BLACK RAMS AND UNRULY JADES: READING ANIMALS IN THE LANDSCAPE OF RENAISSANCE CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY By Jonathan W. Thurston A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English — Doctor of Philosophy 2022 ABSTRACT BLACK RAMS AND UNRULY JADES: READING ANIMALS IN THE LANDSCAPE OF RENAISSANCE CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY By Jonathan W. Thurston From King of Tars to Volpone, animals frequently coded for cultural difference, whether that “entailed” race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. And, ritually, scholars have noted that this correlation exists. Regarding the Middle Ages, Peggy McCracken writes in In the Skin of a Beast about how animal “society” was seen as a 1:1 mirror of human society and had similar cultural differences of its own. But, while many scholars note that animals appear when discussing representations of race and cultural difference, a visible gap remains: no one has discussed significantly the crossover of animals and cultural geography in premodern texts or even what that crossover signifies. My dissertation, Black Rams and Unruly Jades: Reading Animals in the Landscape of Renaissance Cultural Geography seeks to address that gap. With a combination of case studies and literary surveys, I track multiple ways that reading animals into cultural geography significantly alters our interpretation of many of the period texts. Just as Kim Hall works to understand a rhetorical dichotomy of “fair”/”dark” in terms of a contemporary racial discourse and Ian J. Smith reads literary instances of Others’ “barbarism” in the construction of cultural difference, I show how the socially constructed image of animals in the Renaissance informed contemporary understandings of cultural geography as evident in primary literature. I link primary dramatic works to contemporary animal discourse, often in the form of husbandry manuals, encyclopediae, and manége treatises. This historicist lens allows for the argument that contemporary knowledge of animal-human interactions informed these animal representations of human difference at the time. The first chapter examines Shakespeare’s Othello in terms of its animal-racial imagery. As Iago constantly refers to people as different animals, he iterates a social hierarchy of cultural difference through these animals. Each species reference calls to contemporary knowledge of the animal world and informs our reading of the play by providing additional layers of meaning based on the specific species referenced. Chapter two moves into English drama, starting with the Christopher Marlowe play, Tamburlaine the Great. The chapter starts with a longer survey of Renaissance Turk Plays to show the archetypes the Turk could hold in these narratives as well as the frequent animal connections that appeared in rhetoric around the Turk. This survey works at a macro scale, revealing the sheer volume of English drama that centered on the Turk and the English fascination with the exotic. The third chapter focuses on Lust’s Dominion and the way that characters give animal appellations to other characters. The chapter starts with background and synopsis of Dekker’s play and then constructs a theoretical framework for the chapter, claiming that naming a person an animal in the Renaissance responds to a rhetoric of cultural difference. The chapter ultimately argues that understanding the cultural significance of different animal species at the time informs our reading of the characters’ understanding of self and other in Lust’s Dominion. The final major chapter reads The Tempest alongside early colonial American texts, comparing descriptions of indigenous fauna to the island nature in the play. This ultimately works to paint Caliban as an indigenous person who is animalized in ways similar to indigenous Americans. The aspects of animal control and domestication play into the civilized-wild dichotomy here, specifically in fish management. I dedicate this dissertation to my husband, Izzy. We had our first phone call once I started my doctoral program, started dating when I was halfway through coursework, moved in together after I successfully passed my comprehensive exams, and had our wedding after I finished the first draft of this dissertation. They have inspired me and continue to do so. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The process and procedure of writing this dissertation was a long and arduous one, certainly one of the longest writing projects I have undertaken. And, truly, I could not have done it without the help of so many people. First, if not for the many members of my friend circles and found family, this would not have been possible. I remember going to Tabs’ house to record notes from all the texts I was reading, and I spent so much time editing there. He was an amazing emotional support for me as I spent hours and hours working till 3 AM some nights. Granted, it helped that he provided a plethora of healthy snacks, like Pizza Rolls and Nutty Buddies, not to mention the seemingly unlimited coffee. I remember, too, going to Colin’s house to