters on a Renaissance map’ (2013: 81). KE seel. (A) To stitch up the eyelids of a hawk or other bird with a needle and silk thread, a procedure that took place relatively early in a hawk’s training, when it was ready to be handled. Seeling was designed to keep the bird from being agitated by external stimuli. Gradually, as the falcon got used to the normal sounds of the mews, the stitches were loosened and eventually removed. Because there is some overlap in their meaning (i.e., to constrain from opening), ‘seel’ is sometimes taken for its homophone ‘seal’, which, to add to the confusion, may occasionally be spelled ‘seel’. This entry will consider those instances, invariably metaphorical, in which ‘seel’ clearly or possibly refers to the imposed closure of eyes. (B) The whiff of deceit often accompanies the occurrence of ‘seel’ in Shakespeare’s plays. Othello vows before the Venetian Senate that ‘feathered Cupid’ will not ‘seel with wanton dullness / My speculative and officed instrument’, by which he means that love will not blind him to the recognition of his duty to the state (OTH 1.3.270–1). He is correct in that ‘wanton dullness’ does not seel his eyes; rather, deceit does. Brabantio’s warning, which swiftly follows Othello’s proud protestation, contributes to the process of deception by wrongly identifying Desdemona as the future deceiver: ‘Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee’ (1.3.294). Iago later echoes Brabantio, as he tempts Othello to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful: ‘She did deceive her father, marrying you’ (3.3.209), he offers. Having thus brandished this deadly reminder, Iago can leave his sentence hanging and let Othello complete the thought: ‘She that so young could give out such a seeming / To seel her father’s eyes up, close as oak – ’ (3.3.212–13). Antony acknowledges the part he has played in deceiving himself about the consequences of his passion for Cleopatra: ‘when we in our viciousness grow hard – / Oh, misery on’t! – the wise gods seel our eyes, / In our own filth drop our clear judgements, make us / Adore our errors, laugh at’s while we strut / To our confusion’ (ANT 3.3.116–20). Antony rhetorically attributes seeling to ‘the wise gods’, but he is admitting here that his blindness comes from his own refusal to see. Wilders (AR3: 219, n. 116–20) points out that a Christian version of such 367

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seeling may be found in the Bible: ‘He hathe blinded their eyes, and hardened their hearts, that they shulde not se[e] with their eyes, nor understand with their heart’ (Jn 12.40, GNV). The dark implications of metaphorical seeling are present in two further instances in the plays. Macbeth commands the powers of darkness within himself, personified as night, to blind the day – and, more importantly, himself – to what he is about to do: Come, seeling night, Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day And with thy bloody and invisible hand Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond Which keeps me pale. [. . .] (MAC 3.2.47–51) He knows that only when he no longer allows himself to see, that is, to know, what he is doing can he break the covenant that binds human beings: ‘Thou shalt not kill’. Almost imperceptibly, ‘bloody’ and ‘tear to pieces’ return seeling to its source in hawking, a sport which has violence at its heart. In 2H4, the king is frustrated that he cannot sleep. ‘Wilt thou’, he demands of the ‘dull god’ sleep (3.1.15), ‘Seal up the shipboy’s eyes and rock his brains’ as he cradles on the topmast in the midst of a storm so violent it would wake Death itself? (3.1.1). Can you do all that and yet deny sleep to a king? Henry answers his own rhetorical outburst: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ (3.1.30). In the second quatrain of SON 73, ‘seel’ and ‘seal’ merge indistinguishably, when the speaker compares himself to ‘the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night doth take away, / Death’s second self that seals up all in rest’ (5–8). Night shuts (seels) the eyes of all those who sleep, but as ‘Death’s second self’, it also secures (seals) them, as if they were in a coffin, from the cares and worries of life. (C) Turberville (1575: 88–9) provides a detailed explanation of how to seel a hawk. In an example cited by the OED , Adams (1633: 326) carefully distinguishes between ‘seel’ and ‘seal’ in a commentary on 2 Peter 1.18: ‘There was a man in the Gospell, Blinde and Deafe: blinde eyes, is ill; but deafe eares, worse. It is bad [to] have the eyes sieled, but worse to have the eares sealed up.’ Lemon (2002) discusses Macbeth’s refusal to offer the traitor’s conventional, confessional, final speech; unlike Duncan, Macbeth sees treason for what it is, an intellectual commitment that cannot be disavowed, although to embrace it he must initially seel his eyes. KE serpent. (A) Any legless, scaled reptile of the order Squamata, usually one that stings or hisses. Serpents include all snakes by whatever name (asps, vipers, all species of what early moderns also referred to as worms) as well as some sea creatures with snakelike attributes. Of serpents, Pliny says ‘most of them have the colour of the earth that they usually lurk in; that there are innumerable kinds of them’ (NH 8.35 [1940: 63]). Topsell published his Historie of Serpents in 1608 with the subtitle ‘the second booke of 368

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living creatures’ in which he treats of ‘all venomous Wormes of the Earth and Waters’ (sig. A3r). However, the term serpent tends to evoke the biblical appearance of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, convincing Eve to sin, and indeed most uses of the word slant toward the figural or allegorical, used to convey a vile, depraved or sinful being, rather than any particular species of snake. Where an actual snake might be referenced, the assumption would have been that it was venomous. However, even the biblical serpent did not have a single, clear identity: Topsell recounts that Josephus records it as mankind’s familiar before the fall and notes that serpents are also associated, even by Jesus himself, with wisdom (A4v-r); they have ‘lofty and high spirits’ (A5v). PreChristian serpents indeed symbolized knowledge and wisdom. The two serpents woven around a staff on the caduceus, for instance, stand for trade and negotiation and printing (because it is the sign of Mercury, the messenger god); the rod of Asclepius (one serpent twisted around a staff) is the sign of healing and the medical arts. In other premodern cultures, serpents could represent fertility and immortality or rebirth, since they shed their skins – hence, the ouroboros, or the serpent eating its tail, which stands for eternity. (B) By far the most common use of the serpent in Shakespeare’s works stems from its dual reputation as a lurking venomous adversary and (what amounts to the same thing in some ways) the betrayer of humankind into original sin. The serpent’s form and its seductive tongue further lend its poison sexual overtones. When Hermia in MND dreams that a snake eats her heart (the seat of love) while Lysander stands by and smiles cruelly at it (2.2.153–4), the image corresponds to Lysander’s new passion for Helena now that he’s under the influence of the love juice – but the phallic, penetrating serpent is also redolent with sexual meaning. Hermia wakes crying ‘do thy best / To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast’ (2.2.149–50), but Lysander is already gone. The serpent, on the other hand, remains: when she thinks Demetrius has killed Lysander, Hermia calls him serpent, one with a ‘doubler tongue’ than an adder (3.2.72), while Lysander threatens her in turn, ‘I will shake thee from me like a serpent’ (3.2.261). Given that the young lovers are all abroad in the woods together, pursuing one another without either supervision or the benefit of a legal union between any of them, these various serpents remind the audience of the dangers – largely social and moral, but also physical and mortal – of the lovers’ choices and circumstances. Hermia is not alone in dealing with snakes and serpents, however. Oberon observes that Titania sleeps in a forest bower, ‘Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight; / And there the snake throws her enamelled skin’ (2.1.254–5), portraying a hidden threat lurking amidst the fairies’ pleasures. Serpents frequent gardens, real and metaphorical as well as biblical. Juliet accuses her nurse, who advises her to surrender Romeo and marry Paris to placate her family, ‘O serpent heart hid with a flowering face’ (ROM 3.2.73). Wooed in a walled garden, married in secret, with her husband clandestinely conveyed to her bedchamber, Juliet, like Hermia and Helena, courts disaster through choices and actions that have the flavour of original sin; but in a fascinating reversal, it is her very un-Eve-like fidelity to Romeo that causes her fall, and those like the Nurse who should be her guardians and advocates 369

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prove serpents instead. In a play that seems to have little in the way of gardens, Lady Macbeth’s desire that her husband ‘look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under’t’ (MAC 1.5.65–6) is a reminder that Duncan himself embodies the Edenic garden as well as its divine gardener, ‘plant[ing]’ and ‘growing’ his loyal followers (1.4.28–9). Macbeth’s murder of his king thus becomes yet another iteration of the Fall. In R2, the queen overhears a Gardener and his men discussing the care of plants in language that allegorizes the garden to the nation, where caterpillars are allowed to overrun the court and insufficient care is taken to prune and stake where needed. They also share the news that Richard has been deposed by Henry Bolingbroke. Ironically – and mistakenly – it is these gardeners the queen sees as serpents because of the news they repeat: she calls one ‘old Adam’s likeness’ and asks ‘What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee / To make a second fall of cursed man?’ (3.4.72, 75–6). As in MAC , the garden here conveys the state’s reliance for its healthy growth on the monarch’s dutiful labour; because the king is next to God in authority, his removal is a catastrophe equivalent to the first Fall. In AWW , the Countess names herself a mother to Helen, but then remarks, ‘Methought you saw a serpent’ when the word ‘mother’ was spoken (1.3.138). The Countess has learned that Helen loves her son Bertram, and is trying to provoke a confession. Though Helen claims she is simply disturbed by the fact of her low birth, she is eventually pressured into revealing that she does not want Bertram as a brother, but rather as a husband. In this instance, the serpent’s sting lies in the truth Helen tries to hide and the ‘sin’ (1.3.176) of obstinacy. The Countess is, for a fleeting moment, apparently disturbed by the idea that Helen might marry her son (1.3.165; see also Gossett and Wilcox in AR3: 34–7), yet overall the exchange does not truly bring a biblical sense of the serpent to bear. The matter is perhaps more equivocal in LUC , when the poem describes Tarquin penetrating Lucrece’s bedchamber: [. . .] his guilty hand plucked up the latch, And with his knee the door he opens wide. The dove sleeps fast that this night-owl will catch. Thus treason works ere traitors be espied. Who sees the lurking serpent steps aside, But she, sound sleeping, fearing no such thing, Lies at the mercy of his mortal sting. (358–64) The verse absolves Lucrece of any responsibility – but only after depicting Tarquin opening the door in much the same way he will invade Lucrece’s body (see AR3: 269, n. 364), and apparently indicting those who fail to ‘step aside’ when they see the serpent. It is Collatine’s boasting that instead fulfils the verse’s sense: it was he who failed to ‘espy’ the traitor and prevent his vile deeds by tempering his praise of his wife. Elsewhere, the monarch’s weakness in the face of conspiracy amongst those closest to him is reflected in the language of serpents. In 2H6, the ‘commons’ are in revolt when Salisbury comes to Henry to deliver their message: their demand is punishment for 370

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Suffolk, who was implicated in the plot that killed the Duke of Gloucester. Salisbury excuses the mob’s offence against hierarchy and order with an elaborate serpent allegory. Should the king charge his court that no one be permitted to disturb his sleep, Salisbury explains, In pain of your dislike, or pain of death, Yet notwithstanding such a strait edict, Were there a serpent seen, with forked tongue, That slyly glided towards your majesty, It were but necessary you were waked, Lest, being suffered in that harmful slumber, The mortal worm might make the sleep eternal. (3.2.257–63) In other words, it is the people’s duty to protect their monarch from clear danger. This speech implies that Henry’s advisors, including Queen Margaret, might be either failing to warn him of danger, or that they are in fact the unobserved serpent that threatens his rule. King Henry has already used the same image himself when he rebukes Suffolk for trying to pacify his fears. He calls Suffolk’s ‘sugared words’ ‘poison’ (3.2.45) and exclaims, ‘Lay not thy hands on me – forbear, I say! / Their touch affrights me as a serpent’s sting’ (3.2.46–7). While Henry thinks of Suffolk as a kind of basilisk (3.2.52), audiences would be aware that it’s Margaret who is equally a serpent, or Eve, or both, having been Suffolk’s lover and provoking York by leaving Somerset (another conspirator against the dead Duke) free in 5.1. Clifford rebukes King Henry in 3H6 for failing to defend himself and his country, comparing him (negatively) to lions, bears, even worms: ‘Who scapes the lurking serpent’s mortal sting?’ he asks, meaning that Henry should be at least as dangerous to his enemies (2.2.15). Brutus concludes in JC that Caesar must be killed lest he grow yet more tyrannical with elevation to emperor, saying to the conspirators, ‘think him as a serpent’s egg / Which hatched, would as his kind grow mischievous, / And kill him in the shell’ (2.1.32–4). Once again, in HAM serpents inhabit gardens that reflect the state of Denmark. The ghost begins his story debunking the reports of the circumstances of his death: ’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forged process of my death Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown. (1.5.35–40) Like Richard’s Queen, the ghost repudiates a story that ‘rankly abuses’ the ear of Denmark much as it turns out Claudius abused Old Hamlet’s ear with his leprous poison. Hamlet Senior’s garden is invaded and like King Henry in Salisbury’s speech, the king 371

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sleeps unaware of the serpent which has insinuated itself. These elements emphasize Hamlet Senior’s vulnerability, the body’s openness to contamination, and the state’s related pollution by the serpent Claudius. But the ghost’s narrative is continuous with Hamlet’s already-expressed disgust with his mother’s quick remarriage, evidence to Hamlet at least of her lustfulness and inadequate respect for his father. In his first soliloquy, Hamlet’s frustration spills out – and uses the same language of gardens present in the ghost’s speech. The world, he announces, is ‘an unweeded garden / That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely’ (1.2.135–7). Serpents attest to the human body’s multiple frailties, and its exposure to the biting, stinging poisons of the world. Shylock asks in the trial scene of MV , ‘What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?’ (4.1.68). He compares Antonio’s treatment of him to a snake’s bite and marvels that anyone would tolerate such a thing to live. Monarchs, and by extension the state itself, are vulnerable to the same threats as the human body. Early moderns analogized the state to a body with a head (the monarch), and torso, limbs and organs (the many estates of its subjects). Both kinds of vulnerability influence several references to serpents. Macbeth tells one of the murderers he hires to kill Banquo that leaving Banquo’s son alive will be deadly: where Banquo is (to Macbeth at least) the dead serpent, his son is the worm who ‘in time will venom breed’ (MAC 3.4.27–8). Since it is a quite different son, namely Duncan’s son Malcolm along with the father of a murdered son, Macduff, who will depose Macbeth, this remark seems more like a register of general fear for the future than a practical comment on Macbeth’s situation. For King Lear, mistakes about the father–child bond result in his mistreatment by Goneril: ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child’ (LR 1.4.280–1) he complains when she refuses to deal with his knights. When Albany calls Goneril a ‘gilded serpent’ (5.3.85), the description seems confirmation of Lear’s judgement. And in a less devastating fashion, King Henry IV contends with Aumerle’s treason in R2. Although he is cautioned by York that any pity for Aumerle will – shades of Fleance – let York’s son become ‘[a] serpent that will sting thee to the heart’ (5.3.57), the newly-installed king is willing to forgive Aumerle and risk the consequences. These references echo the proverb’s warning about nourishing a snake in one’s bosom, derived from Aesop’s fable (Perry Index 176) about the farmer who finds a frozen viper and out of pity warms it in his shirt, but is bitten for his pains (see Wilson 1970: 747). Serpents are one of the animals commonly associated with Egypt’s Nile, not only because the hot desert countries of Africa seemed to early modern English men and women to possess more poisonous species than other nations, but because serpents were closely associated with theories of spontaneous generation, the idea that creatures like snakes and lizards reproduced asexually out of mud. The muddy banks of the Nile, teeming with strange reptiles and tiny insects after each flood, and the source of Egypt’s remarkable fertility, thus seemed like proof of the theory. ANT is populated with snakes, lizards, crocodiles and other exotic fauna, inspiring Lepidus to instruct his audience ‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred, now, of your mud by the operation of your sun’ (2.7.26–7). But 372

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it is Cleopatra whom Antony calls ‘my serpent of old Nile’ (1.5.26), marking her wanton sexuality as both origin and expression of Egypt’s overwhelming fecundity. When he wants to make it clear how viciously he hates Martius (later Coriolanus), Aufidius in COR turns to the same alignment of geography and species: ‘Not Afric owns a serpent I abhor / More than they fame and envy’ (1.8.3–4). Risking a bite from a serpent is a sign of bravery. Antonio insults Don Pedro and Claudio after they have humiliated his niece in ADO , saying they would be as likely to fight a real man as he would be to seize a poisonous snake by the tongue (5.1.90). Pandulph in JN also refers to holding a serpent by its tongue (3.1.258), an act so exceedingly dangerous as to be impossible (Tilley 1950: S228). The serpent’s hiss also makes a regular appearance in Shakespeare’s plays. In his epilogue to MND , for instance, Puck begs to ‘ ’scape the serpent’s tongue’ (5.1.423) – that is, he asks the audience not to hiss at him, but to clap for the players instead. Meanwhile, in TRO , Thersites comments with regard to Diomed, ‘I will no more trust him when he leers than I will a serpent when he hisses’ (5.1.87–8), meaning he trusts Diomed not at all regardless of his superficial smiles. Finally, while about neither the serpent’s bite nor its hiss, OTH conveys distrust in Iago’s speech altogether when Emilia defends Desdemona to Othello, saying, ‘If any wretch have put this in your head / Let heaven requite it with the serpent’s curse’ (4.2.15–16). She refers to Genesis 3.14 (GNV), ‘Then the Lord God said to the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field: upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.’ Emilia’s curse seems redundant, since Iago has already proven himself a serpent, dripping poison in Othello’s ear. (C) Maveety (1973) discusses the biblical image of the serpent in R2; Kolin (1974) covers biblical imagery including that of the serpent and its punishment in MAC . Biggins (1965) discusses serpents and related creatures as images of treachery in MAC . LaCassagnère (2016) discusses the lurking serpent in MND . Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 483–7) discusses the use of ‘serpent’ as an insult. KR shark. (A) One of many species of fish belonging to the order Selachimorpha, which means that their skeleton is made of cartilage rather than bone. The subclass to which sharks belong, Elasmobranchii, includes rays and skates. In earlier centuries sharks were not always differentiated from other sea-monsters. Some sharks are harmless plankton eaters, but in Shakespeare’s day as in our own the name ‘shark’ usually signifies a carnivorous fish with a terrible bite and voracious appetite. (B) The witches’ cauldron in MAC includes the ‘maw and gulf / Of the ravined saltsea shark’ (4.1.23–4). Technically, ‘ravined’ means that the shark has gorged, has eaten to the point of repletion, but the word itself is etymologically related to ‘ravenous’, which would perhaps be more appropriate in the context. ‘Gulf’ bears some resemblance to ‘gullet’, logically paired with ‘maw’, but ‘gullet’ may also signify a whirlpool. As Clark and Mason point out (AR3: 235–6, n. 23), whirlpools draw into themselves, or 373

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devour, everything that comes near them and so may be seen to fit the description of the shark. Whether the name of the fish gave rise to the verb ‘to shark’ (meaning to victimize or prey upon) or vice versa is difficult to determine. Thomas More warns in STM that those who agitate for foreigners to be thrown out of the country are ensuring that ‘insolence and strong hand should prevail’ (6.92). He argues that, once having legitimized violence against others, they necessarily endanger their own future welfare, ‘For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, / With selfsame hand, self reasons, and self right, / Would shark on you, and men, like ravenous fishes, / Would feed on one another’ (6.95– 8). Jowett (AR3: 190, n. 97–8) points out that More voices a proverbial opinion: ‘The great fish eat the small’ (Tilly 1950: F33), a proverb that was seen as having clear implications for the body politic, as Jowett observes in his note, quoting Ponet (1556: sig. A5v). More’s warning is a version of that voiced by Albany in LR , horrified by Goneril’s cruel treatment of her father. Once the bonds that create community – kindness, restraint and respect – are broken, ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep’ (4.2.50–1). When in HAM , Marcellus asks why Denmark has dramatically increased its production of armaments, Horatio explains that the son of Norway’s king Fortinbras has ‘[s]harked up a list of lawless resolutes / For food and diet to some enterprise / That hath a stomach in’t’ (1.1.97–9). That is, young Fortinbras has gathered an army of mercenaries and may try to retake the land his father lost to Denmark. The predatory implications of ‘sharked up’ colour both Fortinbras and his mercenaries, suggesting that they are bloodthirsty and rapacious, although that possibility is not borne out by the prince’s actions at the end of the play. (C) According to an illustrated broadsheet of 1569, The True Discription of this Marveilous Strange Fish, the name ‘shark’ was suggested by Sir John Hawkins and his crew, who caught one and displayed it in London. Before ‘shark’ was adopted in English, the Latin-derived ‘lamia’ (meaning a sea-monster) was often used for fish having ferocious teeth; the word also means a she-demon who drank the blood of children (OED ). In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne (1981: 1.273) suggests that Jonah’s whale was in fact a lamia. Ben Jonson seems to have been the first to use ‘shark’ to mean a petty swindler, as in the cast of characters for Every Man Out of his Humour (1600), in which Shift is described as ‘[a] Thred-bare Sharke [. . . whose] profession is skeldring and odling’ (2012: dram. pers.), that is, swindling and cheating. KE sheep, shepherd. (A) Four-footed ruminants of the family Bovidae, sheep are mediumsized livestock animals with curly coats that provide wool. The most common species of sheep is Ovis aries, the domestic sheep, which often displays a white coat. A male sheep is a ram, the female is called a ewe; a castrated male is a wether, and the offspring of sheep are lambs. Meat from an adult sheep is called mutton. Because they require large areas for grazing, sheep must be moved from place to place either in fields or on wild forage lands; that and their vulnerability to predators require human (and sometimes canine) guardians and drivers of the flock who are called shepherds. 374

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From at least Roman times in Europe, sheep were a mainstay of households, providing meat and milk, as well as wool, tallow for candles, bone for buttons and other objects, intestines to string musical instruments, and lanolin for waterproofing as well as for cosmetic use. Pliny writes that ‘Sheep are also of great service either in respect of propitiatory offerings to the gods or in the use of their fleeces’ (NH 8.72 [1940: 131]). During the Middle Ages, England produced some of Europe’s finest wool; by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spanish merino wool had begun to compete with England’s product, but England’s ability to cultivate numerous breeds for specific uses allowed it to continue to dominate the market. The trade in sheep and wool was the primary source of tax revenues during the reign of Elizabeth I (Thirsk 1967: 4–5). Topsell boasts that English sheep produce ‘better and weightier fleeces than the greatest in other Nations’ (1658: 484), while his long list of remedies for sheep diseases and afflictions, along with his advice to shepherds on where, when and how to pen their charges in a sheepfold, hint at how crucial to English welfare the animal was – not to mention how complex their care could be. (B) The classical literary image, so common in Renaissance poetry, of the idle shepherd creating songs to while time away as he tends to his flocks was more a fantasy than a reality. Nevertheless, the association of sheep with pastoralism and with otium or leisure was fundamental to myths about the origins of poetry itself. The genre of pastoral poetry takes its name from the pasturing of sheep. Virgil’s Eclogues provided one important source for the vast quantity of Renaissance pastoral literature: the several books of the Eclogues include dialogues between shepherds, singing contests, laments for unrequited love, meditations on the pursuit of fame or nostalgia for an idealized Arcadian past. As in the Eclogues, early modern poets’ uses of sheep and shepherds had a political dimension, whether in comparing negatively the challenges of modernity to a past golden age or debating systems of governance and the need for revolution, or simply celebrating a withdrawal from the life of the city and court. Several plays include references to actual sheep and shepherding – in AYL , for instance, Rosalind and Celia purchase a ‘sheepcote fenced about with olive trees’ (4.3.76) along with its ‘flocks and bounds of feed’ (2.4.82). They promise to continue to employ Corin, the shepherd whose absent landlord wishes to sell his neglected lands, increasing his wages. While this transaction might seem to improve Corin’s lot, in effect he exchanges one extractive master for two temporary owners who want to ‘waste’ their time, as Celia puts it (2.4.94). In this fashion the play glances at the economic consequences of land enclosure, which displaced smallholding shepherds in favour of larger operations owned by nobles and wealthy gentlemen who took profits from the land but did not cultivate it. Shepherds like Corin did not own their sheep – ‘I am shepherd to another man,’ he says, ‘And do not shear the fleeces that I graze’ (2.4.77–8) – and did not make profit from the labour of shearing, leaving them dependent wage labour. At the same time, Celia’s fantasy of ‘wasting time’ in the sheepcote enacts in miniature the whole plot of the pastoral, a genre in which those of noble blood retreat from the negotium of court life into the simple otium of the countryside, where love, usually unrequited, stimulates poetic creation. Arden, however, is also a place of labour, with grumbling and struggling shepherds who know that sheep must be 375

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tarred when their flesh is wounded during surgery (3.2.59), goatherders with plain faces like Audrey, and foresters like her swain William, all of whom remain in their environment when their social betters decamp to return to the city. Only Jacques and the suddenlyconverted Duke Frederick remain. Their choice actually violates the whole purpose of thee pastoral (which is to return with a new perspective to court life), yet it reminds audiences that the forest does not disappear when the nobles leave. Bohemia in WT resembles the pastoral world of AYL in that it is full of shepherds and sheep. It is the location of a sheep-shearing celebration attended by nobles in disguise who woo simple shepherdesses. Perdita, who was saved as an infant by the play’s elderly shepherd, presides over the festivities as hostess, the virtues of her birth shining the brighter for the simple company and surroundings in which she lives. At the sheepshearing, swains dance and shepherdesses banter with Autolycus, the travelling con man. These lighthearted scenes are disrupted, however, by the threat Autolycus represents: true to his name (Autolycus means ‘lone wolf’) he steals from the Clown and others, although his misdeeds are in part balanced by good outcomes when he is the means by which Perdita’s identity is revealed. More dangerous is the intrusion of the court via Florizell, disguised as Doricles, and his father Polixenes. Florizell woos Perdita and when his father condemns the match he vows to persist whatever the cost. In a rage, Polixenes promises to kill the shepherd and mar Perdita’s beauty. Once again, the promise of pastoral otium proves impossible to sustain: sheep and shepherds, which provide Perdita respite from her father Leontes’ murderous and wintry rage, cannot remain untouched by courtly law and politics. When Prospero calls forth a masque featuring pastoral goddesses who celebrate the bounty of life associated with marriage, the environment they describe is fully pastoral, right down to the sheep it includes: Iris comes to bid Ceres leave ‘thy rich leas / Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and peas; / Thy turfy mountains where live nibbling sheep’ (TMP 4.1.60–2) to celebrate the union of Miranda and Ferdinand. The fantasy of a shepherd’s simple life has particular pathos when it is invoked in the history plays. King Henry VI imagines himself ‘an homely swain’ in 3H6, counting the hours only according to his tasks of tending his flock, waiting for his ewes to lamb, or shearing them, until he ends in a ‘quiet grave’ (2.5.22–40). The King’s wistful daydreams echo Elizabeth’s 1576 words in her speech to Parliament when she claimed, ‘If I were a milkmaid with a pail on mine arm, whereby my private person might be little set by, I would not forsake my single state to match myself with the greatest monarch’ (Marcus et al. 2000: 169). Arthur in JN repeats Henry’s longing to be a shepherd: ‘So I were out of prison and kept sheep / I should be as merry as the day is long’ (4.1.17–18). For none of these political figures, however, is such pastoral retreat anything but a daydream. Sheep elsewhere in the plays are surrogates for human beings, especially stupid, innocent or vulnerable ones. Antipholus of Ephesus calls Dromio of Syracuse a ‘peevish sheep’ (ERR 4.1.93), while Thersites avers he would rather be ‘a tick in a sheep’ than ‘such a valiant ignorance’ as Achilles (TRO 3.3.312–13). To Tamora, sheep are foolish enough to surfeit themselves on sweet grains. She promises Saturninus to convince Titus to help defend Rome against the Goths, now led by Lucius, ‘With words more sweet and 376

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yet more dangerous / Than baits to fish or honey-stalks to sheep’ (TIT 4.4.89–90). Honeystalks are clover, which when eaten in too great amounts by sheep can cause deadly bloat. Edgar, disguised as Poor Tom in LR , also sings a ditty about sheep bloat: ‘Sleepest or wakest thou, jolly shepherd? / Thy sheep be in the corn’ (3.6.41–2). Here, however, the song seems unrelated to the action, merely a sign of Tom’s supposed madness. Speed and Proteus engage in a witty exchange that revolves around Speed’s defence that he is not a sheep: Speed: Proetus: Speed: Proteus: Speed: Proteus: Speed: Proteus: Speed:

You conclude that my master is a shepherd then, and I a sheep? I do. Why then, my horns are his horns, whether I wake or sleep. A silly answer, and fitting well a sheep. This proves me still a sheep. True, and they master a shepherd. Nay, that I can deny by a circumstance. It shall go hard but I’ll prove it by another. The shepherd seeks the sheep, and not the sheep the shepherd; but I seek my master, and my master seeks not me. Therefore I am no sheep. (TGV 1.1.76–86)

When Proteus ‘proves’ Speed is indeed a sheep, he responds ‘Such another proof will make me cry “baa” ’ (1.1.91). Given that Speed’s alter ego is Lance (servant to Proteus as Speed is servant to Valentine), whose appearances revolve around his dog Crab, the play sets up a structure that aligns servants with animals, suggesting that they are less than human; yet both servants display a command of language and repartee that provides much of the play’s fun. In the comedies, the fact that some sheep have horns locates them amongst all the animals that can be used to make jokes about the horns of the cuckold. Speed briefly touches on that image above. Katherine and Boyet are more direct in LLL about the sexual innuendo attached to sheep references: Katherine: Boyet:

Katherine: Boyet:

Two hot sheeps, marry! And wherefore not ‘ships’? No sheep, sweet lamb, unless we feed on your lips. You sheep, and I pasture. Shall that finish the jest? So you grant pasture for me. (2.1.218–21)

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Berowne later laments ‘this love is as mad as Ajax. It kills sheep, it kills me – I a sheep’ (4.3.6–7), referring to Ajax’s mistaken slaughter of sheep in Sophocles’ play Ajax, but making himself the sheep (fool) ‘killed’ (in this case, a reference to the little death of orgasm) by love. Sheepish humans are not always so amusing. Those slain in war often end up called sheep, as we see in 2H6 when Dick the Butcher is credited with killing his opponents in battle like sheep (4.3.3). Sicinius is confident Coriolanus can be roused to treat the Roman people with contempt – he says it’s ‘as easy / As to set dogs on sheep’ (COR 2.1.250–1) since Coriolanus already considers Romans foolish beasts. Cassius likewise portrays Romans as sheep to Caesar’s wolf in JC : ‘Poor man, I know he would not be a wolf / But that he sees the Romans are but sheep’ (1.3.104–5). Cassius is disingenuous here – like the other conspirators, he attempts to justify his treachery by deploring both Caesar and the citizens alike. Talbot insults the English forces outside Orleans when they are pushed back by Joan of Arc: ‘Renounce your soil, give sheep in lions’ stead’ (1H6 1.5.29). Shylock recounts the story of Laban’s sheep from Gen. 30.25–43 in order to illustrate his position that taking interest on a loan should by analogy not be doctrinally forbidden. Jacob, the ‘skilful shepherd’, was cheated out of marriage to Laban’s daughter Rachel; in return, he contracted with Laban that all his herd’s spotted or speckled lambs would be Jacob’s – but Laban removed the pied rams to prevent any such lambs being born. However, Jacob arranged to have ewes presented to the rams in the presence of streaked and spotted rods of wood, which ensured that the ‘woolly breeders’ would conceive pied lambs, thus winning the bet (MV 1.3.67–86). Shylock sees this as Jacob’s clever intervention in sheep breeding, a wager meant to increase his wealth; Antonio sees it instead as payment for Jacob’s service to Laban, mocking Shylock ‘is your gold and silver ewes and rams?’ (1.3.91). Shylock snaps back ‘I cannot tell, I make it breed as fast’ (1.3.92). When later in the trial scene, Antonio calls himself ‘a tainted wether of the flock’ (4.1.113), his choice of imagery resonates with this scene, hinting that Shylock has transformed Antonio into a marked (and castrated) sheep not unlike Jacob’s and has indeed made money ‘breed’ like a living – and deadly – thing. To be a ‘sheep-biter’ is to be a dog that ‘worries’ or attacks sheep; when applied to humans it indicates a sneaky thief. Lucio says the Friar (the Duke in disguise) should show his ‘sheep-biting face, and be hanged an hour’ (MM 5.1.352), referring to the practice of trying and hanging unruly dogs. Malvolio in TN is also called by Sir Toby a ‘niggardly, rascally sheep-biter’ (2.5.4–5). In both these cases, as the OED notes, the term has the added connotation of whoremonger (since mutton is another term for prostitute; OED 4). Gloucester confronts the Bishop of Winchester in 1H6 in a slanging match that includes reference to the biblical ‘wolf in sheep’s array’ (1.3.55) – ironic, given Gloucester’s own capacity for deception. He refers to Matthew 7.15 (KJV), of course: ‘Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves,’ as is appropriate to the Bishop’s religious vocation. Like Lucio and Sir Toby, Gloucester couches his mention of scriptural sheep and wolves among other insults like ‘Winchester goose’ (1.3.53) that imply the bishop is a pander. 378

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Sheep provided a range of essential animal-made objects. Benedick makes a glancing reference in ADO to the fact that sheep provided the strings for musical instruments: ‘Is it not strange that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?’ (2.3.57–8). Typical of Benedick’s cynical wit, this remark oscillates between the absurdity of the flesh and the transcendence of emotion, making an implicit case for the distinction between humans and animals. Sheep provided another animal-made object that was crucial both economically and literarily: parchment. Musing in the graveyard scene on death and the fate of the flesh, Hamlet finds what he imagines might be the skull of a lawyer, whose death proves that his many legal writs and documents were powerless to mark possession of more than a grave’s width of land. He demands of Horatio ‘Is not parchment made of sheepskins?’ Horatio responds, ‘Ay, my lord, and of calves’ skins too,’ letting Hamlet quip, ‘They are sheep and calves too which seek out assurance in that’ (HAM 5.1.107–10). In other words, those who lay up worldly goods are fools, since their titles are worthless to them once they die. (C) Chartier (2006) discusses Cade’s hatred of anything written on parchment. Boehrer attempts to pierce the ‘thick fog of classical and ecclesiastical metaphor’ concerning sheep to seek the living, breathing animals in literary history, including in several of Shakespeare’s plays (2010: 164–90); this work is made part of Boehrer’s later (2012), more general examination of Shakespeare’s animals. Nelson (2016) uses Benedick’s reference to sheep’s guts as strings for musical instruments to mount an argument about harmony and order in ADO . Yachnin (2008) argues that sheep are not merely important in Bohemia in WT , but as registers of human ovinity are important to understanding Leontes as well. Shannon (2020) discusses a production of LR , Missouri Williams’s King Lear With Sheep, that uses actual sheep as actors. Yates (2020) examines sheep and sheep-counting as the founding scenario of the pastoral mode. KR shrew. (A) A small mole-like animal of the family Soricidae. Shrews are not rodents, though they may resemble mice and rats and were classified with rodents in early modern natural histories; they are more closely related to moles and even hedgehogs. Topsell, following Pliny, includes the shrew-mouse among other types of mice (1658: 415–20; confusingly, Topsell also includes the ‘sorex’ which is also a shrew, among other mice [425]), noting that its bite is venomous, and it ‘beareth a cruel minde’ (416). Shrews also squeak loudly and are territorial. As most criticism will assert, the shrews referenced in Shakespeare’s plays do not have an animal lineage at all – such uses of the terms ‘shrew’ or ‘shrewish’ are all applied to women and are supposed to derive from the word ‘shrewd’, meaning sharp or abusive. Yet the etymological record places the animal shrew first, leaving ‘shrewd’ a derivative of it not the other way around: the first usage of shrew to refer to the mammal dates from 725 CE (OED 1); the word is first used to designate a human in the thirteenth century (OED 2); while the term ‘shrewd’ dates only to the fourteenth century (OED a.1a). And the sheer preponderance of Shakespeare’s shrews, even if they are clothed in human garb, conjure the animal and its traits and reputation – a poisonous bite and a tart tongue, a ‘cruel minde’ and a woman’s angry 379