study sometimes. He would be playing a video game while I ran through my notes and worked through early drafting of some of the chapters. I probably would not have passed my comprehensive exams if it wasn’t for him, and he helped me have a social life in the first year of the pandemic. As the local Dungeon and Dragons dungeon master, he also kept me sane in a medieval realm throughout grad school. Also, to Rayah, off whom I would often soundboard ideas when I found myself stuck due to some revision feedback or some of my weaker arguments. They were always there to at least talk me through some of the concerns. They continued to remind me, even at my lowest, that things would work out at some point. Then, to my husband. As my dedication shows, the dissertation and our relationship have a lot in common, having grown together: they both started around the same time, they both survived the worst (we hope) of the pandemic, and they both (I hope) have a long future ahead of them. Izzy has continued to be a phenomenal support for me as an academic, and I hope they can v continue to forgive me when I get on my soapbox about early modern printing techniques randomly. Next, to my graduate program and English department, I found so much love and support at Michigan State University. I was fortunate enough to have a cohort I genuinely looked up to and admired. Jessica and Michael Stokes really helped me survive graduate school life, and I always felt like I could come to them with my million imposter syndromes, and they would reveal I was far from alone in most of those. The occasional game night definitely helped as well! Lastly, to my dissertation committee, I found such a wonderfully supportive group to guide and coach me through this process. Thomas Dietz was instrumental in helping me think through the concerns of the animal both inside and outside my dissertation, and he helped me to position my thinking in terms of extant Critical Animal Studies. However, more than that, perhaps, he checked in frequently, forwarded me job offers, and was a genuine form of academic support as an Animal Studies scholar at Michigan State. Jyotsna Singh has been one of my top supporters here, telling everyone she knows about the Renaissance holiday feast Tabs and I cooked for our class one semester, and always sending me useful Shakespeare job leads. I will always be grateful for our many coffee chats. I learned so much about early modern academia from her, and, as you will see in the following dissertation, her work is fundamental to the way I think about Shakespeare. And last but definitely not least, to my dissertation committee chair, Stephen Deng. He went out of his way to be an advisor, a mentor, a counselor, an instructor, and a support to me throughout my career at Michigan State. He provided such substantial feedback for this dissertation, and he helped in facilitating the inner workings of the committee itself. He advised vi me when it came to the job market, along with prepping me for job interviews and sending me job postings when he found them. Plus, he has given me numerous other academic opportunities, like Latin translation. And I loved having the chance to dog-sit for him, given his dog’s and my shared interest in musicals of the 21st century. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………... 1 CHAPTER 1 – Ram-ifications of Cultural Difference: “Natural” Threats in The Tragedy of Othello………………………………………………………………………….. 23 Fear of the East in Husbandry Manuals……………………………………………………... 28 Cultural Animals in Othello…………………………………………………………………. 35 CHAPTER 2 – Beating a Dead Horse: Multicultural Violence in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine………………………………………………………………………….55 Tamburlaine the Conqueror…………………………………………………………………. 59 Tamburlaine the Cavalryman………………………………………………………………... 75 Tamburlaine the Equestrian…………………………………………………………………. 77 CHAPTER 3 – Gorilla Warfare: Lust’s Dominion and Animal Appellations………………… 101 Animals, Humans, and the Chains that Bind Them………………………………………... 105 Animals and Racial Epithets……………………………………………………………….. 109 Horses: Hispanophilia/phobia and Masculinity…………………………………………... 112 Hounds and Curs: Consumption and Vice…………………………………………………. 123 Apes: Rhetoric and Imitation………………………………………………………………. 130 CHAPTER 4 – Colonialist Dog-ma: Domestication in Early Modern Travel Narratives and The Tempest…………………………...……………………………………….. 140 Hakluyt……………………………………………………………………………………... 145 The Tempest………………………………………………………………………………... 