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hostility, loud chittering and a woman’s vocal complaints, all struck early moderns as compelling, even inescapable similarities. (B) Naturally, SHR gives us a bevy of shrews to consider. The play belongs to the genre of shrew-taming comedies, poems and tales dating at least from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; these join a few early modern mock treatises advising prospective husbands on how to recognize a shrew or, if they still marry the woman, tame one. Katherina is immediately recognizable as a shrew: ‘intolerable curst, / And shrewd and forward so beyond all measure’ (1.2.88–9). She is introduced teasing her sister and striking her, and she engages in a trial of wits with Petruccio (2.1.182–277) during which she repeatedly insults him. As part of his strategy to tame her, Petruccio announces afterward, ‘ ’Tis a world to see / How tame, when men and women are alone, / A meacock [tame or effeminate] wretch can make the curstest shrew’ (2.1.315–17). Petruccio pretends in this scene that he takes pleasure in her private submissiveness and has approved her public railing. True to his strategy of treating Katherina only with the greatest consideration while abusing others much as she has done, Petruccio never again employs the language of shrewishness against Katherina – the remaining ‘shrews’ in the play come in comments from Curtis (4.1.18, 76), Tranio (4.2.59) and the widow (5.2.29), while Petruccio resolutely refuses to acknowledge anything but a fully human – that is, defeated, suppressed and compliant – wife. Curtis notes that a shrew might be male as well as female when, after hearing the story of Katherina’s fall from horseback from Grumio, he remarks that Petruccio ‘is more shrew than she’ (4.1.76). The play deflects the possibility that Petruccio might be more bestial than his ‘curst’ wife, however, by celebrating his ability to implement shrewish poisons to cure, rather than kill, his victim. Elsewhere, Antipholus of Ephesus in ERR mentions his wife ‘is shrewish’ when he fails to get home on time (3.1.2), and later names Angelo, the jeweller who has made a chain for him accidentally delivered to his twin, ‘a shrew’ who begins to ‘brawl’ first and thus provokes a fight (4.1.51), demeaning Angelo with this emasculating comparison. The shrew’s sharp vocalizations help Malvolio criticize Cesario who speaks, he reports, ‘shrewishly’ (TN 1.5.156). Unlike Katherina or Cesario, Helena claims, ‘I was never curst; / I have no gift at all in shrewishness’ (MND 3.2.300–1), which puts her, she thinks, at a disadvantage to Hermia who has been arguing with her. If Helena is not shrewish, she is nonetheless clever – or shrewd – for making herself seem weak and in need of rescue by Lysander and Demetrius while the lovers roam the woods. (C) Many critics discuss SHR and shrewishness, but few reflect on the animal at the root of the comedy. Crocker (2010) discusses the alignment of shrews with women only in SHR , while Wayne (1985) argues that Petruccio tames the shrew by becoming one himself. Hodgdon (AR3: 38–41) touches on the etymology of ‘shrew’ and the play tradition to which SHR belongs. Yachnin (2011) addresses the ‘rich variety of the play’s animality’ (111) including the shrew, while Boehrer (2020) argues that the mammal at the play’s heart must be taken seriously as an instance of ‘linguistic appropriation of animal resources’ (171). KR 380

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shrimp. (A) Crustaceans of the order Decapoda with long bodies and multiple legs (the family name comes from the Latin for ten legs); these may be salt or freshwater and of varying size, although most are small. It is unclear whether references in the plays to ‘shrimp’ are to the crustacean or to the etymological origin of the shrimp’s common name, derived from the Middle German schrimpen, to shrivel up. The term prawn is largely interchangeable with ‘shrimp’, although it may reflect a somewhat larger-size categorization. Shrimp and prawns were a common foodstuff, although shrimp are mainly used in the plays to denote size. (B) The Countess in 1H6 mockingly marvels when she meets Talbot, ‘the scourge of France’ (2.3.14), that he is much less impressive than the Hercules or Hector she expected: ‘Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf: / It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp / Should strike such terror to his enemies’ (2.3.21–3). Her comparison also has sexual connotations, as AR3 points out (174, n. 22). Talbot later picks up the image to expand upon it, claiming his ‘substance’ is not actually present before her, but rather is enormous because supplied by the totality of his troops (2.3.50–61). In LLL ’s masque of the worthies, Holofernes comically presents the child Moth as Hercules: ‘Great Hercules is presented by this imp / Whose club killed Cerberus, that three-headed canus, / And when he was a babe, a child, a shrimp, / Thus did he strangle serpents in his manus’ (5.2.582–5). Hostess Quickly in 2H4 reminds Falstaff of his promise to marry her, which she recalls he announced right before the butcher’s wife interrupted them to borrow vinegar for ‘a good dish of prawns’ (2.1.95) that Falstaff then expressed a desire to eat (possibly indicating his sexual voracity, but at a minimum his thoroughly promiscuous appetite). KR silkworm. (A) The larval form of the Bombyx mori moth. Although the silkworm and its domesticated use in cloth production originated in China, the insect’s relative adaptability allowed Europeans, especially the French, to cultivate it throughout the early modern period. It is the silkworm’s cocoon (called a ‘bottom’ in the trade), fashioned from secretions from the larvae’s mouth, that provides silk threads used to create silk cloth; the fineness and strength of these threads lent silk its high value in Shakespeare’s world and made it an easily recognizable marker of high status and wealth. Silkworms feed on the leaves of the mulberry tree, a great number of which were planted by James I and others in the early seventeenth century to encourage the silk industry in England. (B) Nick Bottom in MND is named for the core or spindle on which thread is woven (OED 24a), a clear reference to his craft of weaving; however, as Thomas Moffet’s The Silkewormes and their flies (1599) reflects, a bottom is also a silkworm’s cocoon (OED 24b), suggesting that Bottom may be, or aspire to be, a weaver of silk. Recounting the origin story of the mulberry in the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, Moffet describes the ‘everlasting shrine’ of Pyramus’s love, the tree where

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the little creepers never cease to move But day and night [. . .] Spinne silke this tree beneath and eke above Leaving their oval bottoms there behind To shewe the state of ev’ry Lover’s mind. (18) Moffet’s poem suggests that Bottom is yet more closely linked to the silkworm through the play-within-the-play performed by the mechanicals in which Bottom takes the role of Pyramus. Since all his troupe hopes they will be ‘made men’ (4.2.17–18), or raised significantly in status, Bottom’s involvement in silk-weaving seems likely. While sumptuary laws would have prevented any of the company from wearing silk themselves, the wealth it represented might, with the Duke’s largesse for their performance, have been in range. Othello describes the silken handkerchief he has given Desdemona as enchanted: ‘[T]here’s magic in the web of it. / A sibyl [. . .] In her prophetic fury sewed the work; / The worms were hallowed that did breed the silk’ (OTH 3.4.71–5). Silk is extraordinarily strong, supple, soft and shimmering: the filaments of thread are stronger than most natural substances – a thread can stretch to almost double its length, yet the fabric they make is soft and has a natural sheen. These features lend it a mythic quality that Othello’s tale folds into his insistence on the handkerchief’s function as a charm or magical instrument. King Lear includes the silkworm among those creatures who provide human beings with cover for their nakedness: he muses to Edgar as Poor Tom, ‘Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume [. . .] thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art’ (LR 3.4.101–6). The debt Lear perceives in human relations with the silkworm, along with furred animals and civet cats, is an instance of the Renaissance idea that humans might not be morally superior to animals, but might well be their inferiors, not endowed with the natural accommodations other creatures have been given to withstand the elements or adorn themselves. Lear also touches on the religious association of clothing with mere ornamentation, part of the temptation represented by worldly goods that are the wages (the debts ‘owed’) of sin. Only ‘man’ requires perfume, silk or furs – indeed, only noble men require these things. Lear unwittingly surrendered his claim to them all when he divided his kingdom and abdicated his throne. Here he discovers the folly of his previous investment in luxuries, his certainty that the accoutrements of monarchy were not divisible from his core identity. Free from his ‘debt’ to silkworms, Lear is liberated to discover his essential lowliness and common humanity with a mad vagrant. (C) Peck (2000) addresses the English silkworm industry in general. Borlik (2015) discusses the links between MND , mulberry trees and silkworms. KR

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slug. (A) Like parasite, slug in Shakespeare’s time referred to a human, a slow or lazy person (i.e., a ‘sluggard’). However, by the early seventeenth century, the term had begun to apply to an animal or vehicle (OED 3a dates this usage from 1618), and by the early eighteenth century was used in its modern sense to refer to the slow-moving gastropod or snail (OED 4a). The word is thus an example of the reverse of the process by which animal names and terminology are applied to human beings. (B) When Luciana berates Dromio of Syracuse, calling him ‘thou Dromio, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot’ (ERR 2.2.200), her conjunction of snail and slug may be a very early instance of the contagion that leads to the word slug’s linguistic drift. Elsewhere in the plays, a slug is more clearly human, as when Juliet’s Nurse calls her a ‘slug-a-bed’ (ROM 4.5.2) or Prince Edward refers to Hastings as a slug (R3 3.1.22). KR snail. (A) A member of one of many species of gastropods belonging to phylum Mollusca. There are fresh water and saltwater snails, but the snails referred to in Shakespeare’s works are land snails, almost certainly common garden snails such as Cornu aspersum. The snail is proverbially slow-paced, destructive of garden plants and assumed to be timid (shown by its shrinking into its shell), qualities that explain its being used as an insulting name. It is also ‘horned’, and although the snail’s horns are in fact tentacles and, in some species, eye stalks, they are frequently invoked for jests or insults about cuckolds. (B) When Orlando is late for his meeting with Rosalind, she declares, ‘I had as lief be wooed of a snail’ (AYL 4.1.47). ‘Of a snail?’ (4.1.48), he asks. Her answer gives Rosalind the opportunity for needling Orlando further. Rosalind: Ay, of a snail, for though he comes slowly he carries his house on his head [. . .] Besides, he brings his destiny with him. Orlando: What’s that? Rosalind: Why, horns – which such as you are beholding to your wives for; but he [the snail] comes armed in his fortune and prevents the slander of his wife. (4.1.49–53) The horns of the snail, she quips, are his weapons against the accusation that he is horned. The snail that appears in one of the bitter jests of Lear’s fool decides instead to stay at home and hide away his horns. ‘I can tell why a snail has a house’ (LR 1.5.27), says the Fool. When Lear asks why, the Fool explains: ‘Why, to put’s head in, not to give it away to his daughters and leave his horns without a case’ (1.5.29–30). Berowne finds ‘Love’s feeling’ to be ‘more soft and sensible / Than are the tender horns of cockled snails’ (LLL 4.3.311–12). But his sentimental praise of love is undercut by the fact that ‘cockled’, meaning ‘having a shell’, very closely resembles ‘cuckold’. The snail’s 383

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tender horns are put to an entirely different use in VEN , when the goddess spies Adonis’s bloodied body. A near-epic simile follows: ‘as the snail, whose tender horns being hit, / Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain, / And there, all smothered up, in shade doth sit, / Long after fearing to creep forth again’ (1033–6), so Venus’s eyes withdraw (figuratively) into her head. Duncan-Jones and Woudhuysen (AR3: 217, n. 1033–4) point to the proverb, ‘Pluck (Pull) in your horns’ (Tilley 1950: H620). King Edward III, contemptuous of the ‘ignoble’ King David of Scotland who can only harass ‘silly ladies’ with his ‘threatening arms’, vows to ‘shrink [David’s] snaily horns’ (E3 1.137–8). Here, the assumed tenderness of the snail’s horns implies David’s lack of ardour for battle and his military weakness. Its slow pace serves more frequently than its possession of horns as a basis for likening someone to a snail, as when Jaques describes ‘the whining schoolboy, with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school’ (AYL 2.7.146–8). The assonance in Luciana’s insult to Dromio – ‘thou snail, thou slug, thou sot’ (ERR 2.2.199–200) – gives a certain hiss to her words. Cartwright observes (AR3: 194, n. 200) that ‘Dromio’ means ‘runner’; hence Luciana is being particularly sarcastic when she castigates Dromio (albeit the wrong Dromio) for being slow. Shylock describes Launcelot Gobbo as ‘a huge feeder, / Snail-slow in profit’ (MV 2.5.44–5). Launcelot, in short, is a servant not worth his keep. Richard III names another slow servant, ‘fearful commenting’, which is the ‘leaden servitor to dull delay’, and in turn ‘Delay leads [to] impotent and snail-paced beggary’ (R3 4.3.51–3). Richard seems to mean that failing to seize the moment to act leads to loss and the enduring, irremediable misery that results from that loss. On the eve of battle, Arcite urges his knights to pray that the god Mars will make them like lions and tigers ‘to go on’ but going back, ‘wish we to be snails’ (TNK 5.1.41–2), that is, may we be swift and ferocious to attack but slow to retreat. After the death of Patroclus, Nestor commands his soldiers to ‘bid the snailpaced Ajax [to] arm for shame’ (TRO 5.5.18). ‘Snail-paced’ may refer to Ajax’s refusal to arm himself for battle earlier in the play. But Bevington observes (AR3: 406, n. 5.5.43) that something, perhaps the death of a comrade, spurs the stubbornly sedentary Ajax to lion-like action when he next appears in the play. When in their lullaby the fairies in MND forbid ‘Worm nor snail’ to ‘do offence’ (2.2.22) to Titania, they seem to be attributing to the creatures general repulsiveness, perhaps sliminess, unrelated to horns or slowness. (C) A ‘snaile-mound’ in the estate’s lake features in the entertainment at Elvetham arranged for Queen Elizabeth from 20 to 23 September 1591. The snail-mound, an artificial island shaped like a snail shell, was designed to be attacked with artillery, its destruction evidently symbolizing England’s martial success against its enemies (Nichols 2014: 3.572, 580, 584). Guillim (1638: 217) praises the snail motif that adorns the Shelley family’s heraldic badge, but with a qualification. Snails ‘carry their houses on their back’ and move slowly, he states, both of which are signs of prudence and deliberation, and by their perseverance, they eventually ascend even the highest tower. But wherever the snail goes, he adds, ‘he leaveth such markes and lines, that a man may 384

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as easily tracke him, as a young theefe that is not yet perfect in his trade’. John Donne (1633: 238) offers in ‘The Second Anniversary’ a more sombre treatment of the snail: its shell, like a human body, is a ‘living Tombe’. Barker (1995) argues that the symbolic snail points to the theme of androgyny in Shakespearean comedy and other Renaissance plays. Ormerod (1989) finds a source in French poetry for the image in AYL of the schoolboy’s snail-like pace. Gleyzon (2010) provides a book-length discussion of the symbolic snail in Renaissance paintings and in Shakespeare’s works, with a particular focus on LR . KE snake. (A) A general name for a scale-covered, legless reptile found in every continent except Antarctica. Snakes are divided into eleven families, the largest of which, the Colubridae, are harmless. In Britain, this family is represented by the grass snake and the (rare and secretive) smooth snake. The only venomous snake in Britain, the adder, belongs to the family Viperidae. The term ‘snake’ is employed when the species is not important; indeed, about half of Shakespearean references to snakes allude to those familiar from proverbs, fables and classical and biblical literature. With some exceptions, ‘snake’ refers in Shakespeare’s works to the reptile, understood literally or figuratively, whereas ‘serpent’ often alludes to Eve’s tempter in Genesis 3. (B) Aesop’s fable about the farmer who warms a starved (i.e., frozen) snake in his bosom, only to be bitten when the snake revives, is a favourite early modern image for the traitor or hypocrite (Gibbs 2002: 203; Perry Index 176). Allusions to the fable occur twice and possibly three times in Shakespeare’s works. Provided with soldiers in order to quell rebellion in Ireland, the perfidious York in 2H6 admits in soliloquy that he will use those soldiers to fight for the crown. He compares himself to the snake in the fable. You who have given me an army, he says, will find that ‘you but warm the starved snake / Who, cherished in your breasts, will sting your hearts’ (3.1.342–3). Richard II erroneously assumes that his followers (the Earl of Wiltshire, Bagot, Bushy and Green) have deserted him, and he denounces them: ‘Snakes, in my heart-blood warmed, that sting my heart!’ (R2 3.2.131). As Richard discovers, not his but their heart-blood is at stake. They have not deserted him but have been executed by Bolingbroke. The starved snake appears again in TIT , when Marcus, observing Lavinia kissing the severed heads of her brothers, remarks, ‘Alas, poor heart, that kiss is comfortless / As frozen water to a starved snake’ (3.1.251–2). If this is an allusion to the fable, frozen water replaces warm heart-blood for a situation utterly bereft of life and hope. Snakes with classical provenance appear several times in the plays. The famous story of the infant Hercules in his cradle strangling the snakes that Juno had sent to kill him figures in Holofernes’ plans for a masque of the Nine Worthies. Hercules will be presented in his ‘minority’, or childhood, declares Holofernes. ‘His enter and exit shall be strangling a snake; and I will have an apology for that purpose’ (LLL 5.1.126–8). It is doubtful that anyone would require an apology, or explanation, for a story so well 385

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known, although Moth appears to think that a justification for the violent ‘device’ is necessary: ‘So if any of the audience hiss, you may cry, “Well done, Hercules! Now thou crushest the snake!” That is the way to make an offence gracious’ (5.1.128–30), he declares. His advice is reminiscent of Bottom’s advice in MND , lest the ladies watching Pyramus and Thisbe ‘be afeared of the Lion’ (3.1.25). You must say to them, he exhorts Snug, ‘ “I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble [. . .] I am a man as other men are” ’ (3.1.37–41). In her excoriation of the hapless messenger who brings her news from Rome, Cleopatra tells him that if he has bad tidings for her, he ought to ‘come like a Fury crowned with snakes, / Not like a formal man’ (ANT 2.5.40–1). The messenger with his terrible news comes not as one of the Furies, or Erinyes, winged avengers who had snakes instead of hair. Instead, he comes – inappropriately, in Cleopatra’s view – as an ordinary man. Spreading the news that Doll Tearsheet has been hauled off to prison, Pistol invokes Alecto, the most famous of the Furies, to avenge her: ‘Rouse up Revenge from ebon den with fell Alecto’s snake, for Doll is in’ (2H4 5.5.35–6). Bulman observes (AR3: 420, n. 35) that Pistol sounds here like the Ghost of Andrea in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, a character who in Act 3, Scene 15, repeatedly pleads with Revenge to awake. In MV , as Bassanio considers his momentous decision – whether the gold, silver or lead casket contains the picture of Portia – he reflects that ‘outward shows’ (3.2.73) are often deceptive. He cites, among other instances, ‘crisped snaky golden locks’ (3.2.92) waving beautifully in the breeze. The presence of ‘snaky’, which just hints that he has a Fury in mind, prepares us for his dark conclusion: those golden locks may be in fact ‘the dowry of a second head, / The skull that bred them in the sepulchre’ (3.2 95–6). A woman’s beautiful hair may in fact be a wig made from the hair of a dead woman. The contrast between admiration for the beauty of its skin and the danger posed by its venom may be understood as a version of the treachery or hypocrisy often associated with the snake. Queen Margaret explains to Suffolk, York and Cardinal Beaufort that King Henry VI is easily beguiled by someone’s appearance (in this case, Gloucester’s), just ‘as the snake, rolled in a flowering bank, / With shining checkered slough doth sting a child / That for the beauty thinks it excellent’ (2H6 3.1.228–30). ‘Checkered’ here means that the snakeskin is variegated in colour. (The adjective ‘checkered’ is strongly associated with the much-admired Fritillaria meleagris in Shakespeare’s day [see Gerard 1597: 122–3]; the name ‘snake’s head fritillary’ dates from the nineteenth century.) Snakeskin is rendered memorably in Oberon’s description of the flowery bank on which Titania sleeps: ‘there the snake throws her enamelled skin, / Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in’ (MND 2.1.254–5). The figurative ‘enamelled’, implying brilliant colours, subtly evokes the inflexible result of fusing glass on metal. Combined with ‘weed’ (garment), made of supple fabric, ‘enamelled skin’ turns the snake’s slough ‘[i]nto something rich and strange’ (TMP 1.2.402). That ‘[t]he snakes lies rolled in the cheerful sun’ (TIT 2.2.13) is among the pleasant natural features surrounding them that induce the adulterous Tamora to invite Aaron to a bout of love-making. Bate observes (AR3: 210, n. 13) that the (grammatically acceptable) 386

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‘snakes lies’ increases the ‘snaky sibilance’ of the line. The contrast between serpentine beauty and danger also appears in Oliver’s description of what Orlando sees in the Forest of Arden: A wretched ragged man, o’ergrown with hair, Lay sleeping on his back; about his neck A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself, Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached The opening of his mouth. But suddenly Seeing Orlando, it unlinked itself And with indented glides did slip away Into a bush [. . .] (AYL 4.3.105–12) Most of the description here is devoted to the snake rather than the human being. Although the passage has the quality of a parable or fable, ‘nimble in threats’ renders with accuracy the darting motions of a snake’s tongue (AR3: 309, n. 108) and the S-curves that characterize its movements (‘with indented glides’). The danger and vitality embodied in the sleek, smooth, alert snake is in sharp contrast to the hairy, inert, unconscious man – and makes clear just how withering Rosalind’s earlier remark is, when she observes of Silvius, ‘I see love hath made thee a tame snake’ (4.3.68–9). The snake devoid of beauty is associated in several plays with supernatural or imagined horror. ‘Fillet of a fenny snake’ is an ingredient in the witches’ cauldron in MAC (4.1.12). Tamora, who had earlier praised the ‘snakes lies rolled in the cheerful sun’ (TIT 2.2.13), turns the landscape into a wilderness of horror as she invents a story to damn Lavinia and Bassianus. They threatened to tie me to a yew tree next to ‘this abhorred pit’ (2.2.98), she lies, a pit in which ‘[a] thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, / Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins’ (2.2.100–1) would make such a terrible din that it would drive her mad. The wilderness created by Tamora’s story is reminiscent of ‘the great and terrible wildernes’ through which the ancient Israelites travelled, ‘wherein were firy serpe[n]ts, and scorpions, and drought’ (Deut. 8.15, GNV). Cleopatra, too, imagines a landscape filled with serpents when she wishes the messenger from Rome would lie about Antony’s marriage to Octavia, even if it means that ‘half my Egypt were submerged and made / A cistern for scaled snakes!’ (ANT 2.5.94–5). Wilders observes that ‘cistern’ here, as at OTH 4.2.61–2, means a pond or lake (AR3: 152, n. 95). In contrast to Cleopatra’s and Tamora’s gift for associating snakes with horrible landscapes, Titania’s fairies simply enjoin ‘You spotted snakes with double tongue’ to ‘do no wrong, / Come not hear our Fairy Queen’ (MND 2.2.9, 11–12). These are most likely figurative snakes (with perhaps a glance at Oberon); ‘spotted’ refers to moral staining, and a ‘double’ or forked tongue, to deceit and slander. Macbeth’s realization that Duncan’s murder is not sufficient is expressed with proverb-like succinctness: ‘We have scorched the snake not killed it’ (MAC 3.2.13). That ‘scorched’ means ‘slashed’ or 387

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‘gashed’ becomes clear as he pushes the metaphor further, explaining why Banquo and Fleance must be killed: ‘She’ll close, and be herself, whilst our poor malice / Remains in danger of her former tooth’ (3.2.15–16). Here, as at AYL 4.3.108 and MND 2.1.254, the snake is represented as female. Macbeth means that the snake’s wounds will heal and she will threaten again with her venomed fang. Invoking a snake to represent the threat he perceives is in keeping with the creature’s dominant metaphoric usage, while ‘our poor malice’ conveys Macbeth’s sense that his ruthlessness is not yet sufficiently developed to deal with such threats. (C) Crump (2015: 41–64) provides a summary of the role of snakes in the human imagination, as manifested in their use as symbols, in myths and in religious ceremonies, and as guardians, prophets and healers. In The Faerie Queene, which invariably represents snakes as ugly, hateful and dangerous, Envy holds ‘a snake with venime fraught, / On which she fed, and gnawed hungrily’ (Spenser 2001: 5.7.30), an image that connects envy with evil or poisonous speaking. The parasite Mosca in Volpone, congratulating himself on his success, uses the snake’s suppleness and the sloughing of its skin as a metaphor for his acting: ‘I could skip / Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake, / I am so limber’ (Jonson 1999b: 3.1.5–7). Wood (1965) argues that the ‘fillet’ of the witches’ ‘fenny snake’ in MAC is its slough, held by many to have particularly potent magical qualities. Hale (2000), who traces to Psalm 91.13 the pairing of snake and lioness threatening Oliver in AYL , sees the creatures as symbolic of hidden and open evils. For Fortin (1973), the context of Oliver’s plight – the presence of an ancient tree, a snake and a lion – enhances the audience’s expectations that human experience is to be interpreted in religious terms. La Cassagnère (2016) discusses the lurking snake in MND . See Arnold (2000) for Elizabethan embroidery designs featuring entwined snakes. KE snipe. (A) A wading bird (Gallinago gallinago) that resembles and is often conflated with the woodcock. Both have long, straight bills with flexible tips that allow them to probe the mud for worms and other invertebrates. But the snipe has a longer bill in proportion to its body size and prefers marshes and the swampy edge of ponds and lakes; the woodcock prefers woodlands. (B) The sole occurrence of ‘snipe’ in Shakespeare’s works is figurative, when Iago, after urging Roderigo to put money in his purse, utters a soliloquy that confirms what their interactions have already made clear, that Roderigo is Iago’s dupe. ‘Thus do I ever make my fool my purse’, says Iago; ‘For I mine own gained knowledge should profane / If I would time expend with such a snipe / But for my sport and profit’ (OTH 1.3.382– 5). Iago thus attributes to the snipe the same qualities that were typically attributed to the woodcock: gullibility and foolishness. (C) As Honigmann observes (AR3: 163, n. 384), the OED records Iago’s insult as the first use of ‘snipe’ in a pejorative sense. Cocker and Mabey (2005: 212) observe that the snipe was ‘a common table item for nearly a thousand years’, costing only a quarter of 388

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a penny in the thirteenth century and rising to fourpence each by the early seventeenth century. It was caught with a springe, as woodcocks were. KE spaniel, water-spaniel. (A) The classification of spaniels is confusing due to their early modern division into two categories that are not clearly distinguished in the literature. A small- to medium-sized dog with long silky coat and ears, the water spaniel was used to retrieve game during hunting, and was a favourite dog among gentry and aristocracy, in part because of its quick intelligence and profound loyalty to humans. Spaniels, however, could also be smaller dogs bred as pets or lapdogs. Today’s four groups of spaniels (springers, cockers, sprockers and King Charles spaniels) reflect the refinement and expansion of these original two groups of dogs. (B) Caius, in Of Englishe Dogges, refers to the water spaniel as the ‘finder’ (a retriever), noting that the dog’s name comes from the word ‘Hispaniolus’ (1576: 16–17), although he clearly considers spaniels specifically English animals. It is this working dog that Macbeth references in his list of types of dogs who correspond to types of men: ‘hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, / Shoughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves are clept / All by the name of dogs’ (MAC 3.1.94–6). But Caius also includes the ‘spaniel gentle’ (21), a companion type of dog. Abraham Fleming, the translator of Caius’s work from the original Latin, added the following criticism: ‘These dogges are litle, pretty, proper, and fyne, and sought for to satisfie the delicateness of the daintie dames, and wanton womens wills, instruments of folly for them to play and dally withall, to trifle away the treasure of time, to withdraw their mindes from more commendable exercises and to content their corrupted concupiscences with vaine disport’ (21). Their supposed Spanish or foreign origin meant that a taint of foreignness could attach to either version of the dog; the hunting dog’s popularity among the upper classes and the lapdog’s playful demonstrations of affection could also lead to their association with effeminacy, servile flattery and, as Fleming hints, sexual promiscuity. King Henry VIII spurns the flattery of one of his bishops, saying, ‘To me you cannot reach, you play the spaniel / And think with wagging of your tongue to win me’ (H8 5.2.160–1). Julius Caesar uses the spaniel to criticize the behaviour of obsequious followers when he rebukes Metellus Cimber: Be not fond To think that Caesar bears such rebel blood That will be thawed from the true quality With that which melteth fools – I mean sweet words, Low-crooked curtsies and base spaniel fawning. (JC 3.1.39–43) In another play, Antony turns the dog into a verb in a complex of images that relate directly to the above passage: ‘The hearts / That spanieled me at heels, to whom I gave / Their wishes, do discandy, melt their sweets / On blossoming Caesar’ (ANT 389

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4.12.20–3). In both JC and ANT , the image is of the fawning spaniel, given sweet treats, but fickle and willing to shift allegiances to another. Flattering speech in Antony’s lines becomes the candy showered on the current master that thaws and melts its target. In PER , the sexualization of the spaniel as lapdog emerges when Bolt tries to force Marina into prostitution, saying he’ll have her make money for him or ‘be gelded like a spaniel’ (4.5.129). The threat she represents is not only to his profession, but to his masculinity – she’ll turn him into her lapdog if he allows her to resist further. The association of the spaniel with sexualized servility is most evident in Helena’s speech to Demetrius in MND : I am your spaniel, and Demetrius, The more you beat me, I will fawn on you. Use me but as your spaniel: spurn me, strike me, Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave, Unworthy as I am, to follow you. What worser place can I get in your love (And yet a place of high respect with me) Than to be used as you use your dog. (2.1.203–10) Helena’s absolute self-erasure and her acceptance of mistreatment involve a kind of vicarious sado-masochistic identification with the dog in question. Lance’s estimation of the animal in TGV is a bit more straightforward: he imagines the unnamed object of his affections having ‘more qualities than a water-spaniel’ (3.1.267–8), or being able to function in the several capacities (perhaps sexual, perhaps not) of the hunting dog. Proteus, however, echoes Helena’s speech when he characterizes his love for Silvia, who rejects him: ‘Yet, spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love / The more it grows and fawneth on her still’ (4.2.14–15). Petruccio in SHR calls for his ‘spaniel Troilus’ (4.1.136), a throwaway line that, as Hodgdon points out in AR3, ‘ironically invokes the faithful, tragic lover of medieval Troy legends’ (248, n. 136). (C) Jackson (1950) elaborates on the images of spaniels, candy and melting in the references in JC and ANT . MacInnes (2003) contrasts the spaniel with the mastiff, discussing how both contribute to the construction of English national identity. KR sparrow. (A) A species of small passerines (songbirds) with brown, grey and white plumage. The house sparrow (Passer domesticus) – so named because it long ago adapted to human settlements, often nesting in houses – is one of the most familiar of British birds. Sparrows are found throughout the world; they are not endangered, although the sparrow population is decreasing. (B) Its tiny size, domestic familiarity, less than flamboyant colours and reputation for lechery make the sparrow rhetorically useful for representing that which is insignificant, 390

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unthreatening and slightly unsavoury. In JN , an indirect reference to the sparrow causes Philip the Bastard to bridle, thinking he has been belittled. Having just been recognized as the son of Richard I, the Bastard asks Gurney, the servant, to ‘give us leave a while’ (1.1.230), that is, to give him and his mother, Lady Faulconbridge, some privacy. Gurney replies, ‘Good leave, good Philip’ (1.1.231), which immediately provokes the Bastard’s retort: ‘Philip? Sparrow!’ (1.1.231). Pointing to Skelton’s Philip Sparrow and Gascoigne’s ‘Praise of Philip Sparrow’, Lander and Tobin (AR3: 160, n. 231) observe that pet sparrows were frequently named Philip. Now that he has been elevated to a higher social and political station, the Bastard objects to Gurney’s familiarity and use of the simple name ‘Philip’, good enough for a sparrow but not for him. In one of his many witty demonstrations of Ajax’s stupidity, Thersites declares, ‘I will buy nine sparrows for a penny, and his pia mater is not worth the ninth part of a sparrow’ (TRO 2.1.68–70). Thersites’s remark, as Bevington notes (AR3: 210, n. 68–9), alludes to two biblical verses that comment on the low price of sparrows (two for a farthing at Mt. 10.20, and five for two farthings at Lk. 12.6). The point of both verses is that despite their low monetary value, God notes their fall. Thersites’s point is the opposite: Ajax’s brain is so worthless that even divine providence does not take notice of it. Were not Macbeth and Banquo, asks King Duncan, dismayed by the Norwegians’ assault? ‘Yes, as sparrows, eagles’ (MAC 1.2.35), replies the Captain, that is, as eagles are dismayed by sparrows, so not at all. When Pandarus says of Cressida, who prepares to meet Troilus for the first time, ‘She fetches her breath as short as a new-ta’en sparrow’ (TRO 3.2.31–2), he refers to the early modern practice of ‘taking’, or catching, sparrows to be pets or to be sold as food. There is also perhaps the added implication here of lustfulness. Sparrows were proverbially lecherous (see Tilley 1950: S715), which is why some scholars accept what others view as a corrupt phrase later in TRO . As he watches the fight between Menelaus and Paris, Thersites calls Menelaus ‘cuckold’ and ‘bull’, referring to his horns (5.8.1–2). He also calls one of the combatants ‘double hen’d spartan’ in Q, or ‘double hen’d sparrow’ in F (AR3: 370, tn). Editors usually amend the phrase to ‘double-horned Spartan’ (5.8.3), assuming Thersites means Menelaus, horned as both a cuckold and a metaphorical bull. But ‘double-hen’d sparrow’, although not widely preferred, has been justified on the grounds that Thersites may be referring to Paris, who keeps two mistresses, Oenone and Helen (see AR3: 407, lnd. 5.8.3). In MND , Bottom’s song, which awakens Titania, moves quickly from ‘The finch, the sparrow and the lark’ to ‘The plainsong cuckoo gray, / Whose note full many a man doth mark, / And dares not answer nay’ (3.1.126–9). The cuckoldry announced by the cuckoo makes it likely that the apparently innocuous finch, sparrow and lark are intended to symbolize lechery. Lucio includes in his sarcastic commentary on Angelo’s prudery the remark that ‘Sparrows must not build in his house eaves because they are lecherous’ (MM 3.1.433–4). In the masque interlude of TMP , Iris reports that Venus and Cupid have failed to tempt Miranda and Ferdinand to break their vow of pre-nuptial chastity. Venus has flown back to Paphos, while Cupid, says Iris, ‘Swears he will shoot no more, but play with sparrows / And be a boy right out’ (4.1.100–1). Even if Cupid 391

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does intend to act as a human child, he has chosen playfellows known for their readiness to mate. Three times the tiny sparrow’s exploitation by the cuckoo serves to illustrate a moral problem. The Fool’s couplet, couched in what Foakes (AR3: 203–4, n. 207) suggests is ‘baby-talk’, pushes the exploitative relationship to a shocking extreme: ‘The hedgesparrow fed the cuckoo so long / That it’s had it head bit off by it young’ (LR 1.4.206–7). The house sparrow occasionally builds its nests in hedges or trees, but it is possible that the Fool’s ‘hedge-sparrow’ refers to the tree sparrow (Passer montanus). But the moral point is what matters: the Fool suggests that Goneril’s treatment of Lear amounts to patricide. Horrified and bewildered that her hospitable kindness to Tarquin has led to her violation, Lucrece asks herself how it is that evil can insinuate itself into the abode of virtue: ‘Why should [. . . / . . .] hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests?’ (LUC 848–9). Worcester draws on the bullying relationship between the sparrow and the cuckoo to explain why he and the other rebels have been forced to take up arms against Henry IV: you used us so As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo’s bird, Useth the sparrow: did oppress our nest, Grew by our feeding to so great a bulk That even our love durst not come near your sight For fear of swallowing. But with nimble wing We were enforced for safety sake to fly Out of your sight and raise this present head Whereby we stand opposed by such means As you yourself have forged against yourself By unkind usage [. . .] (1H4 5.1.59–69) Worcester and the rebels are clearly the innocent, nimble-winged sparrow in this simile, forced out of its nest by the unkind, voracious cuckoo chick (or gull), that is, Henry. Unsurprisingly, Henry finds Worcester’s words to be offensively self-serving. Not only does Worcester refuse to take the blame for fomenting insurrection; his use of ‘ungentle’ hints that Henry is ignoble, that is, of undistinguished birth and hence an illegitimate monarch. The sparrow had already been associated with the rebels, though very differently, in an earlier scene of the play, when Hal and Falstaff make fun of them. Douglas is the one ‘that runs a-horseback up a hill perpendicular –’ (1H4 2.4.334–5), says Falstaff, and Hal adds, ‘He that rides at high speed and with his pistol kills a sparrow flying’ (2.4.336–7). ‘You have hit it’, exclaims Falstaff, setting up the inevitable quip from Hal: ‘So did he never the sparrow’ (2.4.38, 39). Yet the sparrow can be used to invert cultural notions of what is important. The verse that Thersites had used to insult Ajax in TRO , Matthew 10.29, is used by two characters to find acceptance in the face of difficulty. Giving up his life savings to Orlando in AYL , 392

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the aged Adam finds assurance in the verse that God will take care of him: ‘He that doth the ravens feed, / Yea, providently caters for the sparrow, / Be comfort in my age’ (2.3.43–5). In response to Horatio’s misgivings about the invitation to play (at swords) with Laertes, Hamlet says, ‘We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow’ (HAM 5.2.197–8). Hamlet means, in Adam’s words, that God ‘caters for’ every element of our lives, but phrasing it as ‘the fall of a sparrow’ points to his imminent death. (C) There are a number of famous literary sparrows in addition to Skelton’s (c. 1505) and Gascoigne’s (1573). The sparrow (passer) that belongs to Lesbia, the lover of the Roman poet Catullus, is, according to Mynott, ‘[t]he most famous pet bird in ancient literature’ (2008: 139). Another famous sparrow appears in a parable in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (731 CE ), in which the brief duration of human life is compared to a sparrow flying in at one door through a lighted hall and within an instant flying out through the other door into darkness (Bede 2014: 1.283 [2.13]). In addition to the well-known verses about the sparrow in Matthew and Luke, the psalmist describes himself as ‘a sparrowe alone upon the house top’ at Psalm 102.7 (GNV). Rowland (1978: 157–60) examines the sparrow’s reputation for lechery; Cocker and Mabey (2005: 437) note that the sparrow was the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘libidinousness’. Their chapter on the sparrow family (436–42) provides a rich cultural history of the sparrow in Britain. Spinrad (2005) analyses HAM ’s representation of revenge in light of Hamlet’s reference to the providential fall of the sparrow. KE spider. (A) Eight-legged arthropods, or invertebrates with exoskeletons, of the class Arachnida, with fangs capable of injecting venom and organs capable of producing fine silk used to build webs. Greek mythology gives an origin story for spiders in the tale of Arachne, the weaver. Ovid’s version in the Metamorphoses has Arachne challenge Athena to a weaving contest which she wins by weaving images of the gods’ transgressions. That enrages Athena, who strikes Arachne with her shuttle. Arachne then hangs herself, but as she is dying Athena takes pity on her, transforming her into a spider who ‘practiceth in shape of Spider still / the Spinners and the Websters craftes of which she erst had skill’ (Golding 1567: 69). Moffet (1658) notes various types of venomous spiders, but also includes ‘tame’ or house spiders, who earn the respect of kings for their wisdom and skill at catching pests in their nets (1067–8). (B) The capacity of the spider to spin a complex web and then wait patiently out of sight for prey to fall into it leads to its use in representing subtlety and plotting. In H8, Buckingham and Norfolk discuss Wolsey’s schemes, with Norfolk speculating that Wolsey’s lack of birth and breeding leads to his ability to spin plans ‘spider-like / Out of his self-drawing web’ in order to secure ‘A place next to the King’ (1.1.62–3, 66). In 2H6, York shares the workings of his brain ‘more busy than the labouring spider, / [that] [w]eaves tedious snares’ to trap his enemies (3.1.338–9). Meanwhile the ever-scheming 393

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King Richard III is twice called a ‘bottled spider’ (R3 1.3.241, 4.4.81): bottled here may mean swollen, conveying the sense that Richard is replete with venom, or it may be a reference to his position lurking in a web or snare (some spiders build funnel-shaped webs and so sit in them like corks in a bottle). Thersites rails against the Greek heroes Achilles and Ajax for being witless: they are such blunt, muscular fools, he laments, that they couldn’t ‘deliver a fly from a spider without drawing their massy irons and cutting the web’ (TRO 2.3.15–16). Rather than emulating a spider, like other subtle rulers, or being too stupid to extract a fly from a spider’s web, King Richard II is convinced that spiders, along with all the noxious creatures of England, will save him when he arrives back in England to defend his crown. He apostrophizes the land, demanding ‘let thy spiders that suck up thy venom / And heavy-gaited toads like in their [the rebels’] way’ (R2 3.2.14–15). King Edward calls himself a ‘poison-sucking, envious spider’ (E3 2.450) for the corrupting effects of his infatuation with the Countess of Salisbury, wishing that he were instead ‘a honey-gathering bee’ (2.448). At the other end of the spectrum from spiderly fearsomeness lies the whimsical chariot Mercutio portrays Mab driving in ROM , made from ‘the smallest spider web’ among other delicate natural items (1.4.64). A woman’s hair might be compared to spider’s silk: Bassanio, seeing Portia’s miniature, exclaims, ‘Here, in her hairs, / The painter plays the spider and hath woven / A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men / Faster than gnats in cobwebs’ (MV 3.2.120–3). While this credits Portia’s beauty, it is also resonant with attitudes about women as temptresses and deceivers. Leontes develops a fascinatingly complex analogy about infidelity and treachery after Camillo escapes, musing that knowing oneself to be a victim makes the experience all the harder to bear: There may be in the cup A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge Is not infected; but if one present Th’abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (WT 2.1.39–45) This imaginative tale of finding a spider in one’s cup makes betrayal a visceral, bodily thing, immediate and compatible with many humans’ atavistic fears about spiders. The fairies in MND banish ‘Weaving spiders [. . .] long-legg’d spinners’ along with other pests from Titania’s bower (2.2.19–20), although these creatures seem more annoyances than fearsome predators. Spider’s silk has greater tensile strength than steel. Shakespeare would not have known that, of course, and yet the idea of the slender but dangerously effectual thread shows up in JN when the Bastard threatens Hubert that he will be executed should a shred of evidence prove he was responsible for the death of Arthur: ‘the smallest thread 394

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/ That ever spider twisted from her womb / Will serve to strangle thee’ (4.3.127–9) says Philip. In contrast, the Duke in MM uses spiders’ silk to represent something flimsy: musing on Angelo’s capacity for deception, he remarks, ‘How may likeness made in crimes, / Making practice on the times, / To draw with idle spiders’ strings / Most ponderous and substantial things?’ (3.1.529–32). Bevington glosses this as ‘How may false seeming of a criminal sort, practicing deception on the world, make weighty and substantial matters seem as illusory and unsubstantial as spiders’ webs’ (2004: 440, n. 266). (C) Blythe (1999) discusses the spider imagery in R3, arguing that ‘bottled’ indicates a spider in its funnelled web rather than just a swollen body. Atkins (2010) examines the Duke’s speech in MM for all the ways spiders’ strings could be interpreted depending on editorial decisions. KR squirrel. A medium-sized tree-dwelling rodent of the family Sciuridae. Lance compares his dog Crab in TGV to the dog originally purchased as a gift for Silvia, saying the ‘other squirrel’ was stolen thus requiring substitution of Crab for the presumably tiny or squirrel-sized dog (4.4.53). Carroll notes that some editors have assumed the dog in question was named Squirrel, but it is more likely that the dogs’ relative size is what is referenced (AR3: 254). In ROM , Mercutio describes Mab’s chariot as an ‘empty hazelnut / Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, / Time out o’mind the fairies’ coachmakers’ (1.4.59–61). The squirrel provides the nuts, the grub (woodworm) carves them out to serve as coaches. KR staniel, stanyel. The kestrel (Falco tinnunculus), also called the windhover, a mediumsized hawk, now the commonest bird of prey in Britain. Kestrels eat small mammals like mice and shrews and also lizards and insects. They hover over a likely site for prey, and when they spot something edible, drop down and seize it. An obsolete name for the bird, ‘windfucker’, which is clearly useful as an insult, appears in Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599: 49) and in Jonson’s Epicoene (1979: 1.4.74). One of the characters in The Alchemist, Kastril, is described as ‘the angry Boy’ (Jonson 1982a: dram. pers.), so named, suggests Gordon Campbell, for the resemblance between ‘kestrel’ and ‘coistrel’, a rascal (1995: 483). This cultural history – the bird’s humble status as a hawk, its preference for vermin and its alternative names – lies behind the reference to the staniel in TN . As he observes Malvolio poring over ‘M.O.A.I. doth sway my life’ (2.5.109), Fabian exclaims that the steward has been caught by Maria’s ploy: ‘What dish o’poison has she dressed him!’ (2.5.111), he marvels. If there is any sympathy in Fabian’s remark, there is none in Sir Toby’s contemptuous rejoinder: ‘And with what wing the staniel checks at it!’ (2.5.112). Toby implies that Malvolio is greedily opportunistic in grasping at and wresting to his advantage anything that might further his ambition. KE 395

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starling. A garden bird (Sturnus vulgaris) common throughout Britain, notable for its repertoire of warbles, chirps and gurgles and its tendency to perform aerial ballets in huge flocks, or murmurations. The starling is a fine mimic of other birds and animals such as frogs, cats and goats, and of whistles and ringing sounds (Cocker and Mabey 2005: 429–30). It can also be taught to imitate human speech – Pliny (1940: 369 [10.59]) reports a starling that could speak Greek and Latin – and so was kept as a pet in Shakespeare’s day. Webster likens a child’s prattle to a pet starling’s ‘speech’. In the wooing scene of The Duchess of Malfi, Antonio claims to the Duchess that a man would miss very little if he did not have children: being called a father, ‘or the weak delight / To see the little wanton ride a-cock-horse / Upon a painted stick, or hear him chatter / Like a taught starling’ (2009: 1.2.314–17). In the face of Henry IV’s refusal to ransom his brother-in-law Mortimer (whose name the king refuses even to hear), Hotspur indignantly declares to his fellow conspirators, ‘I will find him [i.e., the king] when he lies asleep, / And in his ear I’ll holler “Mortimer!” / Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak / Nothing but “Mortimer” and give it him / To keep his anger still in motion’ (1H4 1.3.220–4). Adding a layer of insult to Hotspur’s words, the starling was regarded as the poor man’s parrot (Cocker and Mabey 2005: 430). KE stockfish. (A) Any of a number of gadiformes or rayfinned fish, such as cod, haddock, pollock or whiting, all of which were consumed extensively throughout Europe. The term derives from the Dutch stok or stik – pole or stick – referencing the fact that the fish were generally dried on poles or racks. Once dried, the fish could be stacked like bricks in ships’ holds, thus allowing a preserved food supply for long-distance travel. Because of its white flesh and dessication, stockfish could be associated with either refinement or a lack of vital juices. (B) To explain and condemn Angelo’s antagonism toward sexual license, Lucio says of him in MM that he ‘was not made by man and woman after this downright way of creation [. . .] Some report a sea-maid spawned him; some that he was begot between two stockfishes’ (3.1.368–72). In other words, Angelo is not fully human, or as Lucio puts it, ‘when he makes water his urine is congealed ice’ and he is a ‘motion ungenerative’, or impotent mannequin (3.1.373–5). Likewise, Falstaff attacks Prince Hal for being bloodless by denouncing him as ‘dried neat’s tongue’ as well as ‘stock-fish’ (1H4 2.4.239). Before cooking, stockfish had to be reconstituted with water or milk and pounded to tenderize it; thus, when Stephano threatens to ‘make a stockfish’ of Trinculo for interrupting Caliban, he is promising Trinculo a beating (TMP 3.2.68–9). (C) Of Angelo’s comparison to stockfish, Wakeman (2020) points out that fish was a Lenten dish, associated with the suppression of fleshly appetites; in this context, Angelo’s fishy perversity stems from his refusal to admit his own desires, thus suggesting that his piety and austerity actually generate his need for deviant pleasures, an oblique 396

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critique of his and Isabella’s Catholicism. See also Fitzpatrick (2011: 386–7) on the fish as food. KR swallow. (A) A migratory bird (Hirundo rustica) that arrives in the British Isles as early as March and departs in autumn for South Africa, where it overwinters. It has traditionally been regarded as a herald of summer and of hope; its twittering song has been compared to the peaceful sound of running water. The fact that swallows prey on insects harmful to crops and that they nest in manmade structures (including interior domestic spaces) indicates their long, comfortable companionship with human beings. Before migration was understood, swallows were thought to hide in mud flats during the winter months and to emerge in the spring. (B) Its swiftness is the characteristic for which the swallow is most often invoked in Shakespeare’s plays, in two instances the invocation amounting to little more than a variation on the proverb, ‘As swift as a swallow’ (Tilley 1950: S1023). In TIT , Aaron vows to flee with his new-born son to the Goths, ‘as swift as swallow flies, / There to dispose this treasure in mine arms / And secretly to greet the empress’ friends’ (4.2.174–6). In R3, just before the final battle scene, Blunt assures Richmond that Richard’s so-called friends and followers will abandon him, to which Richmond replies, ‘Then in God’s name, march. / True hope is swift and flies with swallow’s wings’ (5.2.23–4). Ornithologists report that the swallow is not, in fact, notable for speed, but its grace and sleekness give the impression of swift flight. Two further references to the swallow’s speed revitalize the proverbial simile. In 2H4, when Prince John demands why he has only appeared on the field now that the battle has ended, Falstaff asks, ‘Do you think me a swallow, an arrow or a bullet? Have I, in my poor and old motion, the expedition of thought?’ (4.2.32–4). Thus, compressing familiar similes, Falstaff’s rhetorical questions focus attention on the difference between swallows, arrows, bullets and thought – slight, sleek, airborne or (in the case of thought) intangible – and his own ponderous, earth-bound body. In TIT , as they prepare for the hunt, Marcus boasts of the courage and stamina of his dogs, while Titus boasts of his horses, which ‘will follow where the game / Makes way and runs like swallows o’er the plain’ (TIT 2.1.24). If the simile applies to the game, then, as Bate points out (AR3: 209, n. 24), it suggests the sweeping, dispersing movement of the fleeing animals. If the simile applies to the horses, then it conveys not only the horses’ speed but transforms thundering hooves into a silent, graceful, apparently effortless gliding. Its association with summer appears in further references to the swallow. The proverb, ‘Swallows, like false friends, fly away upon the approach of winter’ (Tilley 1950: S1026), lies behind Timon’s response to the declaration of the First Lord that ‘[t]he swallow follows not summer more willing than we your lordship’ (TIM 3.7.28). Timon replies sarcastically, ‘Nor more willingly leaves winter – such summer birds are men’ (3.7.30–1). They are, in short, fair-weather friends. In WT , daffodils are represented as harbingers of summer that appear even earlier than the swallow. At the sheep-shearing 397

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feast, Perdita wishes she had Proserpina’s flowers with which to deck Florizel, Mopsa and Dorcas. First among the flowers she mentions are ‘Daffodils, / That come before the swallow dares, and take / The winds of March with beauty’ (4.4.118–20). In ANT , Scarus, who is loyal to Antony but fears that his army faces defeat, observes to himself, ‘Swallows have built / In Cleopatra’s sails their nests. The augurs / Say they know not, they cannot tell; look grimly, / And dare not speak their knowledge’ (4.12.3–6). The building of nests, ordinarily a sign of the coming of spring and new life, here heralds defeat and the end of life. (C) Because the swallow eats and drinks on the wing, Aristotle classified it with two other ‘footless’ birds (apodes), swifts and martins (1991: 293 [9.30]). These birds in any case resemble each other in shape, swiftness and aerial feeding and are not always distinguished or distinguishable in early modern literary references. The behaviour of birds was of central importance to ancient practices of divination and augury; as Mynott (2018: 249) observes, ‘the Greek word for a bird [. . .] was also the word for an omen’. Although its early modern association with summer generally made the swallow a sign of hope, it could in classical literature be a sign of approaching grief or death because of its presence in the myth of Philomela (Mynott 2018: 288). After her rape by Tereus, her brother-in-law, and her transformation to a nightingale, Philomela’s sister Procne is in some versions of the myth changed into a swallow. DiMeo and Laroche (2011) discuss ‘oil of swallows’ as a common ingredient in early modern ointments; more generally, they consider what the use of such animal ingredients indicates about women’s relationship to the material practice of medicine. Spurgeon (1935: 48) mentions swallows in connection with her observation that it is the movement (rather than the sound) of birds that receives most attention in Shakespeare’s plays. KE swan, cygnet. (A) Cygnus olor, the mute swan, and Cygnus cygnus, the Eurasian common or whooper swan, are large birds that can have a wingspan of over 8–10 feet. Swans have white plumage; the common swan has a distinctive honking cry (their name derives from a term for song). They dwell and breed on large bodies of fresh water and famously mate for life. Their young are referred to as cygnets. The English swans most associated with Shakespeare are the mute swans, recognizable from the knob on top of their beaks, although both species would have been present throughout England and Northern Europe. The proverbial ‘swansong’, sung at the point of death, was a commonplace even by classical times, and is referenced in works by Aeschylus, Plato and Aristotle, as well as in Ovid and Virgil: the convention is that the otherwise silent or unmusical bird suddenly produces lyrical music as it dies. Pliny, however, disputes this as myth (NH 10.32 [1940: 333]). Classical mythology also associated swans with Apollo, and therefore made the bird both a symbol of light and representation of musical arts. The tale of Jove’s rape of Leda while in the form of a swan capitalized on the bird’s beauty and sinuousness to associate it with erotic pleasure – sources that hint at the myth 398

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from Homer’s Iliad to Ovid’s Metamorphoses are equivocal on whether Zeus raped or seduced Leda, allowing the swan to stand in for desire on the part of either gender. At the same time, contradictorily, the swan’s white plumage and mating behaviour aligned with its role as a symbol of purity and innocence. Swans were also considered a valued food source for those with the resources to provide them. (B) The swan’s mythic dying song is referred to several times. Following her rape by Tarquin, Lucrece describes the ‘stain’ on her as being like that on ‘the snow-white swan’ (LUC 1011) – that is, her soiled chastity must be immediately obvious – so it is not unexpected that her revelation of what has happened to her in the presence of her husband and his Roman peers is like the swan’s song: ‘And now this pale swan in her wat’ry nest / Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending’ (1611–12). At the death of King John, Prince Henry laments ‘I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan / Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death’ (JN 5.7.21–2). Emilia in OTH sings the sad song ‘Willow’ that her mistress Desdemona sang in 4.3 as she too dies: ‘I will play the swan / And die in music’ (5.2.245–6). Portia commands Nerissa, ‘Let music sound’ while Bassanio makes his choice of caskets, so that ‘if he lose, he makes a swan-like end’ (MV 3.2.43–4), and PHT references the ‘death-divining swan’ in its opening lines (15) mourning the phoenix and the turtledove. Falstaff alludes to the tale of Leda and Jove or Jupiter, and comically applies it to himself as he waits in the wood with buck’s horns on his head for Mistress Ford: Remember Jove, thou wast a bull for Europa: love set on thy horns. O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other a man a beast! You were also, Jupiter, a swan for the love of Leda: O omnipotent love, how near the god drew to the complexion of a goose! A fault done first in the form of a beast – O Jove, a beastly fault! – and then another fault in the semblance of a fowl: think on’t, Jove, a foul fault! When gods have hot backs, what shall poor men do? (WIV 5.5.3–11) For Falstaff, the fact that a god became both a bull and a swan out of lust for a woman excuses his own bestial behaviour. Here, the god’s descent into the bodies of animals indicates the nature of sexual desire: to succumb to it is to be turned into a ‘goose’, a mere beast – but Falstaff doesn’t yet realize how much of a goose he himself has been made by lust, set up to be mocked and tormented, his horns not the sign of his bull-like potency or of his clever cuckolding of Ford, but of his own humiliation. Suffolk develops a passion for the ‘fairest beauty’ (1H6 5.2.67) Queen Margaret, whom he has captured in battle; he uses the confusing image of a swan’s protection of its young to describe her lot: ‘So doth the swan her downy cygnets save, / Keeping them prisoner underneath his wings’ (5.2.77–8). Burns glosses the pronoun slippage from female to male as a ‘hermaphroditic amalgam’ (AR3: 263, n. 77) that inserts 399

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Suffolk into the image, blending his feminine protectiveness with masculine domination. Shakespeare was apparently familiar with the swan’s behaviour in using its tremendous and powerful wings to shelter its young; he was also willing to identify the nation with its nest, as Innogen does in CYM , calling the island ‘a swan’s nest’ in a ‘great pool’ when compared to the ‘world’s volume’ (3.4.137–9) – not as dismissive a remark as it might seem, given that a swan’s nest can be 6–10 feet in diameter. In 3H6, York describes the repeated charges that end in his side’s loss at the battle at Wakefield: ‘We budged again, as I have seen a swan / With bootless labour swim against the tide / And spend her strength with overmatching waves’ (1.4.19–21) The swan’s fidelity to its mate was often depicted through the image of the birds’ interlinked necks, as images derived from the tale of Leda and the swan demonstrate. Celia uses the image to dispute her father’s insistence that Rosalind is a traitor in AYL : ‘whereso’er we went, like Juno’s swans, / Still we went coupled and inseparable’ (1.3.72–3). She both affirms her close and intimate relationship to Rosalind, and possibly associates their friendship with Elizabeth I, whose iconography included the ‘reconciliation of Venus and Juno’ (AR3: 183, n. 72). Most swans have black legs as well as some black on their bills. Aaron uses this fact to convey the dimensions and power of his own blackness in TIT : ‘Coal-black is better than another hue’ Aaron claims, because ‘it scorns to bear another hue’ and is impossible to wash off: ‘For all the water in the ocean / Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white, /Although she lave them hourly in the flood’ (4.2.101–5). Aaron echoes two Aesopian fables, one in which a raven who admires a swan and tries to wash off its own black colouration, eventually dying from hunger (Perry Index 398), while the other is more indirect, involving a good Samaritan who tries to cleanse what he thinks is the consequence of neglect in a slave’s darkened skin (Perry Index 393), only to cause the man to die from cold. In both cases, the message is that it is impossible to change the order of creation, and that some qualities, especially those aligned with class or racial distinction, are fully ingrained. The allegory can be found widely represented in early modern culture, whether in emblems and proverbs (see Tilley 1950: B436) or in lines like those from Jonson’s 1605 Masque of Blackness, which asserts the power of the British Sun (i.e., the king) to turn black to white, ‘Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force / To blanch an Æthiop, and revive a corse’ (224–5; 1969: 56). What is interesting about Aaron’s allusion is that he notes the hidden blackness of the swan – a swan’s legs are under water and since swans are too large to spend much time on land their nether parts are rarely seen, something that resonates with Aaron’s covert scheming. Above all, swans are beautiful, elegant birds, which inspires their use as comparisonanimals for women. Benvolio promises to introduce Romeo, still obsessed with Rosaline, to some young women who will ‘make thee think thy swan a crow’ (ROM 1.2.88), as indeed happens immediately when Romeo spots Juliet. For the infatuated Troilus, Cressida’s hand is softer than ‘cygnet’s down’ (TRO 1.1.55). And, of course, there is Jonson’s description of Shakespeare himself as the ‘Sweet Swan of Avon’ (‘To the memory of my beloved’; 71) in his poem for the 1623 Folio edition of Shakespeare’s 400

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plays. Jonson associates his rival playwright with the River Avon and its famous swans, suggesting the fluid grace of Shakespeare’s works. (C) Harting (1965: 201–8) discusses swan lore; Keel (1991) uses AYL ’s image of interlocked swans to launch a discussion of same-sex intimacy. Draper (1971) and Theis (2001) discuss the imagery of Leda and the swan in relation to Falstaff’s speech in WIV. KR swine, pig, hog. (A) Sus scrofa domesticus (or Sus domesticus) can be considered either a subspecies of, or a separate species from, the wild boar (sus scrofa); it is a large, eventoed ungulate (that is, a hoofed animal that bears its weight on two of its five toes). The domestic pig is not always clearly distinguished from its wild sibling either in early modern texts or in current scientific taxonomies, since domestic pigs can turn feral and can interbreed with wild pigs, making distinctions between the species variable. A female pig is called a sow, a male one a boar, which tends to confuse the wild and domestic species yet further. Pigs are the most abundant animal on the planet and for thousands of years have served as an important food source. While it was mainly farmed for its flesh, or pork, the animal’s hide and bristles were also an important by-product used in making brushes or leather goods. The pig is a dedicated omnivore, eating almost anything, which made it especially valuable to early moderns as a kind of garbage disposal – cottagers and urban dwellers alike kept pigs on the refuse from the kitchen, while pigs were used in dairies, breweries and distilleries to consume the waste byproducts of these industries. At the same time, pigs could be turned loose into wooded areas to feed, or could be given acorns and other materials gathered from the woods – pigs are what might be called easy keepers, needing little intervention to survive and thrive. The dung they produced was, in turn, useful for manuring gardens and fields for their owners, locking them firmly into the cycle of agricultural food production. Pliny observes that the pig ‘is the most brutish of animals’; it likes wallowing in mud and is intelligent. When used as human analogues or in insults, however, the pig is usually considered greedy, lazy, filthy or stupid (this last, as Pliny recognized, is completely unwarranted). When Homer’s Circe transforms Odysseus’ men into swine in the Odyssey, she does not simply make them bestial, but makes them the lowest kind of beast, one that was perceived as particularly distant from human beings. (B) Pork was taboo for Jews and Muslims, which made the pig an efficient sign of religious difference. In MV , Shylock refuses to eat with Bassanio and Antonio, whom he assumes will eat pork, and Launcelot accuses Jessica of ‘rais[ing] the price of hogs’ by converting to Christianity (3.5.21–2). Thus, when at the trial Shylock uses the example of a ‘gaping pig’ as the kind of random ‘humour’ that possesses him to demand a pound of Antonio’s flesh (4.1.46, 53), he seems to conjure for an instant Jewish dietary law, but then turns his desire for the bond into an irrational personal quirk. There is a predictable range of insults in the plays involving pigs or swinish behaviour. Swine were notable for their appetites, especially for greedily downing swill, 401

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a semi-liquid food on which they were often fed. This appeared to make them a fitting animal to use in conveying drunkenness. Lady Macbeth promises to get Duncan’s chamberlains drunk, which will leave them overcome by ‘swinish sleep’ (MAC 1.7.68), allowing them to be easily dispatched. The Lord in SHR , looking at the sleeping and drunk Sly, remarks ‘O monstrous beast, how like a swine he lies!’ (Ind. 1.33), and Paroles insults Bertram, saying, ‘[d]runkenness is his best virtue, for he will be swinedrunk, and in his sleep he does little harm’ (AWW 4.3.249–51). In a somewhat different manner, Mistress Page invokes the feeding pig when she says of herself and Mistress Ford, ‘Wives may be merry and yet honest too. / We do not act that often jest and laugh; / ’Tis old but true: “Still swine eats all the draff” ’ (WIV 4.2.100–2). The proverb she repeats means the quiet swine slip in to eat all the slop – in other words, they are the real troublemakers (Tilley 1950: S681). Hamlet condemns Claudius’s court for drinking and toasting one another too much, helping tarnish the Danes’ reputation for heavy drinking yet further: ‘They clepe us drunkards and with swinish phrase / Soil our addition’ (HAM 1.4.19–20). To denigrate gold, which he now despises having turned misanthrope and hermit, Timon describes its worship by other men: ‘What a god’s gold, that he is worshipped / In a baser temple than where swine feed!’ (TIM 5.1.46–7). Those men who pursue the lure of gold, like the Poet and Painter who have come to share in the treasure Timon has discovered in the ground, are (either in body or in spirit) lower than the sties of pigs. At the conclusion of JN , Philip the Bastard treats with Cardinal Pandulph for peace, but represents the English military superiority in terms of the king’s ability to terrorize the French, ‘To hug with swine, to seek sweet safety out / In vaults and prisons’ (5.2.142–3). Here the idea of the pigsty as the refuge of cowards aligns with the many, many other insults the Bastard levies against the French. Holofernes alludes to Matthew 7.6 (GNV), ‘Give ye not that which is holy to dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they tread them under their feet, and turning again, all to rent you,’ while he attempts witticisms in LLL : in an exchange that ends with his approval of Costard’s ‘conceit’ about ‘piercing a hogshead’ (referring to a butt of wine as well as anyone who is a drunkard), Holofernes calls it ‘pearl enough for a swine’ (4.2.85–7) – that is, it’s a fine quip for someone as lowly as either Costard himself, or Jaquenetta, in the presence of whom the scene plays out, or perhaps both. Pigs and hogs were also thought to be lazy. In LR , Edgar as Poor Tom claims to have been a ‘hog in sloth’ (3.4.91) among his many sins, and Palamon, having recovered enough to fight Arcite, is impatient to do so fearing the world will think ‘That [he] lay fatting like a swine’ (TNK 3.6.12). The grubby, rough environment in which pigs were normally kept serves as a touchstone for Orlando as he complains about being given a poor education and no funds by his brother Oliver: he asks Oliver, ‘Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion have I spent that I should come to such penury?’ (AYL 1.1.35–7). Though well-born, Orlando finds his education fits him to do no better than be a swineherd and suggestively hints at the parable of the prodigal son (Lk. 15.16), although in truth Orlando has not wasted any of his inheritance since 402

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Oliver has given him none. And in LR , when she meets the much-chastened Lear again after his humbling at her sister’s hands, after his raving on the heath, and his time spent with Poor Tom, Cordelia laments that her father has been ‘fain [. . .] To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn / In short and musty straw’ (4.7.38–40). Whether because they were usually destined for butchering, or because they were toothed and dangerous beasts despite their domestication, pigs also provide material to convey bloodiness or bloodthirstiness. The hunched back of King Richard III, along with his strong association with the boar and his clear willingness to kill those who are in his way, means he is repeatedly compared to various types of swine, as when Margaret calls him an ‘abortive, rooting hog’ (R3 1.3.227), while Richmond refers to him as ‘foul swine’ (5.2.10). These are likely both allusions to Richard’s identification with the wild boar (his heraldic emblem was a white boar, meant to express strength and purity), but they reflect the ways in which all forms of piggishness are associated with filth and destruction. In VEN , the goddess worries that Adonis hunts the boar, ‘churlish swine’ (616), instead of safer prey, and indeed the boar becomes Adonis’ lover in a way that she cannot when ‘the loving swine’ gores his ‘soft groin’ (1115–16). Aaron uses the pig’s squeal at its butchering to mock the Nurse who brings him his newly-born son as he kills her: ‘ “Wheak, wheak!” – so cries a pig prepared to the spit’ (TIT 4.2.148). One of the witches in MAC greets her sisters with the information that she has been ‘[k]illing swine’ (1.3.2): AR3 notes that this was thought to be a common practice of witches (136, n. 2), but it is also a moment that reminds audiences that butchering swine was thought to coarsen those who did so, making them more likely to engage in depraved acts and desires. Lest we forget that swine are enormous and potentially dangerous beasts, Puck reminds us that a hog can be a terrifying animal when he promises to turn into one to torment Bottom (MND 3.1.105, 107). While he is not actually trying to say ‘pig’, Fluellen’s Welsh accent turns the word ‘big’ into ‘pig’ in H5: his attempts to defend the way he pronounces Alexander the Great’s name, or as he puts it, Alexander the Big, which comes out ‘Alexander the Pig’, turns into pure comedy (4.7.12–13). Generally calling someone swine or pig in the plays is less amusing. In 2H4, Falstaff compares himself to ‘a sow that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one’ (1.2.11–12), a strange way of boasting about his all-consuming wit. The image, while perhaps characteristic of Falstaff’s boisterous humour, also suggests a real problem for swineherds: pigs, especially sows, do occasionally eat their young. Even were that not the subtext here, Topsell notes that swineherds must be vigilant to aid piglets that have been ‘overlaid’ by their dams, lest they be smothered (1658: 531). Thus, Falstaff inadvertently – and probably accurately – casts himself as a dangerously bestial mother-figure. (C) Pliny recounts a tale about pigs recognizing the voice of their swineherd when stolen and sinking the ship they are on to return to him, and he notes that it provides more kinds of meat for the table than any other animal (NH 8.77.207, 208, 209 [1940: 145–7). Topsell also notes that swine are called by a variety of epithets, many of 403

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which have to do with negative associations: he includes clamorous, horrible, dirt-lover, unclean, filthy, impatient, greedy and sluggish among others (1658: 514). Their habit of rooting in the earth is a threat to crops, yet Topsell spends several pages on the many kinds of fruits, nuts and other substances they can be fed to produce tastier flesh, hinting at how pigs are the target of contradictory perceptions. Malcolmson and Mastoris (1998) give a general history of pigs in England. Fitzpatrick (2008) discusses Jewish dietary laws in MV as does Goldstein (2013: 67–92; 2014). Quint (1982) uses the ‘Alexander the Pig’ scene in H5 to analyse Shakespeare’s position with regard to history, humanism and poetry. Ungerer (1985) links Shylock’s reference to a ‘gaping pig’ to images of Jews as pigs, and Price (2002) considers the insults, including ‘hog’ and ‘swine’, hurled at Richard in R3. KR

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T tame. (A) Domesticated, removed from a wild state and brought under human control. Although the OED remarks that the term is only rarely applied to humans (1a), in the plays it is frequently used to characterize humans, especially when applied to men, as compliant, cowardly or dull. Taming scenarios in Shakespeare’s works, whether involving humans or animals, show strong familiarity with contemporary animal training practices. Manuals and treatises on gaining control over horses, dogs, falcons and other creatures to teach them how to assist humans in various enterprises are numerous in the early modern period. But tameness had religious associations as well, in biblical narratives and in the accounts of pious humans who miraculously survive encounters with wild beasts. Thus, the Bible places the authority of humans over animals in Adam’s right to dominion over other creatures (Gen. 1.26), and relates the story of Daniel, whose absolute faith in God and insistence on prayer causes him to be thrown into a den of lions (Dan. 6), but who is saved from death by God’s intervention when an angel closes the lions’ jaws. While the story itself is not precisely one of tamed wild animals, many Renaissance paintings depicted Daniel surrounded by complacent and peaceful lions, hinting that his prayers indeed tamed them. St Francis was reputed to have tamed the wolf of Gubbio (the story is included in the fourteenth-century The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi; 1910: 60–4), and St Jerome tamed a lion by removing a thorn from its paw (probably an adaptation of the Aesop fable involving Androcles and a lion). Other animals are reportedly tamed in tales with sexual elements – the unicorn is drawn to and tamed by a virgin’s purity, while Aesop includes a fable about a lion who surrenders teeth and claws to be with a woman he loves (Perry Index 140) that has a long afterlife in Renaissance art and emblems. (B) Taming animals in the Renaissance involved a wide variety of techniques, many of which involved cruelty. The distinction between taming and training is difficult to parse: some animals (horses and most dogs, for example) benefit from being fully tamed, that is from having their aggressive tendencies excised through careful management and repetitive schooling; others, like falcons or mastiffs, must retain some of their predatory instincts if they are to be useful to humans. Training for these animals is designed to make them milder, but not fully remove them from their wild natures. As in the case of human tameness, the problem is finding the fine line between not enough and too much. The most obvious play in which the idea of taming and tameness is central is SHR . Petruccio employs many techniques recognizable to audiences from the training manuals to render Katherina compliant. He starves her; beats her; takes her away from her family 405

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and home; his ‘lessons’ are repeated over and over until she accepts them; and he maintains a happy, encouraging demeanour throughout. ‘I am he am born to tame you, Kate’ he announces (2.1.278). He pretends to the assembled company that she is ‘tame’ behind the scenes, if shrewish in public (2.1.316); and he asserts in a soliloquy: This is a way to kill a wife with kindness, And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humour. He that knows better how to tame a shrew, Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show (4.1.197–200) The violence that registers both in Petruccio’s words (‘this is a way to kill a wife with kindness’) and in his actions (denying his wife food and clothing and subjecting her to humiliation) signals the importance of the taming process to the peaceful order of patriarchal marriage and households. Aristotle argued that humans equally required taming, via an education; in the Nicomachean Ethics, he makes the case that it matters less what habits a child is taught than that the child learns to control his instincts in some way (1962: 1103, b22). Katherina threatens the social order with her outspokenness and wilfulness – a woman cannot, the ideologies of gender dictate, be allowed the latitude to challenge male authority any more than a horse or dog can. Yet Petruccio’s methods have to result not in Katherina’s silence, but in her internalization and embrace of social norms. Taming is thus part dominance, part bonding process. Tranio and Lucentio joke that Hortensio has ‘gone unto the taming school’, of which ‘Petruccio is the master / That teacheth tricks eleven-and-twenty long / To tame a shrew and charm her chattering tongue’ (4.2.55, 57–9). There Hortensio will learn to woo and win his widow. All this jesting among Bianca’s suitors perhaps reassures her as she listens that she, unlike her sister, will need no such training. But at the play’s conclusion, Katherina shows emphatically that Bianca’s education has been neglected to her own and her husband’s detriment when he and Hortensio lose their wager to Petruccio. If shrew-taming requires ‘charm’, as the quote above indicates, then Petruccio has the magic for it, and can use it to increase his household wealth and contentment. Stephano imagines exhibiting and profiting from taking Caliban to Naples if he can ‘keep him tame’ (TMP 2.2.67–8). Since Caliban has already been educated, taught to speak and controlled by Prospero, but all to no apparent avail given his hostility to the magician, Stephano’s likelihood of success is low. The butler merely imagines bringing Caliban out of his fit by administering wine, ‘taming’ him by getting him drunk enough to be manipulated. In this fashion, the play indicates Caliban’s resistance to the kind of taming that creates civilization, associating him instead with that which strips men of independence (liquor) and makes them more, not less, bestial. In TRO , Nestor takes Ulysses’ advice to show up the proud and insolent Achilles by using ‘blockish’ and ‘dull, brainless Ajax’ to fight Hector instead (1.3.376, 382). ‘Two curs shall tame each other’ concludes Nestor (1.3.391), making the over-aggressive warriors equally animal and equally uncivilized. 406