153 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………… 175 viii INTRODUCTION Othello, Caliban, Tamburlaine, and Eleazar all walk into a bar. This curious image evokes not only the early modern British past and its dramatic racialized figures but also a series of potentially comic questions. What would these four characters say to each other? What would they commiserate about? What unfair truths of the world would they rightfully rave about over their glasses? And what indeed would they order? Would Othello ask for a horse’s neck with a kick, in a bittersweet call to his moniker of the “Barbary horse?” Would Tamburlaine make that a double, remembering the men he called his own “horses?” Would Eleazar order Hair of the Dog, knowing he had called himself and his men “hounds,” and would Caliban order the Fish House Punch in memory of his days catching fish for Prospero and his daughter? These questions speak to the four characters’ shared cultural alterity in British drama and furthermore the prevalence of animals in the textual construction of that alterity. One of the first annotated footnotes I remember ever giving me true pause was an online edition of Othello, in which the moment when Othello is labeled a “Barbary horse” was glossed as meaning, “a North African horse.” And that was the limit of the footnote. I found this one gloss to be so fascinating and provoking because I wanted to know how this annotator knew that it was a North African horse. Was there more meaning to be gleaned from this name? Was the Barbary horse typically a black one? Was it a specific landrace-type of horse? Was it one that had specific behavioral traits at the time? What all was packed in this image besides just a location? Why did Shakespeare choose a horse as opposed to any other African mammal? Why didn’t he choose a zebra or a lion or even a gazelle? Throughout my years working with early modern literature, I continued to find similar glosses, similar rabbit holes—if you’ll pardon the pun—to fall into. And the four most significant and productive cases I found for this phenomenon—that of animals 1 working as a code for culturally geographic and often racial alterity—are Tamburlaine the Great, Othello, Lust’s Dominion, and The Tempest. But let me begin with a much more nuanced question, one that can examine this code of animals and alterity more clearly. What specific animals can code for these kinds of alterity? The word specific here is italicized for a number of reasons. The word itself stems from the Latin species (“a form or kind”) and facio (“make”). It gestures loosely to the modern understanding of species, and this gesture frames much of my investigations here, thinking through specific species of animals. When early modern British drama constructed difference—whether in cultural geography or in race—on a textual level, it often did so with these animal monikers and metaphors. But these names—seemingly significant on an ontological level—strictly relied on an awareness of the animal at a species level. Often, these plays operated in a world where society and the animal world operated similarly and became equivalent to one another. Anyone could be coded as an animal, be they protagonist or antagonist. And yet, many figures become placed in a specific hierarchical box—dare I say a species?—that corresponded to those figures’ behaviors, actions, and place in society. Much of what I attempt in this dissertation is an exploration of the various ways specific animal species are used to code for differences in cultural geography and race. If specific animal species code for these kinds of difference, though, how are these specifics understood by readers and viewers of the play? What universal qualities does—let’s say—a Barbary horse convey to the average early modern British mind? In a world rather different from our own, one where animals were a constant part of daily life, a person’s interactions with real-life animals reflected back upon what it meant to be human. Because of the historical context of these animal-human interactions and relationships, the connection between animal species and human alterity is stronger than one may think otherwise. The Barbary horse is more than just a North 2 African horse after all. These contexts really come to light through printed texts like horse husbandry manuals, stable registers, travel narratives, colonist letters, and zoological encyclopediae. Each of these texts speaks both to human alterity and animal species. And that leaves the potentially larger question of “why”: why do these dramatists employ these comparisons of geographic Others and specific animal species? Do they seek to reinforce or counter these tropes? Do these comparisons elevate, reinforce, or detract from other themes in those plays? How do these messages respond to contemporary cultural and racial discourses? The authorial intent in these plays varies, but largely Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Dekker show awareness of cultural knowledge of these animals and employ the tropes to connect to viewers and readers in an attempt to at least address the construction of alterity, usually affirming common stereotypes and beliefs about these Othered peoples. These questions shape my treatment of the four plays in this dissertation. Over four chapters, this project tracks a narrative of ontological evolution of the usage of animals as codes for culturally geographic and racial alterity. The first chapter begins with Shakespeare’s Othello, revealing the ways that Shakespeare discusses race specifically as a kind of genetic corruption, primarily through the image of the “black ram,” a popular means of discussing corruption in a herd of sheep. The second chapter reads Tamburlaine