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Gardiner in H8 gives us a moment of insight into horse-taming methods when he advises a strict reaction against the Church’s reformers: ‘for those that tame wild horses / Pace ’em not in their hands to make ’em gentle, / But stop their mouths with stubborn bits and spur ’em / Till they obey the manage’ (5.2.55–8). Again, the threat of civil disorder inspires Gardiner to advocate the most punitive of training techniques, one not necessarily supported by the horsemanship manuals of the day, which recognized that harsh treatment was unlikely to win the trained animal to affective bonds. But that might well be the message, since Protestant English audiences listening to this scene would understand that harsh bits can result in more determined rebellion, just as Protestants elsewhere in Europe would historically resist Catholicism with bloodshed. At the heart of the concept of civilization is the idea of taming, whether individuals need to tame their ‘wild’ impulses in order to cooperate, or a society must tame those who rebel against its rules to enforce order. While this would tend to suggest that taming is a positive, constructive process, it necessarily also works counter to cultural ideologies that demand assertive, even violent masculinity in men, leaving the ‘tamed’ male in an ambiguous position – hence the negative connotations the term has in many cases where it works against qualities like ambition, warlike aggression or independence. Overall, being tame is good; being too tame is not. Rosalind scoffs at Silvius, calling him a ‘tame snake’ (AYL 4.3.69), and Demetrius calls Lysander ‘a tame man’ (MND 3.2.259), both slights and both examples of the way tameness violates codes of masculine authority. King Richard II tries to assert his natural right to dominate his subjects when he tells Mowbray ‘Lions make leopards tame’ (R2 1.1.174), but he is wrong about his own nature (he is no lion on many levels – neither as brave as he imagines nor as capable of dominating others, as the remainder of the play makes clear). He is equally wrong about Mowbray’s capacity to be tamed – Mowbray immediately notes that the lion cannot make the leopard change his spots (1.1.175). (C) Graham (2020) discusses the broader context of Renaissance training theories; Hodgdon (2010), Boose (1991), Heaney (1998), Shea and Yachnin (20111) and Boehrer (2020) all discuss SHR in terms of animal taming or training. KR tench. (A) A fish (Tinca tinca) resembling a carp, found in fresh or brackish water throughout Britain (except Scotland) and north-western Europe. Unusually slimy and thus difficult to hold when caught, it was once known as the ‘doctor fish’ or ‘nurse fish’, since its mucus was thought to be medicinal (Wheeler 1969: 183; Davies et al. 2004: 91). The tench has fallen out of favour as a food fish in Britain, though it is still eaten on the continent. (B) In 1H4, carriers travelling to London complain that the inn they have stayed in overnight is flea-infested. ‘I think this be the most villainous house in all London road for fleas’, complains the Second Carrier; ‘I am stung like a tench’ (2.1.14–15). Kastan (AR3: 185, n. 15) states that the tench has markings that resemble flea-bites; Bevington 407

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(2008: 160) suggests that such markings are likely to be caused by parasites. Neither explanation for the tench’s supposed spots is wholly satisfactory, as marine biologists fail to mention any such markings in descriptions of the fish, confirmed by photographs and illustrations. Its absence of spots, however, may be the point. The First Carrier dismisses his colleague’s simile and quips, ‘Like a tench? By the mass, there is ne’er a king christen could be better bit than I have been since the first cock’ (2.1.16–18). He means that even a king, who usually has the best of things, has not been as well-bitten as he. As for the tench, it may be best to accept Baskervill’s observation (1929: 95) that fish names are simply a source of humour in Elizabethan England. KE tercel, tercel-gentle, tassel-gentle. The male of a hawk or falcon, thought to be so named because the male is about a third as large as the female (from Latin tertius, third). When Pandarus finally brings Troilus and Cressida together, he predicts that they will soon mate: ‘Nay, you shall fight your hearts out ere I part you. The falcon as the tercel, for all the ducks i’the river’ (TRO 3.2.50–1). In the specialized language of hawking, the falcon is always assumed to be female. Pandarus means that he is willing to bet all the ducks in the river that Cressida (the falcon) will be as eager as Troilus (the tercel) to engage in fighting, a euphemism for love-making. Ducks are typical prey of falcons, however, which allows a second, more predatory, meaning to emerge: the two lovers will engage with each other as eagerly as falcons hunt ducks. Juliet calls Romeo her tercel in the balcony scene of ROM : ‘Hist, Romeo, hist! O, for a falconer’s voice / To lure this tassel-gentle back again’ (2.2.158–9). A ‘tassel-’ or ‘tercelgentle’ is so named because the (peregrine) falcon is considered more noble, i.e., more gentle, than the goshawk, in keeping with the class distinctions that characterize all animals that are part of aristocratic and royal sports. Juliet wishes that she could bring Romeo back to her simply by calling him – and indeed she can. When she calls his name, he responds, ‘My nyas?’ (2.2.167). A nyas is a nestling, thus continuing the metaphor of falconry that Juliet begins and implying that she is still young in the ways of love. KE thrush. Small song birds of the Passerine family (perching songbirds), mentioned only once in Autolycus’s song in WT : ‘The lark, that tirra-lirra chants, / With heigh, with heigh, the thrush and the jay, / Are summer songs for me and my aunts / While we lay tumbling in the hay’ (4.3.9–12). Since the group of birds identified as thrushes was quite large, it is not clear which specific bird is meant here, but unlike the harsher call of the jay, any thrush’s song would have been more melodious, closer to the trill of the lark. Autolycus’s ditty plays on the budding of sexual interest in spring, and includes references – doxy in an earlier stanza but also jay – to prostitutes or loose women (clearly confirmed by the above stanza). KR 408

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tiger. (A) Like the lion, a very large member of the family Felidae, native to central and Southeast Asia and far eastern Russia, an area referred to by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as ‘Hyrcania’ (following Pliny). They had almost certainly never seen Panthera tigris in the flesh. The tiger’s reputation for untameable, fierce wildness (often called rage) and for exceptional speed was gleaned from classical literature; the Bible makes no mention of the tiger. Medieval bestiaries show it with a spotted or speckled coat and report that its speed is so great that the River Tigris is named for it. When in the sixteenth century Europeans first came upon the South American jaguar, they called it a tiger. (B) The tiger’s reputation is such that a bare naming of it, or a reference to Hyrcania, is sufficient to prompt hearers’ imagination of ferocity, as when Timon lists it among the fearsome beasts – ‘tigers, dragons, wolves and bears’ (TIM 4.3.188) – that he urges Mother Earth to bring forth instead of ‘ungrateful man’ (4.3.187). In TNK the Messenger conveys the idea of warriorly strength and prowess by stating simply that Arcite is ‘stout-hearted’ when he is in repose, ‘[b]ut when he stirs, a tiger’ (4.2.130, 131). In 3H6, York twice reaches for a metaphoric tiger to express Queen Margaret’s implacable cruelty. ‘O, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’ (1.4.137), he exclaims; ‘How couldst thou drain the lifeblood of the child / To bid the father wipe his eyes withal, /And yet be seen to bear a woman’s face?’ (1.4.138–40). He invokes the tiger again in a charge that echoes Dido’s accusation in the Aeneid, that Aeneas was nursed by Hyrcanian tigers (AR3: 219, n. 155): ‘you are more inhuman,’ declares York, ‘more inexorable, / O, ten times more than tigers of Hyrcania’ (1.4.154–5). York’s words have literary repercussions. Robert Greene paraphrases them in Greenes Groats-worth of Witte (1592a: F1v) to lambast Shakespeare as ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you’. One suspects that Greene is more envious of Shakespeare’s ability to create an arresting phrase than intent on accusing Shakespeare of wild ferocity. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare continues the ‘conversation’ with Greene in HAM , when Hamlet and the players discuss a speech in which Aeneas tells Dido about Priam’s slaughter. Hamlet starts to quote the speech – ‘The rugged Pyrrhus like th’ Hyrcanian beast [. . .]’ (2.2.388) – but breaks off, saying, ‘ ’Tis not so’ (2.2.389), and starts again: ‘The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms [. . .] did the night resemble’ (2.2.390–1). Thompson and Taylor (AR3: 267, n. 389) suggest that Shakespeare is here dismissing Greene’s words. In another contrast between woman’s assumed gentleness and the ferocity of the tiger, Albany asks, horrified by Goneril and Regan’s cruelty to their father, ‘What have you done? / Tigers, not daughters’ (LR 4.2.40–1). In her complaint to Time, whom she calls a ‘ceaseless lackey to eternity’ (LUC 967), Lucrece prays that Tarquin will be the prey of the sex he has victimized: ‘let mild women to him lose their mildness, / Wilder to him than tigers in their wildness’ (979–80). When she implores Tamora to save her from death or violation, Lavinia begins, ‘O Tamora, thou bearest a woman’s face –’ (TIT 2.2.136). But when Tamora’s sons urge their mother to resist the plea and harden her heart, Lavinia asks, ‘When did 409

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the tiger’s young ones teach the dam? / O, do not learn her wrath’ (2.2.142–3), thus implying that Tamora is a tiger with a woman’s face. The persistent association of tigers and women in Shakespeare’s plays may reflect the existence of legends associated specifically with the female tiger, who was said to be as swift as the wind in her pursuit of hunters who stole her cubs. To slow her down, according to Pliny, the hunters would throw one of the cubs to her (1940: 51 [8.25.66]); according to Topsell, echoing medieval bestiaries, the hunters would throw a mirror to her, so that either she would stop and admire herself or she would be deceived and think that the tiger she saw in the mirror was her cub (1658: 549–50). The tiger’s reputation for speed enhances its reputation for rage and ferocity and explains why ships, especially warships, are named for it. (The rationale for naming an inn ‘the Tiger’ at ERR 3.1.95 is not entirely clear.) When officers bring him before Orsino, Antonio is described as ‘he that did the Tiger board, / When your young nephew Titus lost his leg’ (TN 5.1.58–9). The name of the ship exacerbates the ferocity with which Antonio is already tainted. The First Witch in MAC seems intent on revenge against ‘the rump-fed ronyon’ and plans to harm her husband, who has ‘to Aleppo gone, the Master o’ th’ Tiger’ (1.3.6–7). When Demetrius vows to run away from Helena, leaving her at the mercy of wild beasts in the forest, she declares that the old myth of Apollo pursuing Daphne will have to be reversed. It is now Daphne pursuing Apollo: ‘the mild hind / Makes speed to catch the tiger’ (MND 2.1.232–3). Helena’s bitterly ironic expression echoes Queen Elizabeth’s cry in R3 when she discovers that her two young sons are now in Richard’s ‘care’, from which there is no escape: ‘Ay me! I see the ruin of my house: / The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind’ (2.4.50–1). Menenius calls the fury of the Roman mob, on the verge of rushing off to seize Coriolanus, ‘tigerfooted rage’ (COR 3.1.313) and predicts that they will, when it is too late, discover the folly of their haste. Arcite asks his three knights to intercede with Mars to grant them the qualities necessary for victory in the approaching battle: ‘Require of him the hearts of lions and / The breath of tigers, yea the fierceness too, / Yea, the speed also – to go on, I mean: / Else wish we to be snails’ (TNK 5.1.39–42). In his breathless prayer for ‘breath’, by which he most likely means endurance, Arcite as an afterthought has added the two qualities for which the tiger is best known, its swiftness and its ferocity. Like the Messenger in TNK , Henry V contrasts stillness and tiger-like action after he urges his English soldiers to go ‘Once more into the breach’ (H5 3.1.1). During peacetime, ‘modest stillness and humility’ (3.1.4) are appropriate and becoming, he says. But when at war, men need to ‘imitate the action of the tiger: / Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood, / Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage’ (3.1.6–8). The assumption that it is always ravenous, always ready to devour, may be the tiger’s most important metaphoric attribute. Lucius calls Aaron ‘[t]his ravenous tiger, this accursed devil’ (TIT 5.3.5), implying something inexhaustible about Aaron’s capacity for evil. Lucius also calls Tamora a ‘ravenous tiger’ (5.3.194), although the emphasis in her case is on bestiality. Lucius decrees that she will have no funeral or burial; rather, he commands, ‘throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey: / Her life was beastly and 410

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devoid of pity’ (5.3.197–8). Lucius’s characterization of Aaron and Tamora echoes words that Titus utters in an earlier scene. Hearing that Lucius has been banished, Titus bitterly asks him, ‘dost thou not perceive / That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers? / Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey / But me and mine’ (3.1.53–6). He concludes, ‘How happy art thou then / From these devourers to be banished’ (3.1.56–7). When he serves up Chiron and Demetrius in a pie at the banquet for Tamora, Titus turns her into a literal devourer of human flesh. Romeo threatens to tear Balthazar ‘joint by joint’ and scatter his limbs around ‘this hungry churchyard’ if the servant returns to Juliet’s tomb (ROM 5.3.35–6). That Romeo sees himself as a tiger desperate with hunger is made explicit at the end of his threat: ‘The time and my intents are savage-wild, / More fierce and more inexorable far / Than empty tigers or the roaring sea’ (5.3.37–9). In her complaint against time, Lucrece admits that it is time’s glory to reveal truth and to right injustice, even ‘[t]o slay the tiger that doth live by slaughter’ (LUC 953). But when it works ‘mischief’, why can time not ‘return to make amends?’ (960–1), she mourns. The speaker of SON 19 adopts a less subservient attitude, commanding time to ‘[p]luck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws’ (3) and forbidding time to wrinkle his ‘love’s fair brow’ (9). In a way typical of witchcraft’s reversals of the normal and expected, the tiger invoked by the witches in MAC is not the slaughterer but the slaughtered. Add to the cauldron, chants the Third Witch, ‘a tiger’s chawdron’, that is, its entrails (4.1.33). The tiger’s reputation for the most extreme ferocity makes it rhetorically useful for figures of exaggeration, paradox and impossibility. In order to capture the effect of Orpheus’s lute, Proteus claims that its sound ‘could soften steel and stones, / Make tigers tame and huge leviathans / Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands’ (TGV 3.2.78–80). Venus attributes Orpheus-like power to Adonis’s singing: when ‘[t]o recreate [i.e., refresh] himself [. . .] he hath sung, / The tiger would be tame and gently hear him’ (VEN 1095–6). There are no monsters in Cupid’s pageant, says Troilus to soothe Cressida’s fears, except the monstrous vows made by lovers, ‘to weep seas, live in fire, eat rocks, tame tigers’ (TRO 3.2.74–5). Pandulph seeks the strongest terms he can find in which to advise King Philip of France to renounce his new alliance with the English king, John. You would do better to ‘hold a serpent by the tongue, / A cased lion by the mortal paw, / A fasting tiger safer by the tooth’ (JN 3.1.258–60) than to continue the alliance, he declares. Menenius states of Coriolanus, ‘There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger’ (COR 5.4.27–8). Prince Edward claims that King John’s refusal to relinquish the crown proves him to be a tyrant. Rather than a ‘father, king or shepherd of thy realm’, he accuses John, you are ‘one that tears her entrails with thy hands / And like a thirsty tiger suck’st her blood’ (E3 6.119–21). When he exhorts the Greek army to continue the war against the Trojans, Nestor observes that ‘storms of fortune’ (TRO 1.3.47) separate those who have true valour from those who only seem to have it. When the day is bright, he observes, ‘The herd hath more annoyance by the breese / Than by the tiger’ (1.3.48–9). The breese, with a pun on ‘breeze’ (versus the storm winds), is the gadfly; Nestor implies that most people only seem valorous and combat what are minor problems, while the few who are truly valorous confront and 411

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defy even the fiercest storms, ‘when the splitting wind / Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks / And flies flee under shade’ (1.3.49–51). In another association between Queen Margaret and the tiger, Henry VI declares that her grief is so great that the most hardened audience will be moved: ‘Her tears will pierce into a marble heart; / The tiger will be mild whiles she doth mourn’ (3H6 3.1.38–9). Nonetheless, he concludes, her request for aid from the French king will be in vain. (C) Pliny is responsible for the early modern association between the tiger and Hyrcania, an area south of the Caspian Sea in modern Iran and Turkestan, and for belief in the tiger’s swiftness (1940: 50–1 [8.25]). For a representative entry on the tiger in a medieval bestiary, see White (1954: 12–13); the entry claims that the beast gets its name from the swiftly flowing Tigris river and recounts the story of the hunters’ use of a mirror to distract the tigress, who pursues them after the theft of her cubs. Guillim (1638: 203) moralizes the story: ‘thus are many deceived of the substance, whiles they are much busied about the shadowes’. Topsell admits that not much is known about tigers, which are ‘strangers in Europe’ (1658: 549); the illustration in his entry (1658: 547) shows a big cat with lozenge-shaped markings rather than stripes. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser represents Maleger, the embodiment of rage or lack of self-control, riding a tiger (2001: 2.11.20). In 1646, Browne cast doubt on the swiftness of tigers, using new evidence from eyewitness accounts (1981: 1.290). Milton twice associates Satan with the tiger in Paradise Lost (1667). When he first arrives in Eden, Satan sees lions, tigers, ounces, pards and bears frisking before Adam and Eve (1998: 4.344–5); shortly afterwards, Satan assumes as a disguise the forms of various animals, appearing among other creatures ‘as a tiger, who by chance hath spied / In some purlieu two gentle fawns at play’ (1998: 4.403–4). Loomis (1956) and M. Taylor (1964) find evidence that Shakespeare’s references to a ship called the Tiger in TN and MAC point to an actual ship. Sommers (1960) investigates the implications of calling Rome ‘a wilderness of tigers’. KE toad. (A) A tailless amphibian (Bufo bufo) belonging, like the frog, to the order Anura and, unlike the frog, living mostly on land and returning to water only for the purposes of breeding. Toads and frogs were often lumped together in Shakespeare’s day. The toad’s physiology and habits were not well understood. Its unprepossessing appearance (its ‘warty’ or spotted skin, its squatting posture) and behaviour (its preference for dark, moist habitats; its hibernation in winter; its ability to puff up or swell when threatened; its rather awkward hopping or creeping) were interpreted as clear indications that it was poisonous. Toads do, in fact, secrete a toxin from their spots, which are actually large, visible pores. Bufotoxin can kill very small animals, although it merely causes allergic irritation to human beings. Most importantly for the toad, bufotoxin makes its skin distasteful to predators, although rats and hedgehogs, buzzards and owls, manage to avoid the skin and consume the toad’s inner organs. Superstitious lore surrounds the toad, to which biblical and classical representations contribute. 412

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(B) Largely because the toad was regarded as loathsome and assumed to be venomous, ‘toad’ is invariably a term of opprobrium in Shakespeare’s works. The term ‘spotted’ signifies impurity or adulteration, whether moral or physical, in the early modern period. Edgar’s description of his brother as ‘[a] most toad-spotted traitor’ (LR 5.3.136) is condemnation indeed: he means that Edmund is treacherous, corrupt and malevolent. Richard III is called a toad more often than any other character in Shakespeare’s works. In 3H6, Queen Margaret says to Richard that he resembles neither of his parents, ‘[b]ut is like a foul misshapen stigmatic, / Marked by the Destinies to be avoided, / As venom toads or lizards’ dreadful stings’ (2.2.136–8). The shape of Richard’s body, that is, serves as a ‘natural’ warning that he is evil, just as the toad’s shape warns that it is poisonous. Before Lady Anne encounters Richard in R3 1.2, she curses him in language that prepares for her later calling him a toad: ‘More direful hap betide that hated wretch’, she prays, ‘Than I can wish to wolves, to spiders, toads / Or any creeping venomed thing that lives’ (1.2.17, 19–20). Shortly afterwards, their stichomythic ‘wooing’ dialogue nearing an end, she spits at him, wishing her spit were poisonous. Richard declares, ‘Never came poison from so sweet a place’ (1.2.149), and she replies, ‘Never hung poison on a fouler toad’ (1.2.150). Queen Margaret, by this time the widow of Henry VI, shortly afterwards calls Richard a ‘bottled spider’, a ‘poisonous bunch-backed toad’ (1.3.241, 245). The modifier ‘bunch-backed’ hovers between Richard and the toad, referring primarily to the ‘bunch’ or hump on Richard’s back, but also, like ‘bottled’, hinting at the swollenness associated with the effects of poison. Toads do, in fact, puff themselves up, but it is a defence mechanism, designed to make them look larger and more menacing; it has nothing to do with poison. Knowing that he is responsible for killing his brother George, Duke of Clarence, Richard’s own mother demands of him, ‘Thou toad, thou toad, where is thy brother Clarence’? (4.4.145). Queen Elizabeth recalls and repeats Margaret’s epithets for Richard after his murder of the young princes in the Tower, her sons: ‘O, thou didst prophesy’, she says to Margaret, ‘the time would come / That I should wish for thee to help me curse / That bottled spider, that foul bunch-backed toad’ (4.4.79–81).Tamora in TIT embellishes the horror of the place to which Lavinia and Bassianus have allegedly brought her. ‘They told me’, she claims, ‘here at dead time of the night / A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes, / Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins, / Would make [. . .] fearful and confused cries’ (2.2.99–102), driving the hearer mad. The assumption that toads’ bodies are swollen perhaps explains the trajectory of Apemantus’s vituperative exchange with Titus: ‘Would thou wouldst burst!’ (TIM 4.3.368), he exclaims; shortly afterwards, he calls Timon ‘Beast!’, to which Timon responds, ‘Slave!’ which Apemantus crowns by calling Timon ‘Toad!’ (4.3.370). That the very mud in which toads live absorbs their poison is implied by Lucrece’s lament against the destruction of innocence: ‘Why should [. . .] toads infect fair founts with venom mud?’ (LUC 848, 850), she mourns. The most surprising piece of toad lore in the early modern period, however, turns the toad’s association with poison to good uses. Toads were believed to have a stone in their heads that could detect poison and also act as an antidote to it. Duke Senior, celebrating 413

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with his followers the freedom afforded by a life of exile in the forest, declares that ‘the uses of adversity’ are sweet, ‘Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head’ (AYL 2.1.12, 13–14). Toadstones – in practice, any stone that resembled a toad in colour or shape – were often set in rings or brooches; hence the Duke speaks of ‘a precious jewel’, which could be used by a ruler, for instance, to test the safety of food or drink. The toad’s repellent nature is emphasized by the rhetorical company it keeps. As Margaret’s curses suggest, toads and spiders, also assumed to be venomous, are frequently paired. So, too, are toads and snakes. Indeed, Topsell’s entry on the toad is found in his volume on serpents (1658: 726–31). Guiderius remains unperturbed when he hears Cloten’s name: ‘I cannot tremble at it. Were it Toad, or Adder, Spider, / ’Twould move me sooner’ (CYM 4.2.90–1), he says. The misanthropic Timon also associates the toad with poisonous serpents and other creeping things as he digs in the earth, which as the ‘Common mother’ (TIM 4.3.176) feeds her children. But, he warns, this same mother also ‘[e]ngenders the black toad and adder blue, / The gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm’ (4.3.180–1). Toads are typically brown or grey; ‘black’ here may be metaphorical. The ingredients of the witches’ cauldron in MAC include parts of snakes, newts, lizards and other noxious creatures. But the toad is the first ingredient to be mentioned: Round about the cauldron go; In the poisoned entrails throw. Toad, that under cold stone Days and nights has thirty-one, Sweltered venom sleeping got, Boil thou first i’th’ charmed pot. (4.1.4–9) The witches imply that the toad exudes venom into the ground as it hibernates. Cursing Prospero, Caliban reveals that the witch Sycorax, too, used the toad in her incantations; again, it is first in the list: ‘All the charms / Of Sycorax – toads, beetles, bats – light on you’ (TMP 1.2.340–1), Caliban cries. Topsell’s judgement – ‘The toad is ugly and unpleasant’ (1658: 727) – seems an understatement in light of the creature’s role as the epitome of loathsomeness in several of Shakespeare’s plays. To convince Lear and his company that he is mad, Edgar in disguise as Poor Tom claims to eat creeping things that are ordinarily taboo as food, among them ‘the swimming frog, the toad, [and] the tadpole’ (LR 3.4.125–6). So, too, Autolycus highlights the desire to eat ‘adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed’ as a selling point for a lurid ballad about a ‘usurer’s wife [. . .] brought to bed of twenty money-bags’ (WT 4.4.263–5). When the Nurse in TIT brings Tamora’s mixed-race baby to Aaron, she announces, ‘Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad / Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime’ (4.2.69–70). To convince him of Juliet’s serious intent (and perhaps to pique his jealousy), the Nurse in ROM tells Romeo that although the nobleman Paris 414

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would like to woo her, ‘she, good soul, had as lief see a toad, a very toad, as see him’ (2.4.194–5). Juliet herself speaks of the ‘loathed toad’, which exchanges eyes, it is said, with the lark. ‘O, now I would they had changed voices too’ (3.5.31, 32), she exclaims, protesting that the toad’s croak would be more appropriate than the lark’s song for announcing Romeo’s departure. In a vivid expression of his contempt for Menelaus, Thersites lumps the toad with other animals that he clearly regards as insignificant at best, repulsive at worst: ‘To be a dog, a mule, a cat, a fitchew, a toad, a lizard, an owl, a puttock, or a herring without a roe, I would not care; but to be Menelaus! I would conspire against destiny’ (TRO 5.1.59–62). Bevington (AR3: 403, n. 5.1.59–61) supplies a rationale for each of these animals, arguing that toads are included for their ‘loathsomeness to the touch’. One might say, however, that the toad’s repulsiveness is over-determined in the early modern period; it is not necessary to attribute it solely to the creature’s ‘slimy’ skin. Othello exclaims after Iago’s insinuations that he would ‘rather be a toad / And live upon the vapour of a dungeon’ than share Desdemona’s body with another man (OTH 3.3.274–5). Dungeons and other dark, dank, foul places are assumed to be the habitat of toads. The early modern prejudice against the toad extends to every aspect of its behaviour and appearance. Even its ungainly hopping is grounds for condemning it. Richard II asks the ‘gentle earth’ to turn against his traitorous enemies: ‘let thy spiders that suck up thy venom / And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way’ (R2 3.2.14–15), he prays, ‘heavygaited’ implying that toads move without grace or fluidity. Othello represents the mating of toads – which naturalists describe as a ‘[m]ating ball’ resembling ‘wrestling matches [that] can involve as many as ten males all trying to displace each other over a single female’ (Beebee and Griffiths 2000: 95–6) – as deeply repulsive. I could bear with patience any affliction, Othello says, except one that dries up the fountain of my love, which I then must discard, ‘[o]r keep it as a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in!’ (OTH 4.2.62–3). Depraved sexuality, he implies, has corrupted the pure fountain of his love. The proud Ajax, to Nestor’s sardonic amusement, declares, ‘I do hate a proud man as I hate the engendering of toads’ (TRO 2.3.156–7). Ajax seems to have a particular detestation of toads, calling Thersites ‘Toadstool’ (2.1.19), an epithet that combines poisonous mushrooms and toads’ excrement. (C) Pliny warns that wine in which a salamander or toad has died becomes poisonous (1940: 609 [11.116]), a piece of lore that suggests to Aelian a way of disposing of an enemy (1958–9: 3.338). Topsell reports that ‘[t]he Women-witches of ancient time’ made much use of toads in their plots to poison people (1658: 730). Unusually for the early modern period, however, Topsell seems to have a sneaking admiration for the toad, which he calls ‘the most noble kinde of Frog, most venomous and remarkable for courage and strength’ (1658: 726). At Revelation 16.13–14, frogs (a category including toads) come out of the mouth of the Beast, the Dragon and the false prophet, verses that may contribute to the idea of the toad’s association with the devil and hence its role as witches’ familiar. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s Satan is discovered ‘[s]quat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve’ during his first attempt to induce her to fall (1998: 4.798). Adler (1981) offers 415

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an exhaustive discussion of toads and frogs in Elizabethan literature and culture, with particular attention to the association of toads with jealousy in OTH . Spenser’s Malbecco, jealous of his wife’s satyr lovers, chews on toads and frogs, feeding the suspicion ‘[t]hat doth with curelesse care consume the hart’ (2001: 3.10.59). On the toadstone, see Crump (2015: 136) and Duffin (2010). Volpone, in the role of mountebank, wears a ‘saffron jewel with the toad-stone in it’ (Jonson 1999b: 2.5.12). In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne suggests that the toadstone is not a jewel but a petrified bone from the toad’s forehead (1981: 1.211). Slotkin (2007) treats the epithet ‘toad’ as an element in the clash between aesthetics and ethics governing the representation of Richard III. VienneGuerrin (2016: 406–7) discusses the effect of using ‘toad’ as a direct insult in the plays. KE tortoise. A land-dwelling, four-footed reptile with a large, domed shell belonging to the order Chelonia, which also includes turtles and terrapins. Tortoises are no longer native to the British Isles; the European pond tortoise became extinct here 5,000 years ago, according to fossil remains (Beebee and Griffiths 2000: 176). However, tortoises would have been familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. A story well known to them concerns the death of Aeschylus, killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald head, mistaking it for a rock (Valerius Maximus 2000: 2.375 [9.12]). The shells of tortoises, if not the live animals, were relatively easy to import and were used for medicinal and decorative purposes. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust owns a tortoiseshell box (Garratt and Hambling 2016: 32), and in images of apothecaries’ shops and curiosity cabinets, the precursors of museums, a tortoise shell can often be seen hanging from the ceiling (see Rhodes and Sawday 2000: fig. 46). Romeo, seeking poison to end his life, remembers seeing an apothecary’s ‘needy shop’ in which ‘a tortoise hung, / An alligator stuffed, and other skins / Of ill-shaped fishes’ (ROM 5.1.42–4). The tortoise was also familiar to Britons from Aesopian fables. Prospero seems to allude to the tale of the hare and the tortoise when, frustrated by Caliban’s slowness to respond to his calls, he says to his servant, ‘Come forth I say, there’s other business for thee. / Come, thou tortoise, when?’ (TMP 1.2.316–17). Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 409) argues that the point is the contrast between Caliban’s slowness and Ariel’s swiftness. Prospero has evidently forgotten the fable’s validation of the tortoise. It is possible that the epithet ‘tortoise’ and the later scene in which Caliban, with his ‘fish-like smell’, hides under a gaberdine (2.2.26) owes something to Jonson’s Volpone, in which Sir Politic Would-be hides under a tortoise shell when his creditors come looking for him (1999b: 5.4.53–73). Peregrine, to throw them off the scent, declares to the suspicious merchants that he has come to buy the tortoise, then claims that the tortoise is a fish, and then assures them that they ‘may strike him [. . .] and tread upon him. He’ll bear a cart’ (1999b: 5.4.66–7). KE trout. (A) Any of a number of freshwater fish belonging to the genera Salvelinus and the family Salmonidae, trout are usually found in the cold waters of streams and lakes. 416

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Trout appear only twice in the plays, and both times are caught by ‘tickling’ or stroking their gills in shallow water before being seized and thrown on land, rather than by angling which was the more common means for taking trout. (B) In TN , as Maria, Sir Toby and their crew set up Malvolio with the trick letter from Olivia, Maria says as she drops the letter, ‘Lie thou there, for here comes the trout that must be caught with tickling’ (2.5.19–20). It might be stretching the point a bit, but calling the man a trout whom she also describes as ‘a kind of Puritan’ (2.3.136) and whom Olivia describes as ‘tast[ing] with a distempered appetite (1.5.86–7) might suggest Malvolio’s Lenten (i.e., anti-festive and dietarily restrictive) temperament. In MM , Pompey compares Claudio’s unsanctioned sexual congress with Juliet to ‘[g]roping for trouts in a peculiar river’ (1.2.87). His remark belongs to the general association of women, especially sexually active women, and sexuality itself, with fish. KR turkey, turkey-cock. (A) Either a large ground-dwelling bird of the family Phasianidae native to North and South America, or the guinea-fowl with which it was often confused. The turkey was first introduced to England in the mid-sixteenth century by William Strickland, brought back from his voyages to the Americas. The bird features on his family coat of arms. This version of the turkey’s history, however, is complicated by European misrecognition of New World birds – the turkey, for instance, resembled guinea fowl, peacocks and other European birds, meaning one bird might have been mistaken for the other in natural histories or in everyday references. It is also possible that turkeys had been imported via other nations as early as thirty years before Strickland, leading to suspicion that the turkey got its name because it was bred and traded from Turkey. The OED defines the turkey variously as a guinea-fowl (n1, obsolete), as well as the American bird (2a), since ‘turkey-cock’ referred to the former but was adapted as the name of the latter. (B) Turkeys show up in Shakespeare’s plays without explanation or comment, suggesting that they were relatively common staples of farms and households (which does not help clarify which bird is meant). One of the Carriers in 1H4 refers to the starved turkeys he has in his pannier (2.1.26): he and his fellow are complaining about how poor the quality of the inn at which they stay has become since its previous hostler died; presumably the starved turkeys are another sign that it is a ‘villanous house’ (2.1.14) where food for animals – and humans – is scarce. When Pistol is described as ‘swelling like a turkey-cock’ (H5 5.1.14–15), the bird in question is as likely to be a guinea fowl, which puffs its chest and tail feathers in the same way that any cock does. Tilley, however, notes that it is proverbially the turkey that swells in this way (1950: T612). Fabian describes Malvolio’s narcissism in TN , ‘Contemplation makes a rare turkey-cock of him. How he jets under his advanced plumes’ (2.5.28–9), likewise using the turkey’s supposed strutting pomposity to convey human pomposity. In TNK one of the Countrymen joins in the banter amongst several of his companions who are discussing games to be held in Athens, saying, ‘I’m sure / To have my wife as jealous as 417

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a turkey’ (2.3.30–1) that he is having a holiday. The remark possibly alludes to the proverb ‘Red as a turkey-cock’ (Tilley 1950: 611) – in other words, she’d be furious with him and thus red in the face. (C) Boehrer (2010) traces the turkey, its origins and its misrecognitions, especially for the peacock, which led to its role as a sign of excess, of costly culinary display (133–63). Fitzpatrick (2011: 410–11) also discusses the turkey’s place at the table. KR

418

U unicorn. (A) A small horse-like or goat-like animal with a large spiralling horn in the middle of its forehead. The unicorn was a mythic beast; its purported morphology and temperament modified over time from horrifying and dangerous to beautiful and priceless. Pliny mentions the ‘monoceros’, which is a fierce, untamable creature more like the rhinoceros; he may have intended to describe an oryx or other large-horned animal since in his description the unicorn’s ‘body resembles a horse, but in the head a stag, in the feet and elephant, and in the tail a boar, and [it] has a deep bellow, and a single black horn three feet long projecting from the middle of the forehead’ (NH 8.31 [1997: 57]). A significantly more unified animal body is found in the image for the unicorn in the 1595 miscellany, Liber Animalium, which looks more like a small-horned horse being petted by a woman. It is this latter image that persists until today. (B) Timon alludes to the tale of the lion and the unicorn: he tells Apemantus ‘Wert thou the unicorn, pride and wrath would confound thee and make thine own self the conquest of thy fury’ (TIM 4.3.334–6). The scheming lion rouses the unicorn to fury until the latter charges him, only to have its horn stick in a tree behind the lion, at which point it becomes the lion’s prey (see Topsell 1658: 557). Decius references the same story when he explains Caesar’s superstitions, saying ‘he loves to hear / That unicorns may be betrayed with trees’ (JC 2.1.202–3). Elsewhere, Sebastian marvels at the idea that the island on which he is shipwrecked in TMP is home to invisible spirits. When they bring in a banquet for the stranded party, he exclaims, ‘Now I will believe / That there are unicorns’ (3.3.21–2). (C) Topsell summarizes the debates about whether unicorns exist or not, noting that the value of their rare properties – especially their horns – would explain the controversy and the difficulty of spotting one (1658: 551); he finds evidence, however, in scripture, in Psalm 92 which describes a horned creature, a re’em in Hebrew, which he argues is a unicorn, not a rhinoceros (552). Topsell’s illustration of a unicorn has cloven feet and a long horn (551). The anonymous medieval bestiary Physiologus allegorizes the unicorn as a religious symbol, describing it capable of being gentled only by the hand of a virgin (the reason for the plethora of images of unicorns in women’s laps; see Physiologus Bernensis, Codex 318, f. 16v). This in turn allowed it to be appropriated to the traditions of chivalric love to represent either the union of two lovers or the conquest of the lady over the bestial in her male suitor. KR