the Great regarding its usage of horse husbandry, judging Tamburlaine’s treatment of both his men and his horses as anti-English and therefore better. Then, the next chapter takes on the task of interpreting animal monikers of cultural difference in Lust’s Dominion, with a focus on the categories of dogs, horses, and apes. The fourth and final chapter reads The Tempest alongside colonial texts of North America to establish the animal-racial construction of Caliban as a concluding case study to the project. In thinking about early modern cultural geography, invasion is an important theme at play 3 here. Early modern English people used their constructed animal-cultural rhetoric in drama, like The Tragedy of Othello, to discuss and converse with concerns of foreign invasion and racial politics. These concerns were constantly being framed by contemporary agricultural knowledge, like in husbandry and equestrian manuals. This contextual framing reveals that animal hierarchies informed English awareness of foreign others, as is also seen in the travel narratives. As Iago refers to people as different animals, he iterates a social hierarchy of cultural difference through these animals. Each species reference—from the “black ram” to the “Barbary horse”—calls attention to contemporary knowledge of the animal world—as can be found in animal texts like husbandry and equestrian manuals—and informs our reading of the play by providing additional layers of meaning based on the specific species referenced. The treatment of race is not just about color here but also about foreign cultures that are somehow “threatening,” and Iago’s animal imagery reifies the notion that Othello is a threat by nature, speaking to contemporary English fears and rhetoric of sovereignty. The first chapter tracks these concerns across the play in its characterization of Othello as specific animal species that correlate with and speak to these contemporary concerns of both invasion and genetic corruption, affecting the “herd” in a sense. Early modern English drama reified the exoticization of cultural others found in the travel narratives to work with the Great Chain of Being (more specifically, animal hierarchies), pitting English identity both against nonhuman animals and cultural others.1 The second chapter elevates Tamburlaine the Great as a case study for framing treatment of animals in the East—via Tamburlaine’s equestrian discourse—against contemporary English animal treatments—via the rise of anti-manége equestrian thought. While English drama loves to exoticize the East, English 1 As I show in this dissertation, the Great Chain of Being is a rather contested concept in the field. However, its hierarchical nature is productive for an analysis of the human-animal dichotomy in the early modern period due to the ontological connection associated with the act of calling humans animals in early modern drama. 4 people also saw the East as a viable threat, a place where cruelty happens. Marlowe’s play invites contemporary viewers to question what kinds of people can or should become “beasts of burden” as well as what kind of treatment is “inhumane.” As the play’s characters are Turkish, Scythian, and Persian, one sees a kind of behavioral cataloging that mimics many of the travel narratives. The discourse of cruelty in the play transposes animal images of foreign social hierarchies (for example, conquerors and their prisoners of war) to advance notions of English “natural sovereignty,” especially through the subtextual critique of Eastern equestrian practices in the play. While the English have dominion over others—be they human or animal—this play distinguishes a cruel dominion (that of Tamburlaine) from a civilized one (such as England). However, this chapter also complicates these ideas of dominion and the “civilized” versus “savage” binary, noting the tensions found in the English view of the East at the time. The combined exoticization and making of cultural identity worked together to create an animal shorthand in early modern English narratives, as I argue in the second chapter, allowing for animals to be used as a socioeconomic and sometimes racial demarcation in rhetoric, such as Lust’s Dominion’s animal hierarchy: horses for royalty, dogs for commoners, and apes for subalterns. I argue that the play speaks to English desire to see themselves transposed in the animal chain of being, further shaping their need for “civilized” treatment of animals. The horse appellations in the play correspond frequently to early English rankings of horses in economic value, mirroring the hierarchy of Spanish royalty in the play. The dogs—a much more complex animal image on the premodern English stage (cf. the hounds of Venus and Adonis, the cur of The Merchant of Venice, and the hounds of King of Tars)—maintain that symbolic diversity throughout this play, but it becomes a means of othering, all the same. And apes are used to comment on the Moors’ “ineptitude” with speech, logic, and rhetoric, as the characters “ape” politics in the play. 5 These images allow for all characters to be animalized, but the English identify