419

V venison. (A) The meat of a deer. (B) The term can be used to refer to the deer itself as incipient meat, as we see in CYM when Belarius encourages his wards, ‘He that strikes / The venison first shall be the lord o’th’feast’ (3.3.74–5). The Duke in AYL asks his party ‘shall we go and kill us venison’ (2.1.21), only to then admit he regrets having to ‘gore’ the haunches of the forest’s ‘native burghers’ (2.1.25, 23). Sharing meat was part of the ritual of the hunt, a means of establishing rank and bonds among participants more than it was about food or eating: the noble of highest status or the monarch who leads the hunt doles out portions of venison as signs of relative standing among his party. We learn at the outset of WIV that Justice Shallow has given Master Page venison, although he calls it ‘ill killed’ (1.1.77) and wishes it were a better cut of meat. Through the venison, these two important members of the Windsor community affirm their ties. The gift and Shallow’s description of the venison, however, is also tied up with his complaint that Falstaff has been poaching his deer – potentially Falstaff has injured the same animal Page is given, or even killed and abandoned it: ‘ill killed’ might mean the meat may not be in ideal condition or it might equally and simultaneously indicate Shallow’s anger that Falstaff tried to steal his animals. Falstaff’s violation of the laws governing deer hunting is a usurpation of the Justice’s control over his property, and a sign of how the fat knight will treat others’ wives (see Theis 2001). Page, however, is happy to enjoy ‘a hot venison pasty’ with Falstaff, Slender, Evans and probably anyone else who shows up at his door (1.1.181), a fact that may well be connected to his relatively sanguine relationship with his wife, and thus his imperturbability in the face of Falstaff’s attempts at cuckolding him. That is, unlike others in the play, he is generous with his food, unconcerned with the condition of his venison, not especially jealous of his property and so impervious to other kinds of social intrigue. KR venom. (A) Poison produced by various creatures including snakes, spiders and toads or frogs. (B) Richard II unwisely makes war in Ireland against the kerns ‘[w]hich live like venom where no venom else’ (R2 2.1.157). He uses the tale of St Patrick’s banishment of all snakes from the island nation to justify his plan; upon returning to England to combat civil conflict, Richard calls on ‘spiders that suck up thy [the earth’s] venom / And heavy-gaited toads’ to fight the rebels (3.2.14–15). Spiders were thought to extract 420

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their poisons from the earth’s vapours, while toads were considered poisonous – they do indeed produce a kind of toxin from glands behind their eyes when pressed, and if ingested the venom can be harmful, but their association with venom likely derives from the toxin’s effects on dogs and other animals that try to eat toads, as well as from their connection to witches and witchcraft. Timon also addresses the earth as the home of ‘the gilded newt and eyeless venomed worm’ (TIM 4.3.181), probably the blind-worm (like the toad, also not truly venomous). Venomous toads show up in AYL (2.1.13), 3H6 (2.2.138) and LUC (850) as well. Richard III is a dog with a ‘venom tooth’ according to Queen Margaret (R3 1.3.290), perhaps reflecting the way dog bites fester or transmit rabies and other diseases. Fleance, who has escaped murder at Macbeth’s instigation, is ‘the worm that’s fled / [. . .] that in time will venom breed’, though it has ‘No teeth for th’ present’ (MAC 3.4.27–9). Macbeth here worries about the wrong snake – it is not the son of Banquo whose venom will kill him, but the son of Macduff whose murder will ensure that the father destroys Macbeth in battle. At the conclusion of HAM , the Prince learns that the sword Laertes has used was ‘envenomed’ by Claudius, who also poisoned the cup of wine from which Gertrude has inadvertently drunk (5.2.306). (C) Raber (2011) reads HAM as in part a competition between two ratcatchers setting traps for one another, with Claudius availing himself of the vermin-hunter’s traditional poisons; this makes him both venomous spider and poisonous human. Adler (1981) and Slotkin (2007) also touch on toad venom, while Broussard discusses the venomous asp. KR vermin. A collective noun for animals considered to be harmful, offensive or worthless. In Shakespeare’s day, the term embraced a wider range of creatures than it does today and, along with insects and rodents, included reptiles, birds and mammals such as foxes and badgers. Today, the term usually signifies mice and rats, occasionally invertebrates that destroy crops, and, rarely, raptors that prey on game birds. Used metaphorically, the term is highly contemptuous, as in the exchange of insults between Subtle and Face in the first scene of Jonson’s The Alchemist, when the former indignantly attacks the latter: ‘Thou vermin, have I ta’en thee out of dung, / So poor, so wretched, when no living thing / Would keep thee company, but a spider, or worse?’ (1982a: 1.1.64–6). ‘Vermin’ is not used as an insult in Shakespeare’s works. Rather, vermin are invoked by Edgar to persuade Lear and company that he is in fact mad and not merely performing a part. King Lear, who unlike Edgar is actually mad and imagines Edgar is a scholar, asks him, ‘What is thy study?’ (LR 3.4.153). Edgar replies, ‘How to prevent the fiend and to kill vermin’ (3.4.155). Foakes (AR3: 283, n. 155) points out that the reference to vermin here might have been suggested by Harsnett’s representation of devils, who frequently appear as animals in his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (1603). Edgar is claiming, in effect, that he has learned to repel the devil in all his forms. KE 421

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viper, viperous. (A) The name refers to a snake belonging to the family Viperidae, which is both venomous and viviparous, that is, characterized by the live birth of its offspring (hence its name). That the adder (Britain’s only venomous snake) is a viper was not clearly understood in Shakespeare’s day. The term ‘viper’ is often used in the early modern period as a term of opprobrium, indicating one who is treacherous or traitorous. This aspect of the viper’s reputation has roots in the Bible, in which Jesus uses ‘viper’ to mean a hypocrite, and in Aesopian fable, in which a farmer who warms a frozen viper is bitten when the viper revives. Another ancient tale holds that the female viper bites off the head of the male at coition. Their offspring avenge his death by bursting through her entrails at their birth, thus destroying her – a legend so useful for rhetorical and political purposes that, despite manifold doubts about its literal truth, it persisted well into the seventeenth century. (B) All aspects of traditional viper lore are reflected in Shakespearean usage. In R2 the Duke of York invokes Aesop’s fable when he warns King Henry against the treachery of Aumerle (the Duke’s own son): ‘Forget to pity him, lest thy pity prove / A serpent that will sting thee to the heart’ (5.3.56–7). The legend of the matricidal viper is hidden in the riddle that Pericles must solve before he can marry the daughter of King Antiochus: ‘I am no viper, yet I feed / On mother’s flesh which did me breed. / I sought a husband, in which labour / I found that kindness in a father’ (PER 1.1.65–8). When he solves the riddle – that Antiochus is in an incestuous relationship with his daughter – Pericles realizes his life is in danger. The king’s hypocritical courtesy hides lethal intent, while the princess herself is like the viper’s young, ‘an eater of her mother’s flesh / By the defiling of her parents’ bed’ (1.1.131–2). Jesus’ condemnation of the Pharisees as ‘serpents, the generacion of viperes’ (Mt. 23.33, GNV) appears in a secular, pre-Christian context in TRO , when Paris and Pandarus jest at Troilus’s lovesickness. Paris claims that Troilus ‘eats nothing but doves, love, and that breeds hot blood, and hot blood begets hot thoughts, and hot thoughts beget hot deeds, and hot deeds is love’ (3.1.123–5). To this sally Pandarus responds, ‘Is this the generation of love? Hot blood, hot thoughts and hot deeds? Why, they are vipers. Is love a generation of vipers?’ (3.1.126–8). In 1H6 the matricidal viper is tied directly to political rebellion, when the young King Henry declares, ‘Civil dissension is a viperous worm, / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth’ (3.1.72–3). King Richard II calls his followers, Bushy, Green and the Earl of Wiltshire, ‘vipers damned without redemption’ (R2 3.2.129), believing them to be traitors. In fact, when Sir Richard Scrope confirms that they have indeed made peace with the usurper Bolingbroke, Scrope uses ‘peace’ ironically, for Richard’s followers have been beheaded. In COR , having manipulated the rabble to regard Coriolanus as a traitor, Sicinius demands, ‘Where is this viper, / That would depopulate the city’? (3.1.265–6). Thus reducing Coriolanus to a beast, the emblem of treachery, Sicinius can more easily demand Coriolanus’s death: ‘we are peremptory to dispatch / This viperous traitor. To eject him hence / Were but one danger, and to keep him here / Our certain death. Therefore it is decreed / He dies tonight’ (3.1.287–91). Other uses of ‘viper’ as an abusive epithet lack a clear political thrust and imply that something is venomous in a social or personal way. In another flare-up of their long422

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running quarrel in H5, Pistol seizes upon the alliterative opportunities afforded by the term and addresses Nim, ‘O viper vile!’ (2.1.47). In CYM , Pisano, having just given Innogen the letter in which Posthumus accuses her of adultery, wretchedly imagines slander as a viper, ‘whose tongue / Out-venoms all the worms of Nile’ and which can slither into even the most enclosed and secluded space: ‘Kings, queens and states, / Maids, matrons, nay the secrets of the grave / This viperous slander enters’ (3.4.34–5, 37–9). After the murder of Desdemona, Lodovico calls Othello ‘this rash and most unfortunate man’ (OTH 5.2.280), but he calls Iago ‘that viper’ (5.2.282), implying that Iago’s duping of Othello has exploited and destroyed the bonds of trust that ought to govern the relationship between soldiers, if not all civilized people. The term removes Iago from the realm of the human, and indeed Othello, looking at Iago’s feet, expects to see the devil’s cloven hooves – ‘but that’s a fable’, he says (OTH 5.2.283). (C) Tilley records a proverb – ‘To nourish a viper (snake) in one’s bosom’ (1950: V68) – which is based on Aesop’s fable about the farmer who warms a frozen viper and is bitten for his trouble (Aesop 2002: 203–4; Perry Index 176). In his lengthy chapter on vipers, Topsell reports the legend of the viper’s matricidal offspring, derived from Pliny (1940: 399–401 [10.82]. But he follows the legend with an account of an experiment reported by the humanist Pierius (Pierio Valeriano, 1477–1558), in which male and female vipers were shut up together. The ‘learned men desirous to know the truth’, states Topsell, discovered that the vipers ‘engendred, brought forth, and conceived like other Creatures, without death or ruine of Male and Female’ (1658: 802). In Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne (1981: 1.220–5) comprehensively examines and disproves the legend, citing in addition to his own experiments, those of Francesco Redi. In Jonson’s Volpone, the elderly Corbaccio furiously shouts at his son Bonario, ‘Monster of men, swine, goat, wolf, parricide! / Speak not, thou viper’ (1999b: 4.5.111–12), his insults indicating a vague recollection that young vipers kill a parent. Amelia Lanyer draws on the legend for a simile about misogynistic men: they are like vipers, for they ‘deface the wombs wherein they were bred, forgetting that they were borne of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by means of women they would be quite extinguished out of the world’ (1993: 48). Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 432) discusses the many ways in which ‘viper’ functions as an insult in Shakespeare’s works. As a rhetorical device, the monstrous, matricidal viper comes into its own during the English Civil Wars, when those who separate themselves from the Established Church ‘have’, in the words of James Howell, ‘torne the entrailes of their own mother, their dear Country’ (1643: 7). KE vulture. (A) Very large scavenging birds, often sporting bald heads. Vultures eat carrion, or dead flesh, although they may also attack wounded or sick animals. They are associated with battlefields as a result of their eating habits, and thus by extension with violence, death and putrefaction. Vultures are closely related to eagles, although they have a much darker reputation, and to buzzards; they are sometimes confused with the 423

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latter, although buzzards are not exclusively carrion-eaters. They are depicted as voracious, a result of the manner in which they seize and remove chunks of flesh from dead creatures as well as the fact that they gorge until their crops (an expanding part of the alimentary canal that allows storage of consumed food) swell. (B) Macduff responds to Malcolm’s disclosure of his tyrannical appetites, ‘there cannot be / That vulture in you to devour so many’ (MAC 4.3.73–4), promising Malcolm plenty of women to sate his ‘voluptuousness’ (4.3.61). Lear describes the pain Goneril causes him as being like having ‘Sharp-toothed unkindness, like a vulture’ tied in his heart (LR 2.2.324), while Lucy makes sedition a ‘vulture’ that ‘[f]eeds in the bosom of such great commanders’ as York (1H6 4.3.47–8). The association of the vulture with the heart or bosom aligns the bird with gnawing emotions, particularly painful ones; in TIT , Tamora instead makes the target of the vulture’s attack Titus’s mind when dressed as Revenge she claims to be sent from Hell ‘To ease the gnawing vulture of thy mind / By working wreakful vengeance on thy foes’ (5.2.31–2). Whether heart or mind, the image of the vulture penetrating and feasting on the body derives from the myth of Prometheus, who was punished with eternal torment by Zeus for providing humanity the gift of fire by being tied to a rock where a vulture (sometimes an eagle in various sources) would daily peck out and eat his liver, the ancient seat of the emotions. Reference to Prometheus also informs Pistol’s curse on Justice Shallow, ‘Let vultures vile seize on his lungs’ (2H4 5.3.139), and his abuse of Falstaff, ‘Let vultures gripe thy guts’ (WIV 1.3.82). KR

424

W wasp. (A) A member of the order Hymenoptera, which also includes bees and ants. Social wasps, which belong to the family Vespidae, live in colonies, the population of which is divided into female workers, males and queen. Unlike bees, wasps do not gather nectar nor store food in their nests; instead, workers feed larvae with insects and bits of carrion. A bee dies when it stings; a wasp, in contrast, can sting repeatedly, as its stinger does not get stuck in the flesh of its victim. Hence to call someone ‘waspish’ implies that he or she is constantly irritable and short-tempered. (B) One of the clearest testaments to the pain their stings inflict is the presence of wasps in metaphors for torturing thoughts. In broken syntax that reflects his disordered mind, Leontes asks whether it is conceivable that he would charge his wife with being unfaithful if he were not certain of her guilt, since admitting that he is a cuckold – admitting that the ‘purity and whiteness of [his] sheets’ has been ‘spotted’ – means that he is replacing peace of mind with the sting of ‘goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps’ (WT 1.2.325–7). Northumberland chides Hotspur for repeatedly interrupting him and the Earl of Worcester in order to complain about Henry IV’s ingratitude: ‘Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool / Art thou’ (1H4 1.3.234–5), he exclaims, and ‘waspstung’ may be a loose translation of ‘Hotspur’. Rather than being offended by the rebuke, Hotspur agrees: ‘Why, look you’, he says to Northumberland, ‘I am whipped and scourged with rods, / Nettled and stung with pismires, when I hear / Of this vile politician Bolingbroke’ (1.3.237–9). Lucrece compares her rapist, Tarquin, to ‘a wand’ring wasp’ that has crept into the hive ‘[a]nd sucked the honey which thy chaste bee kept’ (LUC 839–40). Her lament combines two pieces of traditional wisdom: that bees are chaste (derived from Virgil and other classical authors) and that wasps are the enemy of the bee, intent upon the theft of honey. Tamora, too, associates the wasp with rape, but in doing so, she twists biology as well as morality. She calls Lavinia ‘this wasp’, who, when the honey of her chastity has been stolen, should not be allowed to live lest she sting (TIT 2.2.132). In an elaborate metaphor in TGV , Julia tears into pieces the letter she has been longing to receive and then compares her hands to ‘Injurious wasps’ that steal the hive’s honey (Proteus’s sweet words) and sting the bees to death (1.2.106). In their discussion of the latest news about Henry VIII’s divorce proceedings, the Duke of Suffolk informs Surry and Norfolk that a treacherous letter of Cardinal Wolsey to the Pope has been discovered. When Surrey asks if the king will stomach this treachery, Suffolk is very clear: ‘No, no: / There be more wasps that buzz about his nose / Will make this sting the sooner’ (H8 3.2.54–6). In other words, the fact that so much 425

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trouble swirls around the divorce proceedings will make the king even angrier about Wolsey’s letter. To frighten the Clown into handing over the valuable ‘fardel’ containing proof of Perdita’s royal parentage, Autolycus describes the elaborate torture awaiting the son of the shepherd who raised her (i.e., the Clown). The shepherd’s son, declares Autolycus, ‘shall be flayed alive, then ’nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasps’ nest, then stand till he be three-quarters-and-a-dram dead’ (WT 4.4.788–91), and he continues to expand upon the torture. Given Cupid’s association with arrows, it is not surprising that metaphoric wasps appear in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. As the ‘waspish-headed son’ of Venus, Cupid is said to have ‘broke his arrows’ at TMP 4.1.99, implying that both he and his arrows are sharp and prickly. The wasp appears in an extended battle of wits early in Katherina and Petruccio’s acquaintance. Initial barbs in which they aim the names of animals, birds and insects at each other culminate in the series ‘be’, ‘buzz’ and ‘buzzard’ (SHR 2.1.206–9), after which Petruccio pretends to attempt to calm things: ‘Come, come, you wasp, i’faith you are too angry’, he says to Katherina. ‘If I be waspish’, she replies, ‘best beware my sting’. I will then ‘pluck it out’, he counters. ‘Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies’ (2.1.210–13), she says. At this point the sexual underpinning of the exchange becomes even more explicit. Petruccio replies with a question that he answers himself: ‘Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail’ (2.1.214–15). Katherina corrects him: ‘In his tongue’ (2.1.216), but Petruccio seizes upon her words: ‘Whose tongue?’ (2.1.217), he asks. Perhaps sensing where this line of dialogue is heading, Katherina tries to end the conversation: ‘Yours, if you talk of tails, and so farewell’ (2.1.218). This gives Petruccio the cue for his bawdiest quip so far – ‘What, with my tongue in your tail?’ (2.1.219) – which provokes Katherina into slapping him, thus demonstrating the waspishness that she has tried to deny. In AYL , Phoebe, to hide her infatuation, pretends to be angry when she writes a letter to Ganymede (i.e., Rosalind). Delivering the letter, the duped Silvius describes Phoebe’s demeanour: ‘By the stern brow and waspish action / Which she did use as she was writing’ the letter, he reports to Rosalind, ‘It bears an angry tenor’ (4.3.9–11). It does not, of course, bear an angry tenor; Phoebe’s waspishness is reserved for Silvius. Brutus provides in effect a full definition of ‘waspish’ when he finally loses patience with Cassius’s behaviour, and his tirade against his former ally culminates in the word itself. ‘Go show your slaves how choleric you are, / And make your bondmen tremble’ (JC 4.3.43–4), Brutus snaps. ‘Must I stand and crouch / Under your testy humour?’ (4.3.45–6). Swallow ‘the venom of your spleen’, he orders; from now on, I will laugh at you ‘[w]hen you are waspish’ (4.3.50). ‘Choleric’, ‘testy’, ‘splenetic’ – all are synonyms of ‘waspish’. (C) There are no wasps in the early modern Bible: the Hebrew word tsirah at Exod. 23.28, Deut. 7.20 and Josh. 24.12 is translated in the Geneva and Authorized Versions as ‘hornet’. Pliny reports that wasps feed on carrion; when they capture a large fly, they cut off its head and carry off the body (1940: 477 [11.24]). In his entry on the wasp, Moffet describes ‘the endowments of his minde’: ‘he is a political and flocking or gregal 426

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[gregarious] creature, subject to Monarchy, laborious, a lover of his young, and a lover of his neighbour, of a very quarrelsome disposition and very prone to choler’ (Topsell 1658: 921). The character Humphrey Wasp in Ben Jonson’s 1614 comedy Bartholomew Fair is, as his name suggests, perpetually impatient, angry and sarcastic. Tilley records the proverb, ‘As angry as a wasp’ (1950: W76). Patterson, discussing Shakespearean wasps from the perspective of entomology, calls the insects ‘armed freebooters’ who do not store food but, on the contrary, steal honey (1838: 133). Phipson (1883: 414–15) compares the wasps in John Day’s masque, The Parliament of Bees (1607), with Shakespeare’s wasps. H. Harris (2002: 5, 16) discusses the ancient theory that wasps were generated from horses’ carcasses, and the disproving of that theory by Francesco Redi in the seventeenth century. KE waterfly. (A) There are several candidates that might be intended by this term among the many flies associated with bodies of water: what we refer to as waterstriders of the family Gerridae, stoneflies of the family Perlidae, or the sewer gnat (family Psychedidae), to name just three. Waterflies are used to reflect insignificance, nuisance and lack of substance. The association of all flies with spontaneous generation means they can also indicate decay. Topsell includes gnats of various kinds among those flies that sting cattle, dogs and humans (1658: 935), and remarks that ‘Some living creatures live first in moisture and after that they change their shape and live out of it, as it falls out with Gnats about rivers’ (936), although he is sceptical about such transformation. Many gnats, he observes, live in or adjacent to water; the more annoying biting sorts are associated with warm, moist climates (953). ‘Water-spiders’ Topsell also believes are not able to change into a form of gnat, despite Aristotle’s claim to that effect (1021). (B) Hamlet calls Osric a water-fly (HAM 5.2.69) or ‘a superficial, trivial person’ (AR3: 439, n. 69). When Patroclus and Thersites trade insults in TRO , Thersites remarks, ‘Ah, how the poor world is pestered with such waterflies, diminutives of nature!’ (5.1.32–3), casting Patroclus as a tiny but irritating bug. Cleopatra, however, takes a more serious tone when she tells Proculeius that she would rather die in Egypt than be paraded as Caesar’s prize in Rome: ‘Rather a ditch in Egypt / Be gentle grave unto me! Rather on Nilus’ mud / Lay me stark naked, and let the water-flies / Blow me into abhorring!’ (ANT 5.2.57–9). In this case the association of the flies with sewage or foul water is made clear by her reference to ditches and the Nile’s festering mud. Cleopatra reasserts the ubiquitous imagery of the fertile if putrid Nile over Rome’s ability to ‘chastise’ with ‘sober’ eyes like Octavia’s, Antony’s Roman wife (5.2.53), playing on the idea of ‘chastity’ as well as signalling the infertile astringency of Roman values. The fly to which she refers may be a blowfly, rather than a true waterfly, yet the indistinction between one insect that is associated with water but not dead bodies and another that is specifically involved in the decay of flesh is itself paradigmatic of Egypt’s swampy muddling of categories. KR 427

weasel

weasel. (A) A small mammal of the family Mustelidae, closely related to the polecat and ferret, with the same characteristic long body and short legs; weasels are agile predators. Topsell mentions a number of candidates of differing species that have been called weasels, ranging from cats to ermine to the shrew-mouse; he notes that weasels are hunted for their skins and are great predators of mice, snakes and other vermin, although they also attack the eggs of domestic fowl (1658: 562–5). (B) The weasel’s nocturnal habits are reflected in LUC , in which the predatory Tarquin frightens even ‘[n]ight-wand’ring weasels’ (307) as he creeps toward Lucrece’s bed. The animal is notably aggressive as well, thus providing a point of comparison when Pisanio advises Innogen to act like a boy, not a woman, by being ‘[a]s quarrelsome as the weasel’ (CYM 3.4.159), or when Lady Percy exclaims, ‘A weasel hath not such a deal of spleen’ as her husband Hotspur does (1H4 2.3.75). Jaques asks Amiens to sing more of his sad song because he ‘can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs’ (AYL 2.5.10–11), referring to the weasel’s reputation for stealing and eating birds’ and chickens’ eggs. Westmorland elaborates on the same idea by comparing the Scots to the animals, pointing out that if an English king makes war in France, he has to worry about a Scottish invasion at home: ‘For once the eagle England being in prey, / To her unguarded nest the weasel Scot / Comes sneaking and so sucks her princely eggs’ (H5 1.2.169–71). Polonius tries to appease Hamlet by agreeing that a cloud ‘is backed like a weasel’ (HAM 3.2.371), that is, like a weasel its long body creates a hump when it sits. KR wether. (A) A castrated male sheep. (B) When WT ’s clown meets Autolycus, the vagabond trickster, he is mentally counting the likely proceeds from sheep-shearing, a prodigious amount: ‘Every ’leven wether tods, every tod yields pound and odd shilling. Fifteen hundred shorn, what come the wool to?’ (4.3.32–4). A tod is a unit of measurement amounting to the wool from eleven shorn sheep; the clown later notes that there are twenty-four shearers at the shearing, and remarks that he can’t add the sum without ‘counters’ or bits of metal to do the tally. The clown’s speech is a reminder of how important sheep and wool were to England’s wealth. The speaker of poem 17 of Shakespeare’s PP laments, ‘My shepherd’s pipe can sound no deal, / My wether’s bell rings dolefull knell’ (17.17–18). He not only employs the common trope of the poet as lovelorn shepherd, but he hints at his sexual diminishment – denied his love, he is less than whole or vigorous. In MV ’s trial scene, as he awaits his punishment and tries to allay his friends’ anger, Antonio calls himself a ‘tainted wether of the flock’ (4.1.113), recalling Shylock’s earlier summary of the biblical tale of Laban’s sheep (since ‘tainted’ means stained, and Laban’s sheep were pied or stained by multiple colours). Like the Pilgrim, Antonio also suggests that he is emasculated, or as he puts it, ‘the weakest kind of fruit / [that] [d]rops earliest to the ground’ (4.1.114–15). (C) Shell (1979) analyses wethers in the context of MV’s representation of usury. J. Harris (2004) discusses Antonio’s lines at length (52–82) in light of early modern usury cases. KR 428

whale

whale. (A) One of numerous species of cetacean mammals, found in all oceans of the world. What would be regarded today as experimental knowledge of whales could have been gained in earlier centuries from beached individuals and from sailors’ observation of whales’ breeching and spouting. But other sources of information about whales probably outweighed such experimental sources: whales were enveloped in lore inherited from ancient myths and legends, depicted as sea-monsters on maps, conflated with the biblical leviathan, and assumed to be the ‘great fish’ that swallowed the prophet Jonah. A medieval tradition attributes a devilish ploy to the whale: it stays in one place until grass and shrubs grow on its exposed back, and when sailors, thinking they have found an island, anchor there, it suddenly plunges into the depths of the sea and drowns them. (B) The whale’s reputation as a prodigious eater of smaller fish owes something to the story of Jonah (Jon.1.17) and to the general association of the whale with the devil, so that its open jaws are sometimes depicted as the mouth of hell. Paroles gives the notion of the voracious whale a sexual application when he claims that his (slanderous) letter is meant merely to warn a maiden against Bertram, ‘a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds’ (AWW 4.3.216–17). Falstaff’s appetites are also at issue when Mistresses Ford and Page indignantly discuss his attempts to seduce them. Because of him, ‘I shall think the worse of fat men’, says Mistress Ford (WIV 2.1.48– 9). She goes on to wonder, ‘What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?’ (2.1.56–8). The metaphor of the all-devouring whale is more often put to political uses. The First Fisherman in PER explains to his fellows that fish live in the sea ‘as men do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones’ (2.1.28–9). He elaborates, saying that he ‘can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: ‘a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful’ (2.1.29–32). Indeed, the First Fisherman continues, these whales do not stop at devouring poor fry: ‘Such whales have I heard on o’th’land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish, church, steeple, bells and all’ (2.1.32–4). Gossett (AR3: 225–6, n. 28–9) lists numerous early modern works that handle the theme of great fish devouring lesser ones. Twice in Shakespeare’s plays ‘belching’ is used of whales, the adjective expressing the noise made by the whale as it expels air through its blow hole, but also suggesting an eructation from the whale’s capacious stomach – a notion perhaps derived from the story of Jonah and the great fish that ‘cast out Jonah upon the drye land’ (Jon. 2.10, GNV). In TRO , Nestor compares the Greek soldiers, who ‘fly or die’ in the face of Hector’s furious onslaught, to ‘scaled schools / Before the belching whale’ (5.5.22–3). As Bevington notes, the phrase ‘scaled schools’, meaning fish, is also appropriate for armoured soldiers (AR3: 363, n. 22), puny in the face of the enormous whale, Hector. In his farewell to his dead queen, Pericles bitterly laments that he cannot bury her in the ground but must cast her coffin into the sea, ‘Where, for a monument upon thy bones / And aye-remaining lamps, the belching whale / And humming water must o’erwhelm thy corpse’ (PER 3.1.61–3). ‘Belching’ may hint that Thaisa will not remain in the sea. The whale that is so monstrous in the sea loses its fearsomeness when it is out of its watery element. King Henry IV advises his younger son, Clarence, on the best way to 429

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handle his older brother, the Prince of Wales, once the latter inherits the throne: when he is moody, urges the king, ‘give him time and scope / Till that his passions, like a whale on the ground, / Confound themselves with working’ (2H4 4.3.39–41). Henry draws on the nearhomophone, ‘Wales’/‘whales’, to assure Clarence that a beached whale will soon exhaust itself with its struggles. The image of a bleached skeleton lies behind Berowne’s excoriation of the witty, lady-pleasing Boyet, ‘the flower that smiles on everyone, / To show his teeth as white as whale’s bone’ (LLL 5.2.331–2), a description that hints at sterility and predation. Like all creatures notable for their extreme size, whether large or small, the whale is useful for figures of paradox, exaggeration and fanciful invention. ‘They fool me to the top of my bent’ (HAM 3.2.375), Hamlet says, and proceeds to demonstrate the truth of his statement. He exposes Polonius’s hypocrisy by way of a (probably imaginary) cloud. Does it not resemble a camel? asks Hamlet; Polonius agrees. Or is it like a weasel? Yes, like a weasel, agrees Polonius. ‘Or like a whale?’ asks Hamlet. ‘Very like a whale’ (3.2.372–3), says Polonius. Each of these creatures has emblematic relevance to Hamlet’s view of the Danish court. The camel was thought to be disdainful; the weasel, treacherous. As for the whale, its appetite and oiliness are perhaps most appropriate of all for the courtiers, Polonius included, who are attempting to fool Hamlet. (C) Having been swallowed by the whale, Jonah cries to the Lord ‘out of the belly of hel’ (Jon. 2.1, GNV), a verse contributing to the notion of the hellmouth and the whale as an infernal version of Christ, the fisher of men. For a bestiary’s depiction of the whale disguising itself as an island and dragging sailors into the depths of the sea, see Morrison (2019: 28, 126, 156, 215). Holinshed includes a description of a beached whale at Ramsgate in 1574 (1587: 3.1259). In Jonson’s Volpone, Peregrine pokes sly fun at a belief in animal portents, reporting that on the day he left London, ‘[t]here was a whale discovered in the river [Thames] / As high as Woolwich’ (1999b: 2.1.46–7), a report that helps date the play to 1606 (see Jonson 1999b: 7–8). In the First Anniversary, Donne offers as evidence for the decay of the world humankind’s shrunken height; had the earliest human being strayed into a forest or been shipwrecked, ‘an Elephant, or Whale, / That met him, would not hastily assaile / A thing so equall to him’ (1633: 240). Wood (1973b) considers the implications of ‘belching’ for pointing to Shakespeare’s part in writing Pericles. Norford (1979) takes Hamlet’s riddling, whale-shaped cloud as the starting point for a discussion of the problem of knowledge in HAM . Brayton (2012a) sets Shakespeare’s references to whales in the context of the special relationship between princes and whales in the Renaissance. KE wildcat. Felis silvestris, the European wildcat, is a member of the widespread Felidae family, with the same size and shape of body but a larger, rounder skull than the house cat and a narrower range of coat markings. It is impossible to tell whether Shakespeare’s references to wildcats are to this wild animal or to feral house cats, which would have been indistinguishable from their wild cousins. Iago describes women as ‘wild-cats in your kitchens’ (OTH 2.1.110), referring to the cat’s territorialism, and Shylock 430

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complains that Lancelot ‘sleeps by day / More than the wildcat’ (MV 2.5.45–6), again noting a habit that does not really distinguish house cats from wildcats. Katherina is called a wildcat in SHR (‘will you woo this wildcat,’ Grumio asks Petruccio; 1.2.195), a more likely instance in which the actual wild animal is contrasted with the tame one. KR wolf. (A) The largest of the canine family (Canis lupus, the gray wolf), found in forests, steppes, deserts and other sparsely inhabited areas in the northern hemisphere. It was once widespread and abundant in the British Isles, but it is unlikely that Shakespeare and his contemporaries had ever seen a wolf. Exterminated in England by around the end of the fifteenth century, a few wolves survived in remote parts of Scotland until the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. But its fearful reputation for ravenous, savage predation and treachery persisted. It is one of the most ubiquitous metaphoric animals in early modern literature, its reputation confirmed by legend and biblical and classical allusions. The wolf’s absence from the countryside, which meant that it was cheaper in the British Isles than in Europe to raise sheep and produce wool, contributed to the first Industrial Revolution. (B) The inclusion of ‘tooth of wolf’ in the witches’ cauldron in MAC (4.1.22) pinpoints the locus of fear about the wolf. ‘A wolf is said rather to raven then to eat his meat’, notes Topsell (1658: 171), by which he means that the wolf not only eats but savagely and greedily tears apart the body of the creature it kills, as if it continues to treat the carcass more as prey than food. The savagery denoted by the verb ‘raven’ is present in the early modern use of the adjective ‘ravenous’. Thus, when the Shepherd in 1H6 wishes that ‘some ravenous wolf had eaten’ his daughter, Joan of Arc (5.3.31), while she was guarding the flock, the degree of violence implied by his wish is even greater than might at first appear. The Constable of France, scoffing at the English soldiers before the Battle of Agincourt, declares, ‘[G]ive them great meals of beef and iron and steel, they will eat like wolves and fight like devils’ (H5 3.7.148–50). Although he inadvertently suggests that they ravenously consume iron and steel as well as beef, the Constable’s main point seems to be that the brawny English soldiers fight madly and irrationally. When he realizes that Shylock will not back down from demanding a pound of flesh from Antonio, Gratiano explodes into execrations: ‘Thy currish spirit / Govern’d a wolf, who, hang’d for human slaughter, / Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet’ (MV 4.1.132–4), he rails. Gratiano may mean by ‘wolf’ an actual beast, since the hanging of ‘criminal’ animals was an early modern practice. But as Drakakis notes (AR3: 343, n. 133), he may instead or in addition mean Queen Elizabeth’s Jewish physician, Roderigo Lopez (executed for treason in 1594 and whose name means ‘wolf’ in Portuguese). He might even mean a usurer as a type, since usurers were often called wolves. Any one of these possibilities makes Gratiano’s point clear: the soul of this wolf ‘[i]nfus’d itself in’ Shylock, whose ‘desires’ are consequently ‘wolvish, bloody, starved and ravenous’ (4.1.136–7). Shylock’s willingness to see Antonio’s flesh torn from his body identifies him as a lycanthrope in reverse: outwardly he is man but inwardly he 431