more with the regal horses and transpose the foreign East against the barbaric ape as a means of advocating for a “civilized” treatment of animals and elevating their own social status as natural sovereigns. Early modern travel narratives often used exotic animals as mirrors of cultural others to highlight the oddness of these people and commented on cultural others’ “barbaric” treatment of animals to differentiate from English “civilized” treatments. As one of the dominant forces behind communicating the outside world to English people, the travel narratives often are less of a narrative and more descriptive catalogues of what other cultures and lands were like. The way that these places were exoticized relied on juxtaposing foreign (specific) animals against (specific) people with foreign practices. The rhetoric of domesticating exotic animals starts to mirror the rhetoric of domesticating these other peoples. While these connections appear in the foundational travel narratives—those by Marco Polo, Richard Hakluyt, Ramusio, and Samuel Purchas—they are also prominent in many of the colonist texts of the early Americas. These documents allow for early modern English people to identify themselves as “civilized” against these “barbaric” practices, not just in terms of rhetoric or behavior, but also in terms of comparing the treatment of animals, as England was formulating specific beliefs about animal cruelty. However, my chapter also works to complicate notions of the civilized-barbaric dichotomy, addressing capitalist implications of the rhetoric. Ultimately, the rhetoric was weaponized to further English desire to establish authority within a social hierarchy of multiple cultures. Specifically, the texts create this narrative of domestication. To domesticate is to make the “other” a part of one’s own home. In some ways, this works against the tendency to “other.” As this chapter shows, some people / animals are presented as easier to domesticate compared to others. Therefore, domestication also suggests a form of differentiation between cultural “others.” 6 Colonial documents and travel narratives saw the New World as a space of natural opportunity, one that could be simultaneously colonized and domesticated. As such, much of the descriptions of indigenous peoples often echoed those of descriptions of animal husbandry practices. And these colonial texts often spoke about indigenous domestication practices, criticizing them as barbarous or comparing religious conversion to a kind of animal domestication. The fourth and final chapter of the project, centering on The Tempest, examines these comparisons alongside the construction of Caliban’s alterity, especially through his simultaneous fish-ness and management of fish. This chapter cross-analyzes the play’s characterization of Caliban alongside these early colonial texts in order to show how domestication (of both animals and indigenous peoples) matters for the play’s treatment of race, cultural geography, colonialism, and nature. Throughout the project, three major types of texts are used: early modern dramatic works, animal husbandry manuals (and related documents), and travel narratives and colonial texts. This broad set of primary materials works to reveal the myriad forms that cultural discourse took in the period, with that particular focus on animals. Looking at the intersection of animals and cultural geography is so specific, yet that specific intersection is so abundant throughout the corpus. The scope for these texts was largely based around England from 1570-1610 (with some exceptions). This forty-year period covers much of the Elizabethan period, the Anglo-Spanish War, and the major works of Shakespeare. In focusing on drama, I think of the lived space of Shakespeare’s London, a city that was much more culturally diverse than many might first imagine.2 I think of the Globe Theater in the summer heat with the nearby bear gardens. I think of the cultural exchange happening both from mercantilism and the emerging colonialism of the “New World.” As I show, especially in the final 2 See T. F. Earle or Miranda Kaufmann for examples of this. 7 chapter, animals and animal sounds are a major aspect of the early modern English theater. And drama specifically catered to a wide array of viewers, not just the high elite or the fully educated even. Because of that, drama relied on a number of colloquialisms and folk knowledge that certainly matter when it comes to animal discourse. In order to contextualize the appearance and significance of animals in early modern drama, this project relies considerably on what I generally call throughout this book “animal texts.” Animal texts are comprised of non-dramatic printed documents that often chronicle early modern attitudes toward and treatment of animals: zoological encyclopediae, animal husbandry and training manuals, equestrian treatises, and even educational pamphlets. This genre of animal knowledge-centered documents has largely evaded critical study from academics analyzing early modern drama. Yet these documents are a treasure trove for understanding the context behind much of the metaphorical language scattered throughout these plays, especially when it comes to the construction of cultural difference and racial alterity. A final context needed for this argument is that of travel narratives and colonial documents. Especially in my analysis of The Tempest, it is crucial to have an understanding of the animalized perception England had of the New World. Close reading the travel narratives and colonial documents of early modern England reveals much about the constructions of alterity and how they often sat side-by-side with processes of animalization and domestication. Especially in that final chapter, I focus specifically on Hakluyt’s and Purchas’ narratives alongside letters from Virginia. The title of this project, Black Rams and Unruly Jades, comes from the animals that really started me on this academic quest. As my Master’s thesis focused largely on the unruly jades of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 50 and 51 and some of my first conference presentations centered on the black ram of Othello, these specific animal species became guides, totemic points of departure 8 through a period full of animal-human interactions that dictated and influenced economy, humanism, and race formation. While these animals are personal and endemic to my own journey, they also serve as entrance points for a discussion on differences in behavior that are rooted in what is “natural.” Are all jades unruly? Is that nature or nurture? And, so what if a ram is black? Why not call Othello a black dog instead? These seemingly easy questions are what helped to launch this project. However, it is what I found in asking these questions that I came to the implications of the subtitle: “Reading Animals in the Landscape of Renaissance Cultural Geography.” Glen Elder, Jennifer Wolch, and Jody Emel write that studying animals and animal practices is useful for understanding human difference because they serve as defining moments in the social construction of the human-animal divide. While universally understood in literal terms, the divide is a shifting metaphorical line built on the basis of human-animal interaction patterns, ideas about hierarchies of living things…., and the symbolic roles played by specific animals in society.3 Their work shows that there is a strong connection between actual animal-human interactions and our idiomatic and metaphorical discourses around animals. Furthermore, they show that these relationships—actual or rhetorical—with animals have effects on our interactions with cultural others. While these authors focus their work on reading animals in modern America, analyzing both colonial and postcolonial animal narratives, this argument for reading animals into cultural difference is significant even for the cultural past of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Many of the constructions of cultural difference that Elder, Wolch, and Emel note are still being 3 “Le Pratique Sauvage: Race, Place, and the Human-Animal Divide,” Animal Geographies: Place, Politics, and Identity in the Nature-culture Borderlands: Verso, New York, 2008, p. 73. 9 formed in the early modern period, and discourse on the divide between animal and human was common. These two rhetorics—construction of cultural difference and discourse on the difference between animals and humans—appear in both premodern and modern periods. While there are clear distinctions between the two periods in terms of cultural difference and animal-human divides, Elder, Wolch, and Emel have formulated a way to talk about these intersections regardless of the period. Reading for animals and human difference in premodern texts was an easy task for me, easy in the sense of there being an overabundance of correlations between animals and cultural geography in premodern literature. From King of Tars to Volpone, animals frequently code cultural difference, whether that “entails” race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion. And, scholars have noted that this correlation exists. Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton’s Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion frequently tags its many excerpts with specific animals like dogs and primates to show not only that the source texts connote race with these animals but also to show that it could be a trend worth studying.4 Regarding the Middle Ages, Peggy McCracken writes in In the Skin of a Beast about how animal “society” was seen as a 1:1 mirror of human society and had similar cultural differences of its own.5 But, despite these observations that animals appear when discussing representations of race and cultural difference, a visible gap remains: no one as yet has discussed significantly the crossover of animals and cultural geography in premodern texts or even what that crossover signifies. While Loomba and Burton note the crossover through cataloging metadata—a series of keywords in each document of their work, frequently including specific animal species, like “apes,” alongside race—and McCracken makes passing note of the 4 New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 5 In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France, University of Chicago Press, 2017. p. 124. 