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is a wolf. The eternally ravenous wolf that finally consumes itself is, for Ulysses, the symbol of what happens when the desire for power overcomes all else, including order: ‘And appetite, an universal wolf, / [. . .] / Must make perforce an universal prey / And last eat up himself’ (TRO 1.3.121–4). The teeth of the wolf are implied though not represented by the narrator of VEN , who captures the moment between the opening of Adonis’s lips and his uttering of what Venus knows will be words of rejection, even ‘as the wolf doth grin before he barketh’ (459). ‘Grin’ here is closer to ‘grimace’ than to ‘smile’ and indicates the baring of teeth. The wolf’s savagely voracious nature is most frequently represented in Shakespeare’s works by references to its predation of lambs and sheep. It is futile to ask Shylock why he insists on his pound of flesh, Antonio warns Bassanio; ‘You may as well use question with the wolf / Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb’ (MV 4.1.72–3). Slaughtering the lamb, like slaughtering Antonio, is based on instinct untouched by reason. There are ample biblical precedents for the wolf’s threat to the flock, as at John 10.1–16, in which Jesus tells a parable about the shepherd who is willing to die for his sheep versus the hireling who flees when he sees the wolf. The Shepherd who searches through the storm for two of his ‘best sheep’ for fear ‘the wolf will sooner find [them] than the master’ (WT 3.3.64, 65) enacts the parable. When Richard of Gloucester orders the Lieutenant of the Tower to depart and to leave him alone with King Henry VI, the king’s allusion to the parable is an acknowledgement that he will shortly be murdered: ‘So flies the reckless shepherd from the wolf; / So first the harmless sheep doth yield his fleece / And next his throat unto the butcher’s knife’ (3H6 5.6.7–9). Henry’s awareness that he is about to be slaughtered parallels that of York in an earlier scene. When his followers flee like ‘lambs pursued by hunger-starved wolves’ (1.4.5) and he is left alone on the field of battle, York accepts his fate: ‘Here must I stay, and here my life must end’ (1.4.26). Among the wolves who look forward to his slaughter is Queen Margaret, whose voluble desire to see him suffer leads York to call her ‘She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France, / Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth!’ (1.4.111–12). York refers to Margaret’s native country (Anjou in France) and to the ongoing enmity between the French and English. Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 447) observes that he also implies that she is sexually depraved, because L. lupa means both wolf and prostitute. Margaret’s rhetorical association with lambs and wolves emerges in the play’s first scene, when she reacts bitterly to Henry’s decision to disinherit his own son so that the crown will pass to the house of York at his death. Do you think, she demands, that this action will make you safe? ‘Such safety finds / The trembling lamb environed with wolves’ (3H6 1.1.241–2). In 2H6, Good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester had prophesied Henry’s fate in similar language after Henry ‘throws away his crutch’ (i.e., Gloucester himself): ‘Thus is the shepherd beaten from thy side, / And wolves are gnarling who shall gnaw thee first’ (3.1.189, 191–2). Here, the wolves gnarl, or snarl, not at the shepherd but at each other, as they vie for the prey. Queen Elizabeth, mourning the death of the two princes in the Tower, cries in anguish, ‘Wilt thou, O God, fly from such gentle lambs / And throw them in the entrails of the wolf?’ (R3 4.4.22–3), her metaphor implying 432

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that Richard is both the wolf and the hireling shepherd who takes no care of the sheep. Talbot, bewildered at Joan of Arc’s ability to induce fear in her enemies, exhorts his countrymen to renew their battle with the French or else replace the lions in England’s coat-of-arms with sheep. But even sheep, he cries, ‘run not half so treacherous from the wolf, / Or horse or oxen from the leopard, / As you fly from your oft-subdued slaves’, i.e., the French (1H6 1.5.30–2). Burns (AR3: 159, n. 30) suggests that ‘treacherous’, which is a surprising adjective for sheep fleeing the wolf, registers Talbot’s sense of betrayal as his soldiers act more like fearful animals than warriors. Venus, mourning Adonis, attributes to his voice a power like that of Orpheus: ‘when he hath sung, / The tiger would be tame and gently hear him; / If he had spoke, the wolf would leave his prey / And never fright the silly lamb that day’ (1095–8). Only the crude, rough boar is impervious to the transformative power that Venus attributes to Adonis’s voice. The presence of a metaphoric lamb may be inferred in ADO when Leonato signals the end of the ceremony honouring the ‘dead’ Hero by saying, ‘Put your torches out. / The wolves have preyed, and look, the gentle day / [. . .] Dapples the drowsy east with spots of grey’ (5.3.24–5, 26). At one level, because wolves are often associated with the night in Shakespeare’s plays, Leonato is simply although somberly greeting the dawn. But earlier in Act 5 the deeply penitent Claudio had begged Leonato, ‘I know not how to pray your patience’ (5.1.261). By turning ‘pray’ to ‘prey’, Leonato refuses to let Claudio forget that his ravening of Hero’s reputation at the altar has been the action of a metaphorical wolf. The number of references to wolves in the history plays may reflect historical awareness that wolves were once present in Britain. The dying Henry IV, thinking that Hal is a wastrel and a scoundrel, mourns for what he imagines will be England’s future: ‘O, thou wilt be a wilderness again, / Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants’ (2H4 4.3.266–7). In another Shakespearean play set in ancient Britain, Lear cries that rather than to return to Goneril’s hall, he would choose ‘[t]o be a comrade with the wolf and owl’ (LR 2.2.399), ‘comrade’ suggesting that he would rather share the ‘unhoused free condition’ (OTH 1.2.26) of wild creatures than be subjected to the cruel restrictions of his daughter. But the heath to which he retreats is battered so fiercely by the storm that even ‘[t]he lion and the belly-pinched wolf / Keep their fur dry’, afraid to venture out of shelter (LR 3.1.13–14). Gloucester later says in condemnation of Regan, that ‘If wolves had at thy gate howled’ during that terrible storm, ‘Thou shouldst have said, “Good porter, turn the key, / All cruels else subscribed” ’ (3.7.62–4). Precisely what Gloucester means by the last phrase, ‘All cruels else subscribed’, has been much debated (AR3: 300, n. 67–9), but the general sense is clear: the wildness of the storm is such that even wolves would be given shelter by wolfish human beings. Appalled at Goneril’s cruelty towards him, Lear tells her that his other daughter, Regan, will ‘with her nails / [. . .] flay thy wolvish visage’ (1.4.299–300). He is wrong, of course. As the Fool remarks, ‘He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf’ (3.6.18). Because wolves symbolize all that lies beyond the bounds of civility and civilization, both literally and figuratively, there is bitter irony in Timon’s characterization of the Athenians sheltering in their city: ‘O thou wall / That girdles in those wolves, dive in the earth / And fence not Athens’ (TIM 4.1.1–3). 433

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Calling one’s enemy a wolf is a way of justifying or explaining the use of violence, as when Richard of Gloucester vows to kill Clifford (implicated in the death of Richard’s father): ‘I myself will hunt this wolf to death’ (3H6 2.4.13), he declares. Urging her soldiers to battle, Queen Margaret blames King Edward (son of York) for imprisoning Henry VI, slaughtering subjects and bankrupting the kingdom: ‘And yonder is the wolf that makes this spoil’, she cries (3H6 5.4.80). Her epithet is apparently justified when the king shortly afterwards murders the young Prince Edward (son of Henry). In TRO , roused to fury, Ajax calls Thersites ‘Thou bitch-wolf’s son’ (2.1.10) and strikes him. Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 447) argues that because (Latin) lupa means ‘prostitute’, Ajax is in effect calling Thersites ‘whoreson’. It is also possible to see in ‘bitch-wolf’s son’ a forerunner of today’s ‘son of a bitch’, in which ‘bitch’ is usually taken to mean a dog. Indeed, Thersites responds to Ajax’s insult by calling him a ‘mongrel beef-witted lord’ (2.1.12), and in LR , Kent calls Oswald ‘the son and heir of a mongrel bitch’ (2.2.21–2). Ajax, that is, may mean that Thersites is a degraded version even of a dog. So, too, in MAC , when Macbeth says scornfully to the murderers that they are called ‘men’ just as ‘hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, / Sloughs, water-rugs and demi-wolves’ are all called ‘dogs’ (23.1.94–5), ‘demiwolves’ seems to mean either cross-bred dogs (AR3: 207, n. 95) or wild, rough dogs that can barely be distinguished from their wolf ancestors. The proverbial and biblical wolf in sheep’s clothing has a presence in several of Shakespeare’s plays. The Duke of Gloucester calls the Bishop of Winchester a ‘wolf in sheep’s array’ and a ‘scarlet hypocrite’ (1H6 1.3.55, 56), epithets that seem to combine Matthew 7.15 (‘Beware of false prophetes, which come to you in shepes clothing, but inwardely they are ravening wolves’, GNV) and Revelation 17.3–5, which describes the Whore of Babylon, clothed in scarlet and purple. Queen Margaret’s assessment of Gloucester is equally devastating: ‘Seems he a dove?’ (2H6 3.1.77), she asks King Henry VI, and continues, ‘His feathers are but borrowed, / For he’s disposed as the hateful raven. / Is he a lamb? His skin is surely lent him, / For he’s inclined as is the ravenous wolves’ (3.1.77–8). The assumed etymological connection between ‘raven’ and ‘ravenous’ organizes her criticism of Gloucester: his apparently gentle demeanour hides his wolfishness. The presence of a wolf who would like to be in sheep’s clothing is hinted at in SON 96, when the poet, reflecting on the fact that the young man’s beauty causes his faults to be seen as virtues, wonders, ‘How many lambs might the stern wolf betray / If like a lamb he could his looks translate?’ (9–10), that is, if he (the wolf) could transform his appearance into that of a lamb. The question implies that great personal attractiveness carries with it the ability to destroy those who are attracted. When the Lord Chief Justice questions Falstaff about the ‘night’s exploit on Gad’s Hill’ (2H4 1.2.150), the two trade wolf proverbs. The Justice is willing to overlook Falstaff’s highway robbery: ‘since all is well, keep it so: wake not a sleeping wolf’ (1.2.154–5), he says. Falstaff audaciously replies, ‘To wake a wolf is as bad as smell a fox’, or, as we would say today, smell a rat (1.2.156), implying that the Justice’s suspicions are unfounded. Olivia, in love with Cesario (the disguised Viola), inverts a traditional proverb – ‘The lamb is more in dread of the wolf than of the lion’ (Tilley 1950: L36) – in order to make herself feel better about 434

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her predicament: ‘If one should be a prey, how much the better / To fall before the lion than the wolf!’ (TN 3.1.126–7), she muses. Elam (A3: 260, n. 126–7) observes that Olivia’s wrested proverb is ambiguous. Is Cesario the noble lion whom she is proud to love? Or is Cesario rather the cruel wolf who does not return her love? Olivia is, in either case, the lamb. Paradoxical rather than ambiguous, ‘wolvish-ravening lamb’ (ROM 3.2.76) – a paradox in keeping with the Petrarchanism of the lovers’ language – is Juliet’s description of Romeo when she learns that he has killed her cousin Tybalt. Timon uses paradox to convey the hypocrisy of his ‘mouth-friends’: ‘Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites, / Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears’ (TIM 3.7.88, 93–4). Iago utters a simile about wolves that sounds but is not proverbial; it is simply another instance of his obsession with sexuality. To Othello’s request for satisfaction, that is, for ocular proof that Desdemona is having an adulterous relationship with Cassio, Iago demurs, ‘It is impossible you should see this / Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys, /As salt as wolves in pride’ (OTH 3.3.405–7). For Iago, uniquely, wolves are not ravening or greedy but ‘salt’, a term used of bitches in heat. The rhetorical role of wolves in Shakespeare’s works is often to emphasize the helplessness of the victim. Implying that the plebians, despite disliking Coriolanus, will nonetheless recognize that it is against their self-interest to reject him, Sicinius states, ‘Nature teaches beasts to know their friends’ (COR 2.1.6). He assumes that the people are animals, and Menenius accordingly supplies the species: ‘Pray you, who does the wolf love?’ (2.1.7), he asks. When Sicinius answers, ‘The lamb’ (2.1.8), Menenius draws the inevitable conclusion: ‘Ay, to devour him, as the hungry plebeians would the noble Martius’ (2.1.9–10). A later scene further develops the notion that the people are as predatory as wolves. When Coriolanus and Aufidius march against Rome, Menenius observes that unless Coriolanus shows mercy, Rome is doomed. Cominius points out that Rome cannot expect any mercy: ‘the people / Deserve such pity of him as the wolf / Does of the shepherds’ (4.6.112–14). Their entrenched enmity leaves no room for anything but attempted slaughter. Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece is represented first as a metaphor: ‘The wolf hath seized his prey, the poor lamb cries, / Till with her own white fleece her voice controlled / Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold’ (LUC 677–9). ‘Controlled’ here means ‘restrained’ or ‘overpowered’. The metaphor has been prepared for by the narrator’s description of ‘the dead of night’ (162), when Tarquin readies himself for the assault and there is ‘[n]o noise but owls’ and wolves’ death-boding cries’ (165). After she has been raped, Lucrece bitterly chastises Opportunity, whose ‘guilt is great’: ‘Thou sets the wolf where he the lamb may get’ (876, 878). In a twist to the usual relationship of sheep and wolves, Cassius explains to Casca his rationale for assassinating Caesar, who ‘would not be a wolf / But that he sees the Romans are but sheep’ (JC 1.3.104–5). It is a version of blaming the victim. Its ‘death-boding’ howl is frequently the focus of Shakespearean representations of the wolf, sometimes in comic mode, as when Rosalind begs Orlando, Phoebe and Sylvius to put a halt to their language of love-longing: ‘Pray you no more of this, ’tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon’ (AYL 5.2.105–6). Dusinberre (AR3: 435

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326, n. 106) suggests literary influences might lie behind the choice of ‘Irish’ wolves, mentioning in addition a possible allusion to the 1599 Irish expedition; Abyes and Yalden (1995: 204) mention a zoological reason for designating the wolves as Irish. At the close of MND , Theseus sends all the lovers to bed, for ‘ ’tis almost fairy time’ (5.1.354). Beyond the safe world of the sleeping lovers, ‘the hungry lion roars / And the wolf behowls the moon’, sings Robin Goodfellow (5.1.361–2). ‘Behowls’ is endorsed by Chaudhuri as an emendation of Q and F’s ‘beholds’, which seems too passive for wolves (AR3: 273, n. 362). Prospero reminds Ariel ‘[w]hat torment I did find thee in: thy groans / Did make wolves howl and penetrate the breasts / Of ever-angry bears’ (TMP 1.2.287–9). The wolves’ usually sinister howling, that is, here signals their pity for Ariel’s suffering. In love with Palamon and thinking that he has mistaken the ‘brake’ where they were to meet, the Jailer’s Daughter in TNK hears or imagines that she hears howling: ‘Hark, ’tis a wolf!’ (TNK 3.2.4), she exclaims. But love for Palamon makes her reckless of her own life: ‘I reck not if the wolves would jaw me, so / He had this file’ (3.2.7–8). If she ‘whooped’ for Palamon, she reckons, ‘I should call a wolf, / And do him but that service’ (3.2.9, 10–11). Her meaning is ambiguous: either she fears that she would draw a wolf to Palamon and herself, or she hopes that she would draw the wolf towards her and away from him. Her fears for Palamon and her untethered imagination of what may have occurred are sparked by the sound or the idea of howling: ‘I have heard / Strange howls this livelong night; why may’t not be / They have made prey of him?’ (3.2.11–13). Probably but not definitely referring to wolves, the sinister and shadowy pronoun ‘they’ makes the beasts of her imagination all the more frightening. Two lines later, ‘they’ have become ‘fell things’ (3.2.15), deadly and savage creatures that will hear the jangling of Palamon’s chains and know that he cannot defend himself. From that frightening thought, the Jailer’s Daughter concludes that Palamon is ‘torn to pieces; they howled many together / And then they fed on him’ (3.2.18–19). The most chilling representation of the wolf’s howl occurs as Macbeth readies himself to kill Duncan, and his imagination personifies the name of the deed he is about to commit: ‘withered Murder, / Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf, / Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace, / [. . .] towards his design / Moves like a ghost’ (MAC 2.1.52–6). Murder merges here with its sentinel, moving as silently as a wolf moves through the forest in the night. In 2H6, howling wolves are inserted even into the Lieutenant’s reference to the classical chariot of Night, drawn by dragons (here pejoratively called ‘jades’) across the sky: ‘The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day’ is over, he laments; ‘And now loud-howling wolves arouse the jades / That drag the tragic melancholy night’ (4.1.1, 3–4). The Lieutenant’s despair is evident in what Knowles observes (AR3: 284, n. 4) is a triple invocation of darkness in the phrase, ‘tragic melancholy night’. Wolves represent a fourth invocation of darkness, as they are often synonymous with the night in Shakespeare’s plays. Pairing the wolf with the fox, a tradition as ancient as Aesop’s fables, features in several Shakespearean plays. When he disguises himself as Poor Tom, Edgar offers the conventional contrast between the two predators, describing himself as ‘fox in stealth, 436

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wolf in greediness’ (LR 3.4.91). Arviragus puts the same contrast in positive terms. He and his brother, having never left their rural retreat, ‘are beastly: subtle as the fox for prey, / Like warlike as the wolf for what we eat. / Our valour is to chase what flies’ (CYM 3.3.40–2). Cressida contrasts fox and wolf in terms of their prey: if I betray you, she says to Troilus, let ‘As false as Cressid’ become the proverbial equivalent of ‘As false [a]s [. . .] fox to lamb, or wolf to heifer’s calf’ (TRO 3.2.191, 186–8). The wolf is present in several lists of repellent or frightening animals, as in MND , when the magic juice applied to Titania’s eyes will make her fall in love, Oberon says, with whatever she first looks on when she awakes, ‘Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, / On meddling monkey or on busy ape’ (2.1.180–1). Chaudhuri (AR3: 161, n. 180–1) observes that these creatures ‘belong to a wild forest rather than a pastoral wood’, but the observation may put too much pressure on the realism or otherwise of the list, the point of which is the cumulative power gained by naming fearsome creatures. Similarly, Timon exhorts mother earth to cease bearing human beings and instead to become pregnant ‘with tigers, dragons, wolves and bears’ (TIM 4.3.188), all of them enemies to humankind. In R3, Anne wishes Richard to suffer ‘[m]ore direful hap’ than she could wish even to the most feared and detested creatures, ‘to wolves, to spiders, toads / Or any creeping venomed thing that lives’ (1.2.17, 19–20). As he prepares to take baby Perdita ‘[t]o some remote and desert place’ (WT 2.3.174) and abandon her there, Antigonus prays, ‘Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens / To be thy nurses’ (2.3.184–5), as the ravens once nursed Elijah. He then seems to realize that Perdita might well be in more danger from predation than starvation, and he attempts to calm his fears: ‘Wolves and bears, they say, / Casting their savageness aside, have done / Like office of pity’ (2.3.185–7). Pitcher (AR3: 218, n. 185) observes that Antigonus may have in mind the tales of Romulus and Remus, suckled by a she-wolf, and Atalanta, suckled by a bear. An elaborated list of beasts, most of them noxious, appears in TIM , when Timon scoffs at Apemantus’s wish to be an animal rather than a human being. Any beast into which you might transform yourself, Timon points out, would be caught up in a cycle of killing and being killed. If you were an ass, ‘thou lived’st but as a breakfast to the wolf; if thou wert the wolf, thy greediness would afflict thee and oft thou should’st hazard thy life for thy dinner’ (4.3.332–4). Deploring the wolf’s savagery, Timon at least attributes to it the need to eat. Two further references to the wolf are of particular interest because they occur in passages that raise questions about the literary and religious culture of Shakespeare’s day. The first appears in a description of the officer who arrests Antipholus of Ephesus, a description delivered by Dromio of Syracuse when Luciana asks him if his master is well. ‘No’, exclaims Dromio: he’s in Tartar limbo, worse than hell: A devil in an everlasting garment hath him, One whose hard heart is buttoned up with steel; A fiend, a fairy, pitiless and rough;

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A wolf, nay, worse, a fellow all in buff; A backfriend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands The passages of alleys, creeks and narrow lands [. . .] (ERR 4.2.32–8) Scholars have noted the close resemblance between this lively description and the description of a sergeant who arrests debtors in Robert Greene’s A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). Cartwright (AR3: 321–2) provides a detailed comparison of the two passages. In Greene’s pamphlet, the body of the sergeant is framed from ‘the rotten carion of a woolfe’ (Greene 1592b: 11.255). The wolf in Dromio’s description is a metaphor for the character and behaviour of the officer, ‘pitiless and rough’, although the ‘buff’, or leather, worn by the officer may conceivably hint at tanned wolfskin. The closeness of the two descriptions raises the question of who influenced whom, which has some bearing on when ERR was composed. Cartwright concludes that it is ‘more likely that Shakespeare would have imported images from Greene’s trend-setting twopage treatment of the sergeant-figure than that a few words from a speech by Dromio would have been parlayed by Greene into his own longer passage’ (322). The reference to a wolf in H8 points to Reformation controversies. The Duke of Buckingham calls Cardinal Wolsey a ‘holy fox, / Or wolf, or both – for he is equal ravenous / As he is subtle, and as prone to mischief / As able to perform’t’ (1.1.158–61). At one level, Buckingham’s words are pure insult; he attributes to Wolsey the traditional craftiness of the fox and the voracious greed of the wolf. But at another level, Buckingham’s correction of ‘fox’ to ‘wolf, or both’ implies that Wolsey is not merely one of those churchmen (often represented as foxes) hoping to retain Roman Catholic elements in the Reformed English liturgy but is in fact one of those (represented as wolves) wishing to return England to Catholicism (see Brennan 1986). In fact, to make the latter point, Reformers occasionally write Wolsey’s name as ‘Wolfsee’, as, for instance, Tyndale does (1575: 367). (C) The biblical wolf, both literal and metaphorical, appears in two major guises. It is either the hypocritical enemy of the flock (as at Jn 10.12 and Acts 29.26), from which the proverb, ‘A wolf in a lamb’s (sheep’s) skin’ (Tilley 1950: W614) derives, or it appears as the companion to the lamb in representations of utopia (as at Isa. 11.6). The wolf’s ‘actual role as a menace to sheep [in the Near East] is negligible’ in the modern era (Bodenheimer 1935: 110). The cultural importance of the wolf in ancient Greece is indicated by the number of names that include the element ‘lyc’ or ‘lyk’; see Jameson (2014: 57–9, for instance, on the cult of Apollo Lykeios in ancient Athens). Wolves are ‘cruel and fierce’, Pliny states, but he insists that stories of werewolves are false, even though he reports several of them (1940: 59 [8.34]). For early modern interest in lycanthropy as a mental illness, see Burton (1997: 1.133–4); Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi (written 1612–13) suffers from lycanthropia (Webster 2009: 5.2.5–19). In the myth of Rome’s founding, Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, famously represented by the ancient bronze statue now in the Capitoline Museums. Medieval

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bestiaries report that the eyes of wolves shine in the night as brightly as lamps; just so, the works of the devil attract benighted people (White 1954: 59; see Morrison 2019: 253 for a particularly striking medieval manuscript illustration of the wolf). Aybes and Yalden (1995) study English place names that have ‘wolf’ as an element, which provides evidence that wolves were once plentiful in Britain. Especially in the September eclogue of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, wolves represent those clerics who, if not closet Catholics, are secularists who treacherously and hypocritically oppose Protestant reform (1960: 85–96). Perhaps not surprisingly, the wolf appears twice in Jonson’s most political play, Sejanus – when Silius declares his false accusers to be ‘wolf-turned men’ (1990: 3.251), and shortly afterwards, when Tiberius pretends to regret that Silius has killed himself, Arrantius in an aside calls the emperor ‘Excellent wolf’ (3.347). See VienneGuerrin (2016: 446–8) for the implications of ‘wolf’ as a term of insult. Dusinberre (AR3: 2013: 326, n. 106) discusses possible topical allusions in ‘the howling of Irish wolves’ in AYL , but see also Butler (2013). For the association of the Shakespearean wolf with the night, see A. Lewis (1971). Cavell (1983) argues that voraciousness in COR is symbolized by loving the wolf. Sherman (2013) considers the implications of Shylock’s ‘wolf-soul’ in MV . Nash (1959) discusses the judicial hanging of wolves and other animals in earlier centuries. Klinck (1977) and K. Wilson (1978) discuss the proverbial material behind the Fool’s ‘tameness of the wolf’ in LR . Grady (1996: 27–57) takes Ulysses’ term, ‘universal wolf’, as encapsulating the reifying, commodifying and secularizing of desire, power, autonomy and the market in early modern England. KE wood-bird. Literally, any bird whose habitat is the forest, applied figuratively in the single instance in which it occurs in Shakespeare’s works. In MND , Theseus and company awaken the young lovers asleep in the Forest of Arden. He hails them, ‘Good morrow, friends. Saint Valentine is past. / Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?’ (4.1.138–9). Traditionally, Valentine’s Day is the day not only for human couples but also for birds to commit themselves to a mate. Theseus’s pretended surprise – how is it that these young people are only now pairing off? – and his epithet for the lovers, ‘woodbirds’, may also hint, suggests Chaudhuri (AR3: 237, n. 139), that he is punning: they are a bit ‘wood’, or mad. KE woodcock. (A) A large, short-legged, nocturnal wading bird (Scolopax rusticola) resident in Britain that prefers damp woodland to marshes, probing soft ground for worms and insects with its long bill, which is flexible at the tip. The woodcock was commonly eaten in earlier centuries, as the number of references to it in Shakespeare’s plays suggest. Because it was typically and easily caught with snares, called springes or gins, the bird was assumed to be foolish or gullible, which is what characters in Shakespeare’s plays mean when they call someone a woodcock, an insult closely related to calling someone an ass. 439

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(B) ‘O, this learning, what a thing it is!’ says the pantaloon Gremio, duped by the ‘scholar’ Lucentio. Grumio mockingly echoes Gremio in what may be an aside: ‘O, this woodcock, what an ass it is!’ (SHR 1.2.157–8). In ADO , Claudio, in response to being challenged to a duel by Benedict, mocks his challenger by pretending he has been invited to a feast: ‘I’faith, I thank him, he hath bid me to a calf’s head and a capon, the which if I do not carve most curiously, say my knife’s naught. Shall I not find a woodcock too?’ (5.1.151–4). The putative meal features dishes that signal Benedict’s callowness (the calf’s head), cowardice (the capon) and stupidity (the woodcock). That Claudio will ‘carve’ these ‘most curiously’ is his boast that he himself will win the duel. The metaphoric woodcock is served up again in LLL , when Berowne sees that all the characters who have forsworn love – the King, Longaville, Dumaine and Berowne himself – have fallen in love. ‘Four woodcocks in a dish!’ (4.3.79), Berowne ruefully remarks. The most important relationship woodcocks have in Shakespeare’s works is with the snare. As Toby, Andrew and Fabian, in hiding, see Malvolio pick up Maria’s letter, Fabian gleefully observes, ‘Now is the woodcock near the gin’ (TN 2.5.82). Later in the play the gin becomes literal, when Malvolio is imprisoned in a dark room and treated as a madman. Inverting the criteria of sanity and insanity, Sir Topas (Feste in disguise) reintroduces the woodcock: he warns that only when Malvolio professes to believe in reincarnation (‘th’opinion of Pythagoras’) and to ‘fear to kill a woodcock lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam’ (4.2.57–9) will he, Sir Topas, believe that Malvolio is not insane. Pythagoras’ theory about the transmigration of souls, which allowed for a formerly human soul to occupy the body of an animal, was considered foolish heresy in the Renaissance. When Paroles is ambushed and captured in AWW , Lord G sends word to Count Roussillon and Lord E: ‘We have caught the woodcock, and will keep him muffled / Till we do hear from them’ (4.1.88–9). ‘Muffled’, which means blindfolded and gagged, seems designed to put a stop to Paroles’s foolish verbosity (and indeed his name means ‘words’). After York is defeated and taken captive in 3H6, Clifford’s triumphant metaphor makes clear just how helpless his enemy now is: ‘Ay, ay, so strives the woodcock with the gin’ (1.4.61). Polonius scoffs when Ophelia tells him of Hamlet’s ‘tenders / Of [. . .] affection’ for her (HAM 1.3.98–9). ‘Ay, springes to catch woodcocks’ (1.3.114), he chides, the citing of the proverb as insulting to her as to Hamlet (Tilley 1950: S788). With a great deal more insight, Laertes applies the woodcock metaphor to himself, when he realizes that by poisoning the rapier with which to kill Hamlet, he has been the author of his own undoing. In reply to Osric’s query, ‘How is’t, Laertes?’ (5.2.290), he replies, ‘Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric: / I am justly killed with mine own treachery’ (5.2.291–2). As Thompson and Taylor observe (AR3: 455, n. 291), Laertes’s words echo his father’s proverb and combine it with another, ‘The fowler is caught in his own net’ (Tilley 1950: F626). (C) Martial’s epigram about the woodcock (L. rustica) snidely explains that partridge tastes better because it is more expensive (2014: 3.202–3 [13.76]). For the eating of woodcocks (intestines and all) in the early modern period, see Birkhead (2018: 237–8). Vienne-Guerrin (2016: 449–50) discusses the use of ‘woodcock’ as an insult in Shakespeare’s plays. In Colasterion (1645), Milton calls an author who criticizes his 440

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divorce tracts ‘an incogitant woodcock’ (1953–82: 2.756), that is, an unthinking woodcock, or, as Michael Drayton writes in his political satire, The Owle (1604), a ‘witles Woodcock’ (1619: sig. F2r). Cocker and Mabey (2005: 214–20) trace the cultural role of the woodcock through the centuries, including the use of its pin feather as the favoured brush of watercolourists. Curtis (1979) examines Shakespeare’s use of the woodcock and other animal metaphors, arguing that they make the characters of LLL seem more human. Marc’hadour (1984) considers the metaphoric entailments of the woodcock in Hamlet compared to the those of the bécasse in French translations of the play. The OED cites the entry on ‘beccassé’ in Cotgrave’s French–English dictionary (1611), a word which is defined as ‘gulled, abused, woodcockised, make a woodcocke’. Champion (2003) discusses the political implications of the proverbial woodcock in HAM . KE worm. (A) A general name given to invertebrates belonging to several different phyla. Among them are annelids (which include the common earthworm), nematodes (parasitic, disease-producing roundworms) and platyhelminthes (flatworms). The name was also used in the early modern period (as it is though less widely today) for invertebrates that bear some resemblance to worms, such as maggots and other larvae, silkworms, woodworms, canker worms, glow-worms, malt-worms and so on. In its very earliest uses in English, ‘worm’ could refer to any creeping or crawling creature, whether insect, invertebrate or reptile; hence the name once included dragons and serpents, a usage that died out in the seventeenth century. (B) Worms are evoked dozens of times in Shakespeare’s works. Most importantly, they are associated with death and decay in the form of the maggot, all-conquering enemy of earthly creatures. The most complete portrait of the maggot as death’s agent and companion occurs in JN , as Lady Constance, in her grief for her son, longs for death, which she imagines as a skeleton: ‘I will kiss thy detestable bones’, she says, ‘And put my eyeballs in thy vaulty brows, / And ring these fingers with thy household worms’ (3.4.29–31). She thus uses the language of desire to treat what she admits is loathsome. Romeo, for fear that Death wants Juliet to be his ‘paramour’ (ROM 5.3.105), vows to stay with her: ‘Here, here will I remain / With worms that are thy chambermaids’ (ROM 5.3.108–9). In CYM , Guiderius resists admitting that ‘Fidele’ is dead, insisting that ‘[i]f he be gone, he’ll make his grave a bed’ (4.2.215) and denying the reality of bodily decay for the beautiful ‘boy’: ‘With female fairies will his tomb be haunted, / And worms will not come to thee’ (4.2.216–17). Hamlet’s response is not to deny but to jest about Polonius’s death. He is ‘[a]t supper’, Hamlet replies to the king’s query about Polonius’s whereabouts (HAM 4.3.17). The question is not where he is at supper, states Hamlet, but where ‘a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat

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ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes to one table. That’s the end. (4.3.19–24) It is not the end of Hamlet’s jesting. To Claudius’s ‘Alas, alas!’, Hamlet observes, ‘A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm’ (25–7). His dark and complex jesting contains a radical criticism of rank and hierarchy and thus of Claudius’s status, and glances even at the Diet of Worms, the convocation of 1521 that condemned Luther as a heretic and which may therefore be said to have helped ignite a new religious world order, the division between Catholics and Protestants. Before he knows of Ophelia’s death, perhaps to ward off thoughts of the grave’s horror with its maggot-ridden corpses, Hamlet jests about a skull thrown up from the gravediggers’ work: ‘Why, e’en so. And now my Lady Worm’s – chapless and knocked about the mazard [bowl, i.e., head] with a sexton’s spade’ (5.1.83–5). The skull that might once have belonged to a great lady of the court is now reduced, by the action of maggots, to resembling a mere drinking vessel, and even that suffers the indignity of being hit with a shovel. Rosaline’s jest about the action of maggots is less darkly ironic. Disguised as Ganymede, she pretends to dismiss the very idea of Orlando’s lovesickness in AYL : ‘Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love’ (4.1.97–9). Earlier in the play, Touchstone – flaunting his status as a ‘courtly [. . .] wit’ – calls the rustic Corin a ‘[m]ost shallow man! Thou worm’s meat in respect of a good piece of flesh’, meaning that the country bumpkin is but a poor specimen of humanity compared to other manly figures (3.2.67, 62–3). The horror of the body’s decomposition at death is fully admitted by other Shakespearean characters. Henry IV, thinking that Hal is eager to see him die, commands his son with bitter irony, ‘Only compound me with forgotten dust; / Give that which gave thee life unto the worms’ (2H4 4.3.245–6). When Mercutio receives his fatal wound as he comes between Romeo and Tybalt, his imagination, even as he is dying, leaps ahead to foresee that all he is and has been will now only furnish a meal for maggots: ‘They have made worms’ meat of me’ (ROM 3.1.109), he cries. Hotspur, too, objectifies his fatally-wounded body, addressing himself in the third person as he dies: ‘No, Percy, thou are dust / And food for –’ (1H4 5.4.84–5). In a fitting end to their only piece of dialogue in the play, Prince Hal completes the line, ‘For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart’ (5.4.86). ‘[S]he made him roast meat for worms’ (4.2.21–2), declares Bolt in PER , reporting the death of ‘[t]he poor Transylvanian’ who ‘lay with the little baggage’ (4.2.19–20) and probably picked up a venereal disease. A chilling variation on the theme of the human body as food for worms occurs in R3, when the use of the noun ‘prey’ turns worms into predators. As Queen Elizabeth mourns what she knows must be the murder of her young sons in the Tower, Richard swears by God that he is innocent of their deaths. The Queen stops him. If you had really feared God, she says, ‘both the princes had been breathing here, / Which now, too tender bed-fellows for dust, / Thy broken faith hath made the prey for worms’ (4.4.384–6). So, too, ‘prey’ 442

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in SON 74 emphasizes the distance between the poet’s ‘better part’, his eternal spirit, and the body that will someday die, ‘the dregs of life, / The prey of worms’ (8–10). The association of worms with the tomb is repeatedly evoked in the plays and poems, perhaps alluding to the Bible’s ‘whited tombes, which indeed appeare beautifull outward, but are within full of dead mens bones, and all filthines’ (Mt. 23.27, GNV). The Prince of Morocco, opening the golden casket, or chest, that he has chosen in the hope of winning Portia, finds there a death’s head and a scroll: ‘Gilded timber do worms infold’, he reads (MV 2.7.69). A fair outside does not necessarily mean a fair inside, an observation pertaining not only to the casket, but to the prince himself. Boastful of his birth and great fortune, he has condemned himself, by virtue of his superficiality, to an unwedded life and a future without heirs. You will ‘make worms thine heir’, the poet darkly hints to the beloved in SON 6, if you remain ‘self-willed’ (14, 13). In SON 146, the poet asks if worms are to be ‘inheritors’ of the beloved’s ‘fading mansion’ and ‘outward walls’ – that is, his body – painted ‘so costly gay’ (7, 6, 4). The language evokes an ornate sepulchre filled with maggots. In SON 71, the poet directs the beloved not to mourn for him when he is ‘fled / From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell’ (3–4). Here the worms of the grave seem to compact the world’s vileness into themselves. Queen Katherine, confronting her rapidly approaching death, nevertheless wishes her divorced husband, Henry VIII, good health, ‘[w]hen I shall dwell with worms and my poor name / Banished the kingdom’ (H8 4.2.126–7). Richard II rejects words of comfort when he hears that his loyal courtiers have been executed. Instead, he says, ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs’ (R2 3.2.145). The presence of worms in this list represents his disdain for comforting platitudes about death. Robin Goodfellow warns that he must get on with his magic because dawn approaches and ‘Damned spirits all, / That in cross-ways and floods have burial, / Already to their wormy beds are gone’ (MND 3.2.382–4). These restless souls, either through suicide or accidental death by drowning, are condemned to unhallowed graves, a matter of indifference to the ever-present, ever-eager maggot. The worms that eat holes in fabric and wood are not biologically related to maggots but are akin to them in their association with decay. The villainous Borachio in ADO suggests that new fashions are inspired by decayed art. Fashion is ‘a deformed thief’, he observes, leading hot-blooded young men to spend their money dressing themselves ‘like Pharoah’s soldiers in the reechy [i.e., grimy] painting’ or like pagan priests in stained-glass windows, or ‘like the shaven Hercules in the smirched worm-eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy as his club’ (3.3.129–30,131–3). In AYL , Celia teases Rosalind about Orlando’s failure to appear at the appointed time: ‘I do think him as concave as a covered goblet or a worm-eaten nut’ (3.4.22–3), she declares, meaning that she thinks he is a hollow man, emptied out of anything like sincerity. After Henry IV’s victory at Shrewsbury, Rumour admits to spreading lies ‘through the peasant towns / Between that royal field of Shrewsbury / And this worm-eaten hole of ragged stone’ (2H4 Ind. 35), where Northumberland (Hotspur’s father) waits for news of the battle. Worm-eaten stone is, at the literal level, an oxymoron; at the metaphorical level, the phrase anticipates the fall of the house of Northumberland, doomed after the crushing of the rebellion and Hotspur’s 443