10 connection to focus on constructions of gender, neither really focus at length on animals factoring into constructions of cultural difference. Animals matter considerably for early modern culture and geography. Rather than just associating other cultures with animals that come from specific exotic places, early modern English people often transposed their interactions and relationships with specific animals to their treatment of cultural others. I do want to emphasize that rhetoric and metaphoric language about animals are not the only aspect of early modern animals that influence contemporary perceptions of cultural others for the English. Rather, actual agricultural and equestrian practices that were commonplace and everyday informed and affected their interactions with cultural others. These seemingly trivial, quotidian interactions actually affected larger, international discourses for the English, particularly around colonialist thought. The material practices of early modern England are essential for understanding English perceptions of foreign cultures. One of the major aspects of this project, therefore, involves a critical understanding of racial formation in the early modern period. For me personally, I lean a lot on Kim Hall’s reading of early modern race formation: Despite contemporary disagreement about the very existence of “races” and therefore the viability of “race” as a term in cultural or literary studies, I hold onto the idea of a language of race in the early modern period and eschew the scare quotes so popular in contemporary writings on race. The easy association of race with modern science ignores the fact that language itself creates differences within social organization and that race was then (as it is now) a social construct that is fundamentally more about power and culture than about biological difference.6 6 Hall, p. 6. 11 Hall gestures here to not just the existence of race and racial difference in the period but also to scholars’ perceptions of early modern race and the ways those perceptions have evolved over time. I certainly side with Hall’s approach to race, especially the ways that she reads race into poetic language from the time as a means of textual constructions of race. I lean also on works like Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives (2007) and Ania Loomba’s Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (2007) in my knowledge of the prevalence of racial difference in early modern England specifically.7 I also look to more modern studies like T. F. Earle’s Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (2010), Jean Feerick’s Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (2010), and Scott Oldenburg’s Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (2014).8 Early modern race scholarship has gone far just to prove that racial difference was indeed a factor of early modern thinking, and it often finds these clues in colonial texts, letters from royalty, and, of course, drama and poetry. As Hall says, racial formation drew its power from “England’s ongoing negotiations of African difference and from the implied color comparison therein.”9 Race existed, but it was complex and changing, and it requires us as early modern scholars to think about these “ongoing negotiations.” I remember specifically reading through Loomba’s work. In Race in Early Modern England, she works to include all these contemporary texts that mention or discuss racial difference in some form or fashion. And before each text, she provides context for the piece, its publication info, as well as some content tags. The tagging system allows for one to follow specific racial tropes, trends, or patterns across the book. For me, this was invaluable, especially when 7 Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archive, Burlington, VT: 2007. Ania Loomba, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. Palgrave, 2007. 8 Other early modern race scholars I look at are Emily C. Bartels, Margaux Deroux, Miriam EliavFeldon, Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler, Richard Fletcher, Mary Floyd-Wilson, John Gillies, Kim Hall, Errol Hill, Sujaya Iyengar, Eldred D. Jones, S. E. Ogude, Ian Smith, Ayanna Thompson, Elliot Tokson, Alden T. Vaughan, Virginia Mason Vaughan, Stanley Wells, and Kenneth Baxter Wolf. 9 Hall, p. 7. 12 “apes” became a frequent tag. Animals kept popping up in the book, and sometimes they were not even tagged. I saw that there was a clear trend here: to speak of race was often to speak of both the natural and animal worlds. And this pattern deserves critical attention. Very often in this book, I lean on so many of these early modern race scholars to begin an investigation into the ways that animals signified racial difference in the early modern English mind, particularly in contemporary drama. Particularly in the first chapter, on Othello, I look to the ways that Lara Bovilsky and Ian Smith’s work on “barbarian” speech intersects with animal “language,” and Filiz Barin evokes the