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death. Wormholes, the holes left by burrowing insects, are twice used in Shakespeare’s works as metaphors for the dusty, all-but-forgotten past. Henry V’s messenger, Exeter, warns the French king that the English king’s claim to the throne of France is ‘no sinister nor no awkward claim, / Picked from the worm-holes of long-vanished days’ (H5 2.4.85– 6), but is rather legitimate and current. After Lucrece has been raped, she declares in her anguish that the function of Time is ‘[t]o ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, / And smear with dust their glitt’ring golden towers; / To fill with worm-holes stately monuments’ (LUC 944–6), that is, to expose the truth about those whose worldly status is based on falsehood, oppression and pride, qualities that epitomize her rapist, Tarquin. Because they taint and blight, worms are held responsible for at least some physical ailments. Benedick, not wanting to admit that he is lovesick, claims in ADO that he has toothache. His companions are sceptical. How can such serious sighing be attributed to ‘a humour or a worm’ (3.2.25), Leonato wonders, referring to the imbalance of the humours or the tiny worms thought to cause toothache. In his vivid imagining of Queen Mab’s coach, Mercutio describes the wagoner as ‘a small grey-coated gnat, / Not half so big as a round little worm / Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid’ (ROM 1.4.67–9). Most editors attribute Mercutio’s statement to a proverbial saying, that worms breed in the fingers of idle maidens, although no such proverb has been found. Nonetheless, Queen Mab seems originally to have been connected to household cleanliness, and Keil’s suggestion – that Mercutio refers to the hand-worm, acarus scabiei, the mite that causes scabies – seems likely (Keil 1957). Macbeth’s dark look into the future hinges on the fact that ‘worm’ may signify a serpent as well as a harmless creeping thing. When he hears that his hired murderers have killed Banquo but let Fleance escape, Macbeth grimly observes, ‘There the grown serpent lies; the worm that’s fled / Hath nature that in time will venom breed, / No teeth for th’ present’ (MAC 3.4.27–9). What seems at first insignificant will prove in time to be deadly. The vengeful Lord Clifford, arguing that King Henry VI is showing too much lenity towards the Yorkists, relies upon natural analogies to make his case. He ends with the serpent: Who scapes the lurking serpent’s mortal sting? Not he that sets his foot upon her back. The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on, And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood. (3H6 2.2.15–18) Whether the ‘smallest worm’ is an earthworm or a diminutive version of the ‘lurking serpent’, Clifford’s repetition of the proverb – ‘Tread on a Worm, and it will turn’ (Tilley 1950: W909) – holds good. His point is that the king must ruthlessly suppress his enemies (who are, in this internecine war, also his family) or they will take equally ruthless revenge on him. The worm referred to by the disguised Duke in MM is recognizable as a serpent by its forked tongue. Attempting to reconcile Claudio to his coming execution, the Duke observes that the valour on which we pride ourselves is shown to evaporate in the face of death, delivered by a serpent’s venom: ‘Thou’rt by no means valiant, / For 444

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thou dost fear the soft and tender fork / Of a poor worm’ (3.1.15–17), he observes. With anger and scorn, Hermia similarly attacks Demetrius’s valour, thinking he has murdered the sleeping Lysander: ‘And hast thou killed him sleeping? O brave touch! / Could not a worm, an adder do so much?’ (MND 3.2.70–1). Cleopatra, preparing for her suicide, refers to the asp as ‘the pretty worm of Nilus’ (ANT 5.2.243). The Clown offers contradictory assurances about the prowess of the worm – ‘a very honest woman, but something given to lie [. . .] makes a very good report o’ th’ worm’ when she died – but has to admit that ‘the worm’s an odd worm’ (5.2.250–1, 254, 256–7). Before he can finally be ushered away, the Clown twice wishes Cleopatra ‘joy of the worm’ (5.2.259, 278), assuring her first that ‘the worm will do his kind’ (5.2.261–2), that is, do what is natural to asps, and then warning her that ‘the worm is not to be trusted but in the keeping of wise people; for, indeed, there is no goodness in the worm’ (5.2.264–6). The shadow of approaching death darkens the whole scene, and behind the worm of the Nile lurks that other worm, the maggot. The Nile’s worm appears also in CYM , when Pisano realizes how gravely wounded Innogen has been by Iachimo’s slander, ‘Whose edge is sharper than the sword, whose tongue / Out-venoms all the worms of Nile’ (3.4.34–5). The Earl of Salisbury, seeking to persuade Henry VI to execute Suffolk, offers a kind of parable. Let us say, argues Salisbury, that you had withdrawn into your inner chamber, ordering that no one should disturb your sleep on pain of death: Were there a serpent seen, with forked tongue, That slyly glided towards your majesty, It were but necessary you were waked, Lest, being suffered in that harmful slumber, The mortal worm might make the sleep eternal. (2H6 3.2.259–63) The serpent’s forked tongue and sly gliding are clearly meant to warn Henry of Suffolk’s duplicity, potentially fatal to the king. In 1H6, Henry emphasizes the teeth rather than the tongue of the serpent: ‘Civil dissension is a viperous worm, / That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth’ (3.1.72–3). According to ancient legend, young vipers tear their way through their mother’s entrails at birth, killing her in the process. Henry means that a seditious people destroy the mother country to which they owe their life and sustenance. The worm of conscience is another worm that gnaws. Among the curses that Queen Margaret utters against Richard is the wish that he will be tormented with remorse for his evil deeds: ‘The worm of conscience still [i.e., continually] begnaw thy soul’ (R3 1.3.221), she cries. Benedick’s invocation of the worm of conscience occurs in a battle of wits with Beatrice. The problem is, he explains, that if a man does not ‘erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies’ (ADO 5.2.76), that is, proclaim his own achievements, then he will be forgotten as soon as the funeral bell stops tolling (after an hour) and the widow stops crying (after fifteen minutes). ‘Therefore’, Benedick concludes, ‘is it most expedient for the wise, if Don Worm – his conscience – find no impediment to the contrary, to be the trumpet of his own virtues’ (5.2.76–9). 445

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The fact that the worm crawls on the earth makes it an inevitable figure for lowliness and insignificance. When Lady Macduff’s son says that he will live ‘[a]s birds do’, now that his father is dead, she replies, ‘What, with worms and flies?’ (MAC 4.2.33–4). The preposition ‘with’ allows her to imply that he is claiming both to eat worms and flies and also to live with them as companions, since his father’s (assumed) death has diminished the status of the family. Marina, protesting that she has never harmed anyone, declares, ‘I trod upon a worm against my will, / But I wept for’t’ (PER 4.1.75–6). She unwittingly echoes her father’s use of the worm as the epitome of lowliness, when in the first act of the play Pericles solves the riddle set by Antiochus but knows he cannot utter the solution without danger. He voices his realization in ambiguous words, which themselves amount to a sort of riddle: ‘The blind mole casts / Copped hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is thronged / By man’s oppression, and the poor worm doth die for’t’ (1.1.101–3). Whether the humble worm is a synonym for the humble mole, or the haughty mole (constructing Babel-like towers) is being contrasted to the subterranean worm is not clear (see AR3: 188, n. 101–3). But Pericles’s general meaning seems clear. He is, in effect, explaining why he cannot reveal that he knows of the incestuous relationship between Antiochus and his daughter: the lowly individual who points out abuses by the powerful is crushed, while the powerful, impervious to criticism in their moral blindness, continue to erect monuments to themselves. After his blinding, Gloucester asks an old man if the disguised Edgar is a beggar. ‘Madman, and beggar too’, replies the old man (LR 4.1.32). ‘I’th’ last night’s storm I such a fellow saw’, says Gloucester (the past-tense verb registering what he has lost), ‘[w]hich made me think a man a worm’ (4.1.34–5). Is he thinking also of himself? His conclusion is close to Lear’s, that ‘man is no more but such a poor, bare forked animal’ (3.4.105–6). So, too, Prospero affectionately implies that Miranda is in the abject state to which all human beings are reduced when they fall in love: ‘Poor worm, thou art infected!’ (TMP 3.1.31). Berowne uses similar language when he reproves King Ferdinand for chastising others who have fallen in love, when the king himself has done so: ‘Good heart, what grace hast thou thus to reprove / These worms for loving, that art most in love?’ (LLL 4.3.150–1). Not gentle reproach but (pretended) scorn lies behind the Hobgoblin’s, i.e., Pistol’s, denunciation of Falstaff: ‘Vile worm, thou wast o’erlooked even in thy birth’ (WIV 5.5.83), meaning that Falstaff was cursed by the evil eye when he was born. Twice in Shakespeare’s plays, women are associated with worms, but in almost directly opposite ways. At the conclusion of SHR, Katherina calls upon women to remember that our bodies are ‘soft, and weak, and smooth’, and that ‘our soft conditions and our hearts’ should agree with the constitution of our bodies (5.2.171, 173). ‘Come, come, you froward and unable worms’, she exhorts them; renounce your desire for control and accept the supremacy of your husbands (5.2.175). The symbolic worms in LUC are those petty faults for which women are condemned. The fact of women’s ‘smoothness’ (1247), Lucrece mourns, which is on display like a beautiful, level plain, makes all their faults stand out; it ‘[l]ays open all the little worms that creep’, whereas in men, who are like ‘a rough-grown grove’, ‘[c]avekeeping evils’ remain concealed (1248–50). (C) Among other functions, worms in the Bible are used to symbolize the brevity and insignificance of human life; Job 25.6 and Psalm 22.6, especially, may lie behind 446

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Gloucester’s conclusion that man is a worm. Pliny remarks that almost all insects ‘give birth to a maggot’ (L. ‘vermis’, worm); he is particularly concerned with those worms that infest human beings and cattle and give rise to diseases (1940: 499, 503 [11.36, 38]), concerns that are also apparent in the Bible (as at Job 7.5 and 19.26; Joel 1.4 and 2.25; and Jon. 4.7). The medieval bestiaries, under ‘Vermis’, include an exceptionally wide array of creatures, from earthworms and leeches to spiders and scorpions (see White 1954: 191–4; Clark 2013: 203–4). For Shakespeare’s references (at LLL 5.2.83; ROM 1.3.27, 30; HAM 3.2.175; and LUC 893) to wormwood – the plant artemisia absinthium, used among other things as a vermifuge, or moth preventive – see Thomas and Faircloth (2014: 362–3), who also discuss the relationship between Shakespearean worms and gardens (361–2). Worms are the first creatures that Moffet considers under the heading ‘Insects that want [i.e., lack] feet’ (Topsell 1658: 1103–24); Topsell paraphrases the first part of Moffet’s chapter, on the earthworm, and includes it in the volume on serpents (1658: 811–18). Brown (2006a: xvi) notes that the word ‘vermilion’ or ‘vermeil’, beloved of poets, is derived from the Latin vermis, ‘worm’. Neill (1997: 74–7) demonstrates instances in early modern literature and art in which the worms (i.e., maggots) infesting corpses are associated with the serpent that tempted Eve. MacInnes (2012) argues that the worm complicates the dividing line between life and death in early modern texts by signalling the fertility that can emerge from within decay. Raber (2011, 2013) discusses worms as bodily inhabitants in HAM ; elsewhere (forthcoming) she argues that the concept of the ‘worm of conscience’ moves from metaphor to medical premise in the Renaissance. Martin (2015: 134–65) argues that Shakespeare’s representation of the worm in HAM and ANT registers proto-Darwinian thought. KE wren. (A) A very small, mainly brown and short-tailed passerine bird, Troglodytes troglodytes, or the Eurasian wren; it is difficult to tell whether early modern references are to this bird or to a species of warbler known as Regulus, or ‘kinglet’, which has a yellow crown on its head. Regulus is so named because its crown is associated with its fabled aspiration to become monarch of the birds according to a tale passed on by Plutarch, attributed to Aesop (although it does not appear in contemporary collections of the Fables). In a competition to determine the king of the birds by the height each achieved in flight, the wren hid beneath the eagle’s wing and at the highest point of flight, threw itself yet further into the air, thus earning the crown (Plutarch 1936: 202– 3). Birds in general were thought to be able to reveal murders, a belief linked to birds’ association with the supernatural and possibly also to the very real flight patterns of some birds over carrion. An old proverb, quoted by Camden in the Remaines . . . Concerning Britain (1605) reads, ‘Every thing helpes quoth the wren when she pist I’ the sea,’ suggesting the power of even the smallest contribution to change. (B) The Duke of Gloucester may be thinking of this story when he hypocritically condemns those who think he bears ill will to the king and his relatives in R3: ‘[T]he world is grown so bad / That wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch’ (1.3.69–70). In his 447

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formulation, the topsy-turvy politics of the day (which he has partly caused) result in the fable becoming reality when the peaceful vegetarian wren turns into a hunter and killer. Apart from this fable, the most important quality of the wren is its diminutive size and its frequent lilting song, which is marked by rapid bubbly chirping. In 2H6, the king brushes off Suffolk’s comfort as the mere ‘chirping of a wren’ (3.2.42), while Portia makes the wren’s song the negative standard to which other birds must be compared, saying that if, for instance, the nightingale sang by day it would be deemed no better than the wren (MV 5.1.102–6). In TN , Sir Toby greets Maria as ‘the youngest wren of nine’, or the smallest in a large nest (3.2.63), either to compliment her tiny size or to suggest she is trivial, or both. Lady Macduff’s claim that the wren ‘The most diminutive of birds, will fight, / Her young ones in her nest, against the owl’ (MAC 4.2.10–11) likewise proves both prophetic and ironic, since in Macduff’s absence (to whom she compares the wren unfavourably) she and her son are indeed attacked, and she – equally tiny – proves unable to defend her nest and young either. Shocked by the discovery of Cloten’s headless body beside her, Imogen pleads, ‘Yet left in heaven as small a drop of pity / As a wren’s eye, feared gods, a part of it!’ (CYM 4.2.303–4). In PER , Dionyza dismisses Cleon’s fear that their (attempted) murder of Marina will be exposed by belittling him, saying, ‘Be one of those that thinks / The petty wrens of Tarsus will fly hence / And open this to Pericles’ (4.3.21–3). (C) Harting (1965) notes the wren’s size and song, and provides brief readings of its appearance in several plays, as do Geike (1916) and Stockelbach (1959). KR wryneck. A woodpecker (Jynx torquilla) that spends most of its time on the ground licking up ants with its long tongue. It has subdued grey and brown but beautifully mottled plumage. Once widespread, the wryneck is now extinct as a breeding species in Britain and is wholly migratory. The first element of its name, ‘jynx’, stems from its use in classical antiquity as a magical love charm (see Mynott 2018: 269–71), while ‘torquilla’ refers to its habit of twisting its neck in courtship rituals and at moments of threat, when it also emits a snake-like hiss. The wryneck may possibly be present in adjectival form in MV , when Shylock commands Jessica to shut the house against the sounds of feast-day celebrations: ‘when you hear the drum / And the vile squealing of the wry-necked fife, / Clamber not you up to the casements then, / Nor thrust your head into the public street / To gaze on Christian fools’ (2.5.28–32). McDonnell (1964) argues that it is the wryneck’s shrill cry that explains its presence in Shylock’s speech. Drakakis (AR3: 253, n. 29), however, doubts whether Shylock’s speech refers to the bird at all, pointing out that ‘fife’ means the instrument as well as the player. He proposes that Shylock’s ‘wry-necked’ simply alludes to the need for the player to bend or ‘wry’ his neck to one side in order to play the instrument. KE

448

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

All’s Well That Ends Well angling, ass, bee, bunting, carp, cat, chough, feather, fish, fox, fry, hawk, lark, lion, mite, phoenix, purr, serpent, swine, whale, woodcock.

Antony and Cleopatra asp, beat, beetle, boar, breese, courser, cow, crocodile, cuckoo, dog, dolphin, dove, dragon, eagle, fly, gnat, Gorgon, hart, herd, horse, humans, kite, lion, mallard, mare, mermaid, monster, nightingale, ostrich, oyster, pearl, phoenix, quail, seel, serpent, snake, spaniel, swallow, water-fly, worm.

As You Like It animal, ape, bird, boar, capon, cattle, civet, claw, cock, coney, deer, dragon, egg, ewe, falcon, fawn, flock, fly, goat, guinea-cock, hart, hen, herd, hind, horse, hunt, lion, mutton, ox, oyster, panther, parrot, pearl, pigeon, ram, rat, sheep, snail, snake, swan, swine, tame, toad, venison, venom, wasp, weasel, wolf, wool, worm.

The Comedy of Errors ape, ass, bait, buck, capon, centaur, dog, feather, fish, fur, gnat, horn, human, lapwing, mermaid, parrot, peacock, phoenix, porpentine, sheep, shrew, snail, tiger, wolf.

Coriolanus ape, bait, bark, bear, beast, butterfly, calf, canker, crow, cur, dog, dove, dragon, eagle, fly, fox, geese, goat, greyhound, grub, hen, herd, hunt, Hydra, kite, lamb, kion (type of lion), minnow, mole, mouse, mule, osprey, parasite, rat, serpent, sheep, tiger, viper, wolf, wool.

Cymbeline ape, basilisk, bee, beetle, boar, bug, capon, cat, chicken, cock, colt, cricket, dragon, eagle, fly, fox, game, gnat, goat, hart, jay, lamb, lark, lion, owl, ox, Philomel, phoenix, puppy, rat, raven, scorpion, sea-monster, swan, toad, venison, viper, weasel, wolf, worm, wren.

Edward III ant, bear, drone, fox, grasshopper, pelican, raven, snail, spider, tiger. 449

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

Hamlet adder, angling, animal, ape, bait, Barbary, bat, beast, bug, camel, canker, capon, centaur, chameleon, crab, crocodile, crow, dog, dove, eyas, falcon, fish, fly, fox, frog, fur, glowworm, handsaw, hart, hobby-horse, honey, horse, human, jade, kite, lapwing, lion, maggot, mole, monster, owl, peacock, pearl, pelican, pigeon, porpentine, quill, rat, raven, roe, sable, satyr, serpent, shark, sheep, swine, tiger, venom, water-fly, weasel, whale, woodcock, worm.

Henry IV Part 1 anchovy, ant, ape, bacon, bear, beast, brach, bull, canker, capon, cat, caterpillar, cattle, centaur, chough, colt, cony, cricket, duck, eagle, eel, egg, flea, fox, game, geld, goat, griffin, gurnet, hen, herd, honey, horse, Hydra, jade, lion, loach, mackerel, maltworm, manage, mole, ostrich, otter, ox, parmaceti, parrot, Pegasus, raven, robin, salamander, starling, stockfish, tench, turkey, wasp, worm.

Henry IV Part 2 ape, ass, bait, bee, bird, bloodhound, boar, bull, calf, canker, Cerberus, cow, Dauphin, dove, eel, ewe, feather, flock, fly, fox, goose, guinea-hen, hen, horn, horse, hound, Hydra, jade, maltworm, mare, mastiff, mouse, ousel, pearl, pigeon, prawn, rat, seel, shrimp, snake, swallow, swine, vulture, whale, wolf, worm.

Henry V ass, bear, bee, beef, boar, cock, courser, crow, cur, Dauphin, dog, dolphin, duck, eagle, feather, ferret, flea, fly, fox, frog, game, goat, greyhound, halcyon, hawk, honey, horse, hunt, Hydra, jade, lamb, leech, leviathan, lion, louse, mare, mastiff, palfrey, peacock, Pegasus, salmon, swine, turkey, viper, wolf, worm.

Henry VI Part 1 bark, bee, canker, deer, dolphin, dove, dragon, eagle, fly, goose, halcyon, hart, hawk, herd, herring, human, lamb, lion, minotaur, mouse, mule, peacock, phoenix, rat, sheep, shrimp, swan, viper, wolf, worm, wren.

Henry VI Part 2 adder, bear, bee, birdlime, calf, canker, caterpillar, chicken, cow, crocodile, dace, deer, dog, dove, drone, eagle, falcon, falconer, feather, fox, geld, hawk, hunt, jade, kite, lamb, lizard, minotaur, mutton, ostrich, owl, ox, palfrey, parrot, porpentine, quill, raven, scorpion, serpent, sheep, snake, spider, wolf, worm. 450

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

Henry VI Part 3 bear, bird, bug, bull, chameleon, courser, deer, dove, eagle, falcon, feather, flock, fly, fox, game, gnat, hunt, inhuman, lamb, lion, lizard, magpie, mermaid, mole, night-crow, owl, Phaëton, phoenix, raven, serpent, sheep, swan, tiger, toad, venom, wolf, woodcock, wool, worm.

Henry VIII bark, colt, cur, fish, flock, fox, fry, honey, lark, louse, manage, phoenix, roe (deer), spider, tame, wasp, wolf, worm.

Julius Caesar Actaeon, adder, ape, ass, bait, bee, crow, dog, eagle, egg, ferret, hart, herd, hunt, kite, lion, raven, serpent, sheep, spaniel, unicorn, wasp, wolf.

King John ass, calf, canker, cow, Dauphin, dolphin, dragon, eagle, gnat, horn, husbandry, lamb, lion, monster, mouse, raven, serpent, sheep, spider, swan, swine, tiger, worm.

King Lear adder, angling, animal, ant, ape, bark, bear, bird, boar, brach, canker, cat, centaur, crow, cuckoo, dog, dolphin, dragon, egg, feather, fly, fox, frog, fur, goat, halcyon, herring, horse, human, kite, lark, louse, mastiff, mouse, nightingale, oyster, pearl, pelican, polecat, purr, rat, sea-monster, serpent, sheep, silkworm, snail, swine, tiger, toad, vermin, wolf, worm.

A Lover’s Complaint bee, horse, manage.

Love’s Labour’s Lost animal, ape, ass, beast, buck, calf, capon, Cerberus, claw, colt, cony, cuckoo, deer, dove, eagle, eel, flea, fly, fox, game, geld, gnat, goose, greyhound, hobby-horse, horn, humble-bee, hunt, lamb, lark, leopard, louse, maggot, minnow, moth, mutton, owl, pearl, pigeon, raven, rook, sheep, shrimp, snail, snake, swine, whale, woodcock, wool, worm.

451

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

Macbeth adder, ape, bait, bat, bear, beetle, bird, blind-worm, chicken, chough, cricket, crow, dog, dragon, eagle, egg, falcon, fly, frog, fry, goose, Gorgon, greyhound, Grimalkin, hawk, hedgehog, horse, hound, human, kite, lamb, lizard, loon, magpie, martlet, mild, monster, newt, owl, pearl, rat, raven, rhinoceros, rook, scorpion, seel, serpent, shark, snake, spaniel, swine, tiger, toad, venom, vulture, wolf, worm, wren.

Measure for Measure ape, ass, bait, beef, beetle, crow, falcon, feather, fish, fox, fur, geld, horn, lamb, lapwing, lion, mouse, mutton, rat, sheep, spider, stockfish, trout, worm.

The Merchant of Venice animal, ape, bait, bee, cat, cattle, colt, crow, cur, dog, dove, drone, ewe, fish, gnat, goose, gudgeon, herd, human, inhuman, lamb, lark, lion, martlet, mutton, neat, nightingale, parrot, pigeon, pork, ram, rat, sea-monster, serpent, sheep, snail, snake, spider, swan, swine, wether, wildcat, wolf, wool, worm, wren, wryneck.

The Merry Wives of Windsor Actaeon, ape, ass, bacon, bear, beast, bird, brach, buck, cat-a-mountain, cattle, coney, cricket, cuckoo, deer, Diana, doe, dog, dove, eyas, fox, gelding, glow-worm, goose, goat, hart, hawk, hedgehog, horns, horse, joy, louse, monster, oyster, pearl, polecat, puppy, rat, swan, swine, venison, vulture, whale, worm.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream adder, ape, ass, bark, bear, beast, beetle, blind-worm, boar, Bottom, bull, canker, centaur, chough, claw, cock, crow, cuckoo, Diana, dog, dove, dragon, duck, feather, finch, flea, fox, glow-worm, goose, griffin, hedge-pig, hind, horn, horse, hound, human, humblebee, hunt, lark, leviathan, lion, mare, mermaid, minotaur, monster, newt, nightingale, ounce, ousel, owl, pard, pearl, Philomel, quail, raven, serpent, shrew, silkworm, snail, snake, spaniel, spider, swine, tame, tiger, wolf, wood-bird, worm.

Much Ado About Nothing angling, animal, ape, ass, bait, bark, bear, birdlime, bull, calf, canker, cat, civet, claw, cow, daw, dog, ewe, fox, greyhound, haggard, hawk, horn, jade, newt, night-crow, oyster, parrot, serpent, sheep, wolf, woodcock, worm.

452

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

Othello ape, asp, ass, baboon, Barbary, bear, beast, birdlime, butterfly, Caliban, cat, centaur, courser, Crab, crocodile, daw, dog, ewe, fly, goat, grasshopper, guinea-hen, haggard, hen, horn, house, Hydra, inhuman, jennet, loon, monster, parrot, pearl, polecat, ram, raven, salmon, seel, serpent, silkworm, snipe, swan, toad, viper, wildcat, wolf, worm.

The Passionate Pilgrim bait, bird, boar, cock, dove, ewe, flock, nightingale, pearl, Philomel, ram.

Pericles baboon, bee, bird, cat, caterpillar, courser, cricket, dove, dragon, drone, duck, eagle, fish, fly, geld, glow-worm, gnat, goose, honey, lion, loon, manage, mite, mole, mouse, night bird, porpoise, spaniel, whale, worn, wren.

The Phoenix and the Turtle dove, phoenix, swan.

The Rape of Lucrece adder, bee, bird, canker, cat, claw, coral, doe, dove, drone, eagle, falcon, gnat, griffin, hawk, hind, lamb, mouse, owl, pearl, Philomel, quill, raven, serpent, swan, tiger, toad, venom, wasp, weasel, wolf, worm.

Richard II adder, ass, Barbary, caterpillar, colt, eagle, falcon, geld, horse, jade, lamb, leopard, lion, manage, oyster, parasite, pelican, Phaëton, raven, serpent, snake, spider, swine, tame, toad, venom, viper, worm.

Richard III ape, bark, basilisk, bear, beast, boar, buzzard, cock, cur, dragon, eagle, hedgehog, hind, honey, horse, inhuman, kite, lamb, lark, mermaid, newt, owl, pearl, rat, snail, spider, swallow, swine, tiger, toad, venom, wolf, worm, wren.

Romeo and Juliet addle, alligator, ape, bait, bird, canker, cat, cock, cricket, crow, dog, dove, dragon, eagle, eyas, falconer, fish, fly, goose, grasshopper, grub, hind, honey, horse, lamb, lark, lure,

453

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

mouse, nightingale, rat, raven, roe (deer), roe (eggs), serpent, spider, squirrel, swan, tercel, tiger, toad, wolf, worm.

Sir Thomas More herring, pigeon, shark.

Sonnets adder, bait, canker, coral, crow, dove, feather, hawk, herd, hind, horse, lamb, lark, lion, pearl, phoenix, quill, raven, sable, seel, tiger, wolf, worm.

The Taming of the Shrew ape, ass, bait, beef, boar, brach, bug, bull, centaur, cock, cony, cricket, deer, dove, falcon, feather, flea, fox, greyhound, haggard, hart, hawk, hen, horse, hound, human, hunt, jade, jay, lion, louse, lure, magpie, monster, mutton, nightingale, ox, oyster, roe (deer), shrew, spaniel, swine, tame, wasp, wildcat, woodcock, worm.

The Tempest adder, ape, beast, bee, beetle, bull, Caliban, canker, cat, cat-a-mountain, chicken, cock, coral, dog, dove, duck, fish, fly, goose, hedgehog, herd, human, lion, marmoset, mild, mole, monster, neat, owl, panther, peacock, pearly, phoenix, puppy, rat, raven, scamel, sheep, sparrow, stockfish, tame, toad, tortoise, unicorn, wasp, wolf, worm.

Timon of Athens adder, ape, ass, baboon, beagle, beast, blind-worm, boar, canker, chicken, dog, dragon, eagle, feather, fly, fox, greyhound, lamb, leech, leopard, newt, parasite, phoenix, swallow, swine, tiger, toad, unicorn, venom, wolf.

Titus Andronicus Actaeon, adder, beast, bee, bird, boar, cat-a-mountain, cattle, centaur, Cerberus, Chiron, deer, Diana, doe, eagle, fly, frog, game, gnat, hart, hedgehog, honey, horn, hound, human, hunt, inhuman, lamb, lark, lion, monster, owl, palfrey, panther, pearl, Philomel, pigeon, ram, raven, sheep, snake, swallow, swan, swine, tiger, toad, vulture, wasp.

Troilus and Cressida adder, angling, ass, bait, bear, brach, breese, bug, camel, canker, Cerberus, cow, cur, daw, dog, dove, dragon, duck, eagle, egg, elephant, falcon, finch, fly, fox, fur, goose, 454

Index of Shakespeare’s Works

hart, herd, herring, hind, honey, horn, horse, humble-bee, hunt, lark, lion, lizard, louse, mastiff, monster, mouse, panther, parrot, peacock, pearl, porpentine, quail, raven, roe, serpent, sheep, snail, sparrow, spider, swan, tame, tercel, tiger, toad, viper, water-fly, whale, wolf.

Twelfth Night Actaeon, ass, beagle, bear, beef, brock, canker, daw, Diana, dolphin, elephant, feather, flea, fox, haggard, hart, herring, hunt, lamb, mutton, nightingale, phoenix, raven, roe (deer), sheep, shrew, staniel, tiger, trout, turkey, wolf, woodcock.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona ass, bee, birdlime, canker, cat, chameleon, Crab, cock, cur, dog, fox, geese, honey, lamb, leviathan, lion, mutton, nightingale, pearl, Phaëton, puppy, robin, sheep, spaniel, squirrel, tiger, wasp.

The Two Noble Kinsmen angling, ape, baboon, boar, chough, cricket, dove, eagle, eel, fly, frog, hawk, herd, horse, leech, lion, magpie, manage, mare, minnow, nightingale, osprey, owl, Philomel, phoenix, raven, salmon, snail, swine, tiger, turkey, wolf.

Venus and Adonis adder, Adonis, beast, bird, boar, canker, caterpillar, courser, deer, dive-dapper, dove, eagle, falcon, fawn, feather, fly, fox, glow-worm, herd, horn, horse, hound, hunt, jennet, lark, lure, mare, mermaid, owl, palfrey, roe (deer), snail, swine, tiger, wolf.

The Winter’s Tale adder, angling, ape, basilisk, bear, beast, bug, bull, calf, carp, cony, cow, cricket, crow, dog, dove, egg, falcon, fly, geld, herd, human, jay, kite, lamb, mole, neat, parasite, puppy, ram, raven, satyr, sheep, spider, swallow, thrush, wasp, wether, wolf.

455

456

Bibliography of Shakespeare’s Works

Arden, Third Series (AR3) (All Arden volumes published London and New York: Bloomsbury.) All’s Well that Ends Well, ed. by Suzanne Gossett and Helen Wilcox (2019). Antony and Cleopatra, ed. by John Wilders (1995). As You Like It, ed. by Juliet Dusinberre (2006). The Comedy of Errors, ed. by Kent Cartwright (2016). Coriolanus, ed. by Peter Holland (2013). Cymbeline, ed. by Valerie Wayne (2017). Hamlet, ed. by Anne Thompson and Neil Taylor (2006). Julius Caesar, ed. by David Daniell (2005). King Edward III , ed. by Richard Proudfoot and Nicola Bennett (2017). King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. by David Scott Kastan (2002). King Henry IV, Part 2, ed. by James C. Bulman (2016). King Henry V, ed. by T. W. Craik (1995). King Henry VI , Part 1, ed. by Edward Burns (2000). King Henry VI, Part 2, ed. by Ronald Knowles (2004). King Henry VI, Part 3, ed. by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (2001). King Henry VIII (All Is True), ed. by Gordon McMullan (2000). King John, ed. by Jesse M. Lander and J. J. M. Tobin (2018). King Lear, ed. by R. A. Foakes (1997). King Richard II , ed. by Charles R. Forker (2002). King Richard III , ed. by James R. Siemon (2009). Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen (1998). Macbeth, ed. by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason (2015). Measure for Measure, ed. by A. R. Braunmuller and Robert N. Watson (2020). The Merchant of Venice, ed. by John Drakakis (2010). The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. by Giorgio Melchiori (2000). A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. by Sukanta Chaudhuri (2017). Much Ado About Nothing, rev. edn, ed. by Claire McEachern (2015). Othello, rev. edn, ed. by E. A. J. Honigman, intro. by Ayanna Thompson (2016). Pericles, ed. by Suzanne Gossett (2004). Romeo and Juliet, ed. by René Weis (2012). Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woodhuysen (2007). Shakespeare’s Sonnets, rev. edn, ed. by Katherine Duncan-Jones (1997). Sir Thomas More, ed. by John Jowett (2011). The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hodgdon (2010). The Tempest, rev. edn, ed. by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (2011). Timon of Athens, ed. by Anthony B. Dawson and Gretchen E. Minton (2008). Titus Andronicus, rev. edn, ed. by Jonathan Bate (2018). Troilus and Cressida, rev. edn, ed. by David Bevington (2015). Twelfth Night, ed. by Keir Elam (2008).

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The Two Gentlemen of Verona, ed. by William C. Carroll (2004). Two Noble Kinsmen, rev. edn, ed. by Lois Potter (2015). The Winter’s Tale, ed. by John Pitcher (2010).

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488

Index Adultery 13, 21, 35, 57, 68, 79, 81–2, 86, 127–8, 132–3, 134, 189, 199, 226, 230–33, 250, 270, 280, 297, 303, 317, 346, 359, 377, 383, 391, 399, 420, 425 Aeneid 409 Aesop 7, 24, 33, 38, 48–9, 125, 146, 185, 188, 190, 273–4, 351, 372, 385, 400, 405, 416, 422, 423, 436, 447 Africa 4–5, 7, 17, 31, 32, 33, 42, 45, 46, 88, 89, 90, 96, 111, 120, 163, 208, 234, 270, 271, 273, 308, 340, 356, 365, 372, 397 Alchemist, The 151, 162, 222, 255, 269, 291, 330, 395, 421 Alciati, Andrea 33 Alcohol, drunkenness 90, 103, 107, 123, 144, 179, 198, 241, 243, 248, 254, 294–6, 297, 323, 363, 402, 406 Aldrovandi, Ulysse 110 All’s Well That Ends Well 20, 35, 60, 83, 96, 97, 111, 175, 188, 191, 221, 246, 257, 268, 277–8, 290, 335, 343, 370, 402, 429, 440 Amazon warriors 71, 105, 134, 248, 251, 290 Anatomie of Absurditie, The 109 Ancrene Wisse 97 Annales of England 176, 342 Anthony and Cleopatra 14, 20, 32–33, 57, 66, 71, 74, 78, 110, 118, 123, 128, 137, 144, 150, 157, 181, 183, 197, 204, 215, 218, 238, 245, 276, 283, 284, 288, 294, 306, 309–30, 315, 327, 336, 344, 367, 37, 389–90, 398, 427, 445 Apuleius, The Golden Ass 39, 41, 77 Arcadia, The 105 Aristophanes, The Frogs 191 Aristotle 2, 4, 7, 8, 36, 5, 173, 286, 330, 356, 398 History of Animals 2, 109, 127, 143, 162, 243, 304, 397 Parts of Animals 116 Nicomachean Ethics 406 Arte of English Poesie, The 48–9 Art of Riding, The 239 As You Like It 21–2, 29, 48, 67, 74, 95, 102, 111, 112, 113, 133, 163, 165, 168, 169,

172, 177, 179, 200, 215, 223, 224, 227, 237, 249–50, 251, 274, 301, 315, 320–1, 323, 327, 337, 349, 355, 383, 384, 387, 392–3, 400, 402, 407, 414, 420, 421, 426, 435, 442, 443 Astley, John 3, 239 Avon (river) 400–01 Baldwin, William 99, 207 Bartholomew Fair 18, 123, 307, 427 Beauty 30, 48, 84, 92, 102, 107, 157, 160, 208, 225, 227, 259, 277, 306, 327, 351, 376, 386–7, 394, 399, 434 Bede 393 Beowulf 287 Bermuda 89–90, 364 Berners, Lady Julia 19 Bestiality 56–7, 70, 81, 104, 260, 318, 363 Bestiaries 2, 17, 62, 75, 123, 125, 162, 187, 190, 271, 278, 304, 306, 308, 310, 321, 328, 330, 365, 409, 410, 412, 419, 430, 439, 447 Beware the Cat 98, 207 Bible 17, 75, 77, 94, 101, 109, 177, 184, 189, 205, 265, 310, 315, 321, 358, 363, 391, 405, 415, 426, 429, 432, 438, 447 Coverdale Bible, The 80 Geneva Bible 22, 31, 46, 47, 50, 62, 63, 60, 161–2, 191, 198, 263, 270, 271, 272, 254, 291, 329, 330, 349, 355, 365, 368, 373, 387, 393, 402, 422, 429, 430, 434, 443 King James Bible 24, 56, 91, 261, 273, 325, 330, 349, 366, 378 Psalms 15, 24 Blundeville, Thomas 3, 239 Boar’s Head Tavern 74 Body as dust 23 and insect bites 24 Booke of Haukynge, The 19 Booke of Falconrie or Hawking, The 166, 171, 222, 368 Bouquet of Flowers with Two Lizards 279 489

Index

Breeding 8, 26, 46, 81, 87, 96, 102, 103, 116, 118, 128, 135, 165, 176, 195, 200, 234, 238, 240, 241, 259, 281, 346, 378, 393, 412, 448 Browne, Thomas 17, 47, 50, 146, 196, 207, 213, 288, 307, 311, 330, 365, 374, 412, 416, 423 Bullein, William 64 Butchers, Worshipful Company of 81 Caius, John 3, 129, 136, 140, 205, 240, 286–7, 311, 389 Calydonian boar 70–71 Camden, William 447 Cannibals, cannibalism 44–45, 51, 88, 89, 107, 235, 256, 293, 339–40, 366 Cantimpré, Thomas de 323 Carew, Thomas, Coelum Britannicum 341 Castel of Helthe, The 312 Castration 194–5, 223, 428 Cavendish, Margaret 216 Cecil, Robert 50, 247 Cecil, William 247 Chapman, George 107, 310 Homer’s Odyssey 298 Sir Giles Goosecap 285 Chaucer, Geoffrey The Canterbury Tales 269, 317, 380 Merchant’s Tale, The 365 Monk’s Tale, The 19 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 190 Wife of Bath’s Tale 283 Chester, Robert, Love’s Martyr 145 Chronicles of England, The 356 Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, The 144, 149 Class, social rank 43, 76, 101, 111, 119, 131, 174, 219–20, 225–6, 234–6, 241, 274, 280, 316–7, 318, 375–6, 402, 420 Clothing 28, 192, 308–9, 325, 338, 360, 381–2 Cogan, Thomas 339 Colasterion 441 Comedy of Errors, The 27, 35, 79, 105, 139, 174, 192–3, 197, 230, 232, 243, 266, 288, 313, 323, 324, 335, 340, 376, 380, 383, 384, 410, 437–8 Compleat Angler, The 20, 96, 162–3, 279 Comus 298 Coriolanus 26, 44–5, 47, 51–2, 57, 84, 87, 126, 129, 139, 147, 149–50, 157, 181, 188, 490

202, 206, 207, 223, 224, 252, 254, 262, 265, 275, 288, 292, 298, 300, 301, 308, 322, 347, 373, 378, 410, 411, 422, 435 Cornucopiae 49 Courtship 86, 87, 105, 116, 145–6, 184, 229, 390 Coverdale Bible, The 80 Cowardice 7, 90 110, 152, 202, 214, 277 Crime 75, 113, 116, 117, 138, 160, 192, 203, 204, 240, 323, 431 Cruelty 84, 87, 97, 128, 169, 248, 329, 351, 352, 405, 409, 433 Cuckoldry, see adultery Culpeper, Nicholas, School of Physick 327 Cymbeline 15, 30, 48, 62, 66, 74, 80, 95, 97, 100, 110, 113, 114, 121, 139, 150, 155–6, 157, 160, 178, 181, 184, 185, 194, 197, 218, 219, 257, 259, 274, 267, 269, 276, 314, 315, 333, 336, 358, 365, 366, 400, 414, 420, 423, 437, 441, 445, 448 Cynicism 31, 64, 107, 141, 270 Dante 206 De Rerum Natura 323 Death 66, 73, 126, 182, 281, 313, 353–4, 441–7 Declaration of Egregious Popish Imposters, A 421 Defence of the Apologie for the Churche of England 80 Defence of Poetry 236, 239 Dekker, Thomas 50–51, 55, 109, 116, 118, 142, 307, 356 Roaring Girl, The 118 Shoemaker’s Holiday 307 The Witch of Edmonton 142 Devil is an Asse, The 317 Disease 6, 48, 64, 83, 92, 94, 110, 126, 143, 177, 199, 202, 229, 262, 269, 282, 295, 327, 347, 350, 375, 421, 441, 442, 447 Domesticity 6, 121–122 Donne, John 385, 430 Drayton, Michael 441 Duchess of Malfi, The 123, 196, 396, 438 Dudley, John 50 Dürer, Albrecht 4, 25, 64, 65, 214, 273, 309, 312, 356, 357, 358

Index

Eastward Ho! 342 Ecclesiastical History 393 Eclogues 375 Edward II 341 Edward III 24, 55, 152, 186, 205, 305, 329–30, 331, 354, 384, 394, 411 Egypt 32, 57, 64, 124, 184, 197, 334, 427, 445 Elizabeth I 50, 177, 274, 288, 325, 326, 335, 336, 376, 431 Elyot, Thomas 312 Emblems 33 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse 310 Epicoene 23, 295 Epithalamion 267 Euphues 136, 137 Europa 57, 81–3, 135, 399 Every Man Out of His Humour 118, 400 Exeter Book 317 Faerie Queene, The 17, 49, 80, 89, 125, 151, 162, 166, 191, 269–70, 288, 304, 321. 348, 354, 357, 364, 388, 412, 414 Fairies 13, 65, 66, 69, 85, 92, 113, 122, 196, 207, 222, 246, 250, 304, 314, 332, 369, 384, 387, 394, 441 Familial relations 67, 95, 329 ‘First Anniversary, The’ 430 Fishing 19–20, 43, 44, 173–5, 288 Five Hundred Pointes of Good Husbandrie 176, 291 Fletcher, John, The Tamer Tamed 167 Flowers 16, 61, 65, 73, 92, 93, 127–8, 100, 127, 327, 336, 358, 369, 398 Anemone 17, 72–3 Artemesia 134 Buttercup 127–8 Carnation 92 Daffodil 398 Daisy 127–8, 134 Food 19, 43, 44, 63–4, 94–5, 112, 116, 147, 163, 175, 182–3, 208, 215, 283, 301–2, 316–7, 338–9, 342, 359, 381, 396, 401–2, 417, 420, 440 Ford, John, The Witch of Edmonton 142 Foure Books of Husbandrie 102 France 4, 15, 59, 60, 100, 120, 144, 152, 161, 195, 235, 257, 269, 300, 335, 381, 411, 428, 431, 432, 444

Garden of Eden 100, 133, 369, 370, 412 Gardens, gardening 24, 100–1, 150, 222, 291, 310, 324, 369–72, 383, 401, 447 Gascoigne, George 75, 131, 216, 247, 250 Noble Art of Venerie 75, 131, 216, 247, 250 ‘Praise of Philip Sparrow, The’ 391 Gender 6, 9, 17, 18, 30, 46, 49, 52, 66, 77, 116, 117–8, 131–32, 172, 204, 211, 237–8, 242, 248, 251, 258, 284, 316–7, 406 Geneva Bible 22, 31, 46, 47, 50, 62, 63, 60, 161–2, 191, 198, 263, 270, 271, 272, 254, 291, 329, 330, 349, 355, 365, 368, 373, 387, 393, 402, 422, 429, 430, 434, 443 Georgics 58, 62, 63, 153 Gesner, Conrad 2, 4, 47, 277, 342 Golden Ass, The 39, 77 Government of Health, The 64 Great Chain of Being 8–9, 90, 174, 243 Greek myths 103–104, 105, 133 Greene, Robert Defense of Conny Catching, The 116 Greenes Groats-worth of Witte 125–6, 409 A Quip for an Upstart Courtier 438 Grisone, Federigo 3, 239 Guillim, John, A Display of Heraldrie 70, 159, 162, 171, 271, 286, 310, 361, 363, 365, 384, 412 Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas His Pilgrimes 18, 90, 364 Hall, Joseph, Virgidemiarum 340 Hamlet 15, 19, 23, 28, 45, 46, 49, 56, 57, 80, 91, 92, 95, 105, 108, 113, 118, 124, 147, 165, 175, 183, 185, 192, 196, 213, 218, 221, 229, 235, 245, 258, 261, 266, 276, 281, 291, 297, 299, 314, 325, 327, 329, 337, 240–1, 345, 347–8, 352, 359, 360, 363, 371, 374, 379, 393, 402, 409, 421, 427, 428, 430, 440, 441–2 Happy Beast tradition 193 Harsnett, Samuel 343, 421 Hart, James 19 Haven of Health 339 Hawking 158, 168–70, 171–2, 211–12, 219–22, 368, 408 Henry IV, Part 1 19, 24, 43, 54, 56, 64, 74, 78, 83, 94, 97, 98, 101, 103, 105, 107, 111, 115, 116, 122, 128, 132, 149, 153, 154, 156, 161, 162, 163, 176, 178, 185–6, 491

Index

194, 195, 199, 207, 209, 214, 215, 223, 225, 226, 229, 235, 239, 246, 254, 258, 276, 277, 279, 281, 283, 292, 308, 211, 315, 322, 323, 328, 353, 355, 358, 362, 392, 396, 407, 417, 425, 442 Henry IV, Part 2 28, 29, 45, 61, 68, 74, 83, 107, 112, 130, 146, 162, 164, 178, 183, 184, 189, 200, 203, 208, 223, 235, 254, 258, 270, 283, 284, 298, 302, 312, 324, 327, 337, 342, 348, 368, 381, 386, 397, 403, 424, 430, 433, 434, 442, 443, 448 Henry V 34, 51, 58–9, 60, 64, 112, 117, 126, 130, 137, 140, 144, 152, 154, 161, 176, 184, 189, 191, 194, 199, 206, 220, 235–6, 239, 252, 254, 258, 262, 269, 272, 280, 283, 287, 300, 318, 325, 328, 362, 403, 410, 417, 423, 428, 431, 444 Henry VI, Part 1 46, 60, 94, 130, 132, 144, 146, 147, 149, 156, 181, 202, 212, 218, 219, 224, 245, 275, 289, 300, 301, 315–6, 324, 335, 348, 378, 381, 399, 422, 4224, 431, 433, 434, 445 Henry VI, Part 2 52, 59, 62, 69, 87, 93–4, 100–1, 110, 124, 126, 132, 138, 146, 152, 159, 161, 170, 178, 187, 195, 220, 226, 252, 258, 261, 262, 263, 265–6, 287, 288, 289, 310, 314, 318, 341, 351, 355, 365, 370, 385, 393, 421, 432, 434, 436 Henry VI, Part 3 52, 55, 66, 80, 81, 107, 118, 132, 147, 159, 171, 178, 181, 189, 197, 215, 252, 256, 263, 277, 278, 282, 292, 304, 314, 331, 335, 355, 371, 409, 412, 413, 432, 434, 440, 444 Henry VIII 46, 115, 129, 139, 175, 178, 186, 191, 207, 229, 236, 335, 358, 389, 393, 407, 425, 437, 443 Henry VIII 324 Hentzner, Paul 50 Heraldry 50, 81, 170, 206, 270, 273, 276, 278, 360, 361, 365 Hercules 39, 106, 135, 150, 198, 248, 253, 255, 276–7, 366, 381, 385–6, 443 Heresbach, Conrad 102 Herodotus 143, 206 Hilliard, Nicholas 328, 335 History of Four-Footed Beasts, The 2–3, 25–6, 33, 49, 50, 63, 69, 70, 75, 83, 86, 91, 97, 492

102, 109, 173, 176, 181, 184, 198, 205, 217, 239, 254, 273, 279, 291, 311, 338, 379, 368, 403, 414, 415, 423, 427, 428 Holinshed, Raphael 55, 144, 149, 176, 340 Homer 208, 399 Iliad 208, 399 Odyssey 23, 77, 298, 401 Homer’s Odyssey 298 Hooke, Robert 280 Micrographia 184, 198, 291 Horace 287, 351 Human-animal boundary 21–3, 26, 27, 31, 88–9, 104, 119–20, 256, 324 Human exceptionalism 140–41, 243–5 Humoralism 55, 63, 64, 98, 213, 215, 240 Hunting 8, 17, 49, 52, 57, 68, 69, 70, 79, 116, 131–3, 134, 169–71, 172, 188–9, 193, 210–11, 214–5, 217–9, 240–2, 247–53, 420 Husbandry 3, 5, 25, 102–3, 195, 291, 299, 346 Hybridity 9, 11, 28, 47, 88–90, 104–6, 111, 117, 201, 207, 254, 282, 287–8, 289–90, 284–7, 298, 342, 363–4 Iliad 208, 399 James I 50, 253, 335, 381 Jerome, Saint 274, 405 Jew of Malta, The 213, 356 Jewel, Bishop John, A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande 80 Jews and Jewishness 23, 44, 46, 129, 139, 147, 231, 264, 338-40, 346, 356, 401, 404, 43 Johnson, Thomas, Cornucopiæ 49 Jonson, Ben 400–1 The Alchemist 151, 162, 222, 255, 269, 291, 330, 395, 421 Bartholomew Fair 18, 123, 307, 427 Devil is an Asse, The 317 Eastward Ho! 342 Entertainment at Britain’s Burse 310 Epicoene 23, 395 Every Man Out of His Humour 118, 374 Masque of Blackness 400 Oberon 363 ‘On Poet-Ape’ 26 Poetaster, The 349 Sejanus 350, 439 Staple of News, The 349 Volpone 78, 184, 190, 342, 388, 416, 423, 430

Index

Jousting 105, 118 Julius Caesar 15, 27, 28, 38, 61, 68, 126, 138, 155, 163, 173, 218, 224, 251, 258, 261, 275, 303, 353–4, 389–90, 419, 426, 435 Kenilworth Entertainments 50 King James Bible 24, 56, 91, 261, 273, 325, 330, 349, 366, 378 King John 38–9, 88, 92, 130 139, 144, 148, 156, 197, 216, 231, 252, 264–5, 275, 300, 354, 376, 391, 394, 399, 402, 441 King Lear 15–16, 19, 21, 24, 27, 47, 53, 55, 66, 70,,77, 78, 84, 92, 98, 104, 111, 127, 128, 137, 139, 142, 144, 149, 163, 185, 186, 189, 192, 200, 212, 226, 245, 262, 270, 280, 287, 300, 304, 305, 317, 326, 329, 338, 348, 349, 366, 371, 374, 378, 382, 383, 392, 403, 409, 413, 414, 421, 424, 433, 437, 446 Klinikē or the Diet of the Diseased 19 Kyd, Thomas, The Spanish Tragedy 386 Labour 24, 33, 35, 38, 59, 61, 63, 81, 102, 111, 153, 225, 233, 234, 239, 247, 293, 315, 375, 376 Lacy, John 135 Land enclosure 375 Language of animals 15–6, 47, 61, 86, 97,111 Lanyer, Amelia, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 423 Lenten Stuffe 395 Liber animalium 419 Linnaeus, Carl 2 Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi, The 405 London 45, 50, 74, 144, 164, 175, 176, 208, 216, 227, 235, 266, 270, 311, 319, 355, 374, 407, 430 Lopez, Roderigo 23, 431 Love’s Labour’s Lost 21–2, 29, 30, 40, 56, 79, 85, 87, 95, 96, 112, 114, 116, 127, 131–2, 146, 160, 162, 176, 182, 188, 193, 195, 197, 201, 206, 229–30, 232, 246, 248–9, 258–9, 264, 267, 270, 280, 281, 289, 299, 302, 313, 325, 327, 337, 351, 359, 361, 377–8, 381, 383, 385, 402, 430, 440, 446 Love and courtship 14, 17–8, 19, 21, 26, 42, 44, 47, 51, 57, 67, 72–3,74,79, 82–3, 93,

103, 105, 111, 114, 128, 131, 134, 143, 145–7, 160, 171, 182, 197, 204, 217, 223, 238, 241–3, 247, 248–50, 259, 267, 283, 316, 323, 324, 326, 337, 346, 350–1, 366, 419, 422, 437, 440, 446 Lover’s Complaint, A 62, 105, 237, 238 Love’s Martyr 145 Lucan, The Civil War 124 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 18 Lust 54–5, 237, 228–9 Luther, Martin 442 Of Two Woonderful Popish Monsters 298 Lyly, John 136, 137 Macbeth 15, 26, 44–5, 49, 51, 53, 66, 67, 69, 110, 111, 121, 126, 141–2, 151, 158, 163, 171, 179, 190, 191, 203, 204, 206, 207, 221, 224, 235, 242, 243, 262, 264, 278, 279, 282, 285, 294, 304, 314, 327, 349, 352, 357, 359, 368, 370, 371, 373, 387, 389, 391, 402, 403, 410, 411, 414, 421, 424, 431, 434, 436, 444, 446, 448 Machiavelli 7, 107, 201, 264, 277 Madness 67, 79, 91, 98, 104, 121, 142, 181, 190–1, 192, 213, 214, 221, 243, 276, 305, 329, 342, 348, 377 Magic 4, 39, 76–7, 109, 139, 196, 292, 298, 311, 339, 382, 388, 406, 437, 443, 448 Malynes, Gerald 94 Mandeville, John 4, 284–5, 337 Manwood, John 132 Marlowe, Christopher 107, 340 Edward II 341 Jew of Malta 213, 356 Marriage 68, 105, 128, 148, 164, 169, 171, 174, 222, 237–8, 241, 248, 267, 284, 214–5, 337, 376, 406 Masculinity 74, 75, 117, 132, 175, 183, 204, 226, 237, 241, 242, 389, 390, 407, 428 Masque of Blackness 400 Measure for Measure 27, 34, 44, 64, 66, 127, 169, 187, 192, 231, 266, 277, 300, 301, 348, 378, 391, 395, 417, 444 Medicine 85, 92, 269, 416 Melanchthon, Philip, Of Two Woonderful Popish Monsters 298 Meleager 70 Merchant of Venice, The 22, 30, 44, 61, 85, 98, 103, 115, 126, 129, 139, 147, 152, 164, 493

Index

165, 175, 177, 197–8, 203, 208, 214, 225, 244, 245, 256, 264, 268, 274, 285–6, 301, 302, 303, 305, 337, 339–40, 346, 347, 348, 371, 378, 384, 386, 394, 399, 401, 428, 430–1, 432, 443, 448 Merchant’s Tale, The 365 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 13–14, 28, 34–5, 40–1, 43, 54–5, 57, 67, 77–8, 79, 82, 99, 102, 116, 122, 128, 131–2, 133, 135, 138, 140, 146, 165, 176, 189, 196, 198, 203, 205, 218, 220, 222, 228, 231, 236, 250, 257, 259, 297, 316, 327, 348, 355, 399, 402, 420, 424, 429, 446 Micrographia 184, 198, 280, 291 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 15, 26, 39–40, 51–2, 56, 66, 69, 74, 75–7, 81, 85, 92, 105, 111, 112,-3, 115, 118, 122, 126, 128, 133, 137, 145, 146, 150, 154, 169, 173, 177, 186, 188, 201, 203, 207, 222, 227, 231, 237, 241, 243, 245, 246, 248, 267, 238, 272, 274, 284, 288, 289, 296–7, 300, 304, 305, 311, 312, 314, 315, 319, 320, 327, 332, 344, 351, 369, 373, 380, 381, 384, 387, 390, 391, 394, 403, 407, 410, 436 439, 443, 445 Milton, John 262, 269 Colasterion 441 Comus 298 First Defense of the English People 330 ‘Il Penseroso’ 123 Paradise Lost 63, 272, 298, 412 Reason of Church Government, The 94 Samson Agonistes 365 Sonnet 1 307 Minos, King 82, 289 Misogyny 20–1, 104, 124, 232, 362 Moffet, Thomas Silkewormes and their Flies 381 Theatre of Insects 3, 24, 62, 64-5, 84, 85, 96, 102, 152, 153, 184, 196, 198, 282, 393, 426 Monarchy 37, 46, 128, 130, 236, 263, 275, Monsters, monstrosity 15, 18, 248, 204, 290, 293–8, 266 Montaigne, Michel de, ‘Of the Cannibales’ 89, 293 Much Ado About Nothing 19, 21, 29, 34, 43, 44, 47, 54, 69, 81, 87, 95, 97, 111, 130, 165, 185, 211, 220, 232, 259, 304, 315, 323, 373, 379, 433, 440, 443, 444, 445 Music 67, 104, 115, 126, 240, 267, 288, 304, 306, 398–9 494

Nash, Thomas Anatomie of Absurditie 109 Lenten Stuffe 395 Pierce Penniless 125 Unfortunate Traveler 196, 310 Natural History (Pliny) 2, 32, 47, 59, 64, 75, 91, 110, 117, 125, 127, 144, 161, 162, 164, 173, 176, 190, 191, 196, 200, 209, 212, 217, 270, 273, 308, 313, 323, 325, 330, 334, 335, 341, 362, 363, 365, 366–7, 368, 375, 396, 398, 403, 410, 412, 415 Neville, Richard 50 Nicomachean Ethics 406 Noble Art of Venerie, The 75, 131, 216, 247, 250 Oberon 363 Odyssey 23, 77, 298, 401 Of Englishe Dogges 129, 136, 205, 240, 246, 287, 311, 389 Of Two Woonderful Popish Monsters 298 Omens 66, 68, 97, 111, 125, 126, 155, 261, 282, 288, 304, 313, 314, 352–3, 359 ‘On Poet-Ape’ 26 On Stones 117 Ornithologiae 110 Orpheus 107, 225, 272, 411, 433 Othello 30, 33, 37, 42, 46, 51, 56, 69, 85, 90, 97, 110, 114, 118, 120, 124, 130–1, 139, 164, 179, 181, 183, 199, 205, 208, 211,212, 231, 238–9, 245, 254, 256, 259–60, 267, 297, 323, 325, 346, 352, 362–3, 373, 382, 387, 388, 399, 415, 423, 430, 435 Ovid 13–14, 17, 39, 76, 82, 103–4, 204, 212, 289, 306, 331, 332–3, 334, 366, 393, 399 Owle, The 441 Paradise Lost 63, 272, 298, 412, 415 Paré, Ambrose 298 Pasiphae 82, 289 Passionate Pilgrim, The 43, 67, 74, 114, 115, 145, 146, 165, 177, 226, 346, 428 Pastoral poetry 165, 177–8, 226, 375, 376, 379 Perfume 111, 382 Pericles 42, 60, 66, 98, 101, 118, 122, 145, 150, 152, 153, 161, 173, 179, 184, 192, 195, 196, 197, 202, 237, 278, 279, 290, 292, 300, 306, 342, 361, 390, 422, 429, 442, 446, 448 Petrarch 48, 61, 151, 227, 312, 350–1, 435

Index

Pets 5–7, 25, 42, 97, 137, 142, 173, 282, 307, 323, 389, 391 Philip Sparrow 391 Phoenix and the Turtle, The 145, 158, 336, 361, 399 Physiologus 419 Pierce Penniless 125 Plants 100, 127–28, 291, 370, 381, 447 Plato 8, 331 Pliny 2, 32, 47, 59, 64, 75, 91, 110, 117, 125, 127, 144, 161, 162, 164, 173, 176, 190, 191, 196, 200, 209, 212, 217, 270, 273, 308, 313, 323, 325, 330, 334, 335, 341, 362, 363, 365, 366–7, 368, 375, 396, 398, 403, 410, 412, 415 Plutarch 32, 77, 306, 447 Poetaster, The 349 Poison 32–3, 43–4, 48, 327, 348, 385–8, 394, 412–5, 416, 420–1 Politics and allegory 246 and betrayal 93–94 as deception 108 imagery, tyranny 57, 68–9, 71–2, 133 power 180–1 ‘Praise of Philip Sparrow, The’ 391 Prostitutes/prostitution 49, 50, 64, 115, 175, 201, 202, 208, 229, 245, 259, 262, 271, 281, 297, 302, 327, 338, 344, 378, 390, 409, 434 Psalms 15, 24 Pseudodoxia Epidemica 17, 47, 50, 146, 196, 207, 213, 288, 307, 311, 330, 365, 374, 412, 416, 423 Purchas, Samuel 18, 90, 364 Purgatorio, The 206 Puttenham, George 48–9 Pythagoras 22, 124, 439, 440 Quip for an Upstart Courtier, A 438 Race 31, 46, 49, 89–90, 164, 199, 228, 238–9, 251, 263, 268, 325, 400, 414 Rape 9, 14, 16, 26, 43, 57, 60, 67, 76, 82–3, 88, 89, 104, 107, 110, 135, 152, 218, 220, 228, 251, 252, 263, 272, 290, 305, 306, 332–5, 355, 398, 399, 425, 435, 444 Rape of Lucrece, The 16, 59, 60–1, 67, 92, 97, 112, 117, 135, 145, 146, 152, 160, 169, 197, 205, 220, 227, 265, 313, 326,

332–3, 345, 355, 361, 370, 392, 399, 409, 411, 421, 425, 428, 435, 444, 446 Ravens Almanacke, The 356 Reason of Church Government, The 94 Rebellion 39, 68, 89, 128, 137, 246, 254, 258, 331, 385, 392, 407, 422, 444 Religion 2, 31, 58, 77, 90, 129, 139, 146, 148, 164, 165, 177, 190, 191, 244–5, 264, 265, 273–4, 278, 301, 324, 328, 331, 339–40, 346, 369, 378, 382, 388, 401–2, 419, 437, 442 Remaines . . . Concerning Britain 447 Reynard the Fox 98 Richard II 37, 45–6, 91, 100, 114, 118, 160, 161, 170, 195, 235, 239, 257, 263, 270, 275, 316, 328, 331–2, 355, 370, 371, 385, 407, 415, 420, 422, 443 Richard III 28, 47, 48, 55, 56, 71–2, 86, 113, 129, 148, 157–8, 222, 228, 229, 235, 256, 261, 313, 326, 383, 384, 394, 397, 403, 410, 413, 422, 432, 445, 447 Roaring Girl, The 118 Romeo and Juliet 18, 44, 67, 68, 92, 98, 112, 113, 122, 126, 127, 139, 146, 160, 153, 165, 175, 182, 183, 198, 201–2, 205, 207, 215, 226, 228, 235, 264, 267, 299, 305–6, 349, 350, 358, 359, 369, 383, 394, 395, 400, 407, 411, 414, 416, 435, 441, 442, 444 Romeo & Juliet, A Monkey’s Tale 31 Rowley, William 142 Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum 423 Samson Agonistes 153, 365 Savery, Roelant 279 Scala natura, see Great Chain of Being School of Physick, The 327 Seasons 3, 67, 79, 84, 125, 127–8, 135, 203, 268 Sejanus 350, 439 Service/Servants 35, 36–7, 49, 119–20, 130, 131, 137, 141, 206, 213, 228, 240, 247, 295, 340, 349, 377, 378, 384, 389 Sex/sexuality 13–14, 15, 20, 25–6, 29, 40–1, 45, 54, 56–7, 68, 72, 79, 81, 82–3, 86, 103, 113, 114, 115, 116, 191, 195, 198, 201–2, 237–8, 258–9, 280, 389, 391, 408, 415, 426, 435; see also, men, women, prostitution, adultery 495

Index

Shakespeare, William, 125–6, 409, 438; see also under individual works Shepheardes Calender 439 Shoemaker’s Holiday, The 307 Sidney, Philip 6, 105, 177, 236, 239 Silkewormes and their Flies 381 Sir Giles Goosecap 285 Sir Thomas More 226, 337, 374 Skelton, John 323–4, 391 Sonnet 6 443 Sonnet 12 225, 360 Sonnet 19 276, 335 Sonnet 34 326 Sonnet 35 92 Sonnet 54 92 Sonnet 71 443 Sonnet 73 368 Sonnet 83 345 Sonnet 85 345 Sonnet 91 219 Sonnet 95 92 Sonnet 96 265, 434 Sonnet 99 92 Sonnet 102 332 Sonnet 112 15 Sonnet 113 126, 146 Sonnet 120 117 Sonnet 127 351 Sonnet 120 117 Sonnet 129 43–44 Speculum Mundi or a Glasse Representing the Face of the World 49, 213 Speke, Parrot 323–4 Spenser, Edmund Epithalamion 267 Faerie Queene, The 17, 49, 80, 89, 125, 162, 166, 191, 288, 304, 348, 354, 357, 364, 412 Shepheardes Calender, The 439 Spontaneous generation 123–124, 281 Staple of News, The 349 Stow, John Annales of England 176, 342 Chronicles of England 356 Strachey, William 90, 364 Strange, Wonderfull, and Bloudy Battell betweene Frogs and Mise, The 191 Swan, John 49 213 Sycorax 88, 293–4, 298, 355, 414 496

Tamer Tamed, The 167 Taming of the Shrew, The 15, 29–20, 45, 64, 74, 78, 80, 82, 86105, 113, 116, 118, 122, 132, 147, 168, 176, 188, 205, 206, 210, 213, 218, 219–20, 223, 229, 236, 238, 241, 245, 248, 259, 262, 276, 280, 197, 301, 305, 315, 327, 359, 380, 389, 402, 405–6, 426, 431, 440, 446 Tempest, The 15, 28, 61, 81, 88–90, 92, 97, 99,110, 117, 118, 139, 145, 153, 174, 176, 182, 200, 222, 225, 244, 285, 292, 293–6, 303, 313, 321, 325, 348, 364, 376, 386, 391, 396, 406, 414, 416, 419, 426, 436, 446 Teniers, David the Younger 257 Theatre of Insects, The 23, 62, 84, 85, 196, 198, 282, 393, 426 Theater, theatricality 37, 55, 120, 166, 178, 224, 299 Theophrastus 117 Timaeus 331 Timon of Athens 16, 31, 34, 42, 49–50, 57, 69, 70, 92, 110, 141, 151, 160, 161, 180, 186, 205, 266, 269, 270, 298, 322, 335, 397, 402, 409, 413, 414, 419, 421, 433, 435, 437 Titus Andronicus 13–14,44, 57, 67, 70, 87, 99, 103, 104, 107, 110–11, 131, 133, 135, 158, 179–80, 191, 194, 197, 217–8, 223, 229, 231, 241, 245, 251, 256, 263, 264, 268, 278, 313, 318, 319, 326, 333, 346, 351–2, 377, 385, 386, 387, 397, 400, 403, 409, 410–11, 413, 424, 425 Topsell, Edward 2–3, 25–6, 33, 49, 50, 63, 69, 70, 75, 83, 86, 91, 97, 102, 109, 173, 176, 181, 184, 198, 205, 217, 239, 254, 273, 279, 291, 311, 338, 379, 368, 403, 414, 415, 423, 427, 428 Tower of London 4, 71, 311, 350, 355 Training of animals 29, 45–6, 50, 54, 165, 168, 171, 210–11, 219–21, 234, 236–9, 367, 405–7 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, The 3, 284, 337 Treatise and Discourse of the Laws of the Forest 132 Troilus and Cressida 15, 33–4, 51, 60, 64, 78, 79, 80, 82, 85, 91, 129, 131, 140, 146, 151, 157, 163, 164, 171, 173, 180, 183, 185, 187, 192, 202, 216, 218, 225, 226, 227, 229, 231, 239, 246, 252, 267, 270,

Index

275, 279, 280, 287, 297, 300, 314, 320, 323, 324, 340, 344, 353, 359, 373, 376, 384, 391, 392, 394, 400, 406, 408, 411, 415, 422, 427, 429, 432, 434, 437 True and Admirable History of a Mayden of Consolens 109 True Description of this Marveilous Strange Fish, The 374 True Reportory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates Knight, A 90, 364 True Tragedy of Richard III, The 352 Turberville, George 166, 171, 222, 368 Tusser, Thomas 3, 176, 291 Twelfth Night 14, 34, 49, 53, 64, 79, 92, 131, 133, 144, 164, 176, 189, 211, 216, 217, 226, 242, 264, 299, 302, 335, 350, 353, 358, 378, 380, 395, 410, 417, 435, 440, 448 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The 35, 61, 69, 92, 98, 108, 114, 118–9, 129, 140, 154, 203, 229, 265, 272, 301, 305, 306, 326, 331, 358, 377, 395, 411, 425 Two Noble Kinsmen, The 20, 28–9, 42, 43, 71, 111, 121, 147, 159, 183, 190–1, 220, 221, 225, 238, 269, 277, 282, 284, 288, 306, 308, 313, 333, 336, 351, 354, 362, 384, 402, 409, 410, 417, 436 Unfortunate Traveler, The 196, 310 Venus and Adonis 16, 17–18, 56, 67, 70, 71, 72–3, 92, 102, 117, 132, 133, 145, 159, 168, 172, 183, 185, 192, 196, 216, 225, 237, 242, 251, 259, 267, 284, 288, 313, 318, 326, 359, 384, 403, 411, 432 Virgil 198, 398, 425 Aeneid 409 Eclogues 375 Georgics 58, 62, 63, 153 Volpone 78, 184, 190, 342, 388, 416, 423, 430

Wars of the Roses 73, 94 Webster, John 123, 196, 396, 437, Duchess of Malfi, The 123, 196, 396, 437 White Devil, The 344 Whitney, Geffrey 286 ‘Whoso List to Hunt’ 131, 228, 219 Winter’s Tale, The 19, 26–7, 48, 51–2, 56, 80, 87, 96, 122, 126, 139, 146, 153, 163, 171, 174, 177, 182, 184, 195, 225, 243, 259, 262, 265, 268, 292, 303, 322, 346, 354–5, 363, 376, 394, 397, 406, 414, 425, 4226, 428, 432, 437 Witch of Edmonton, The 142 Witches, witchcraft 5, 6, 15, 35, 48, 49, 53, 69, 88, 96, 98, 142, 149, 151, 190, 207, 223, 278, 287, 304, 313, 314, 349, 355, 373, 387, 403, 410, 411, 414, 415, 421, 431 Wither, George 364 Women 49, 54, 55, 147, 223, 284, 311 and chastity/virginity 13, 44, 58, 60, 92, 121, 132–3, 133–4, 182, 191, 195, 238, 248, 265, 290, 325, 332–3, 399, 425, 427, 429 and motherhood 55, 80, 87, 244 and gender expectations 30, 147, 258–9, 266, 380, 394 and hunting 131, 135 and misogyny 20, 21, 104, 124, 133–4, 232, 315 and infidelity 49–50, 92, 127, 96, 227, 258–9 genitalia 174–5 nature of 133–4 virtue 325 See also, sex/sexuality, prostitutes/ prostitution Wyatt, Thomas 6, 131, 219, 228 Wyl Bucke His Testament 135 Xenophon 239

Walton, Izaak 20, 96, 162–3, 279 War 52–3, 60, 125, 126, 138, 140, 146, 156, 158–9, 194, 224–5, 275, 292, 315, 431

Zeus 57, 78, 83, 103, 111, 179, 233, 234, 258, 331, 399, 424

497

498

499

500

501

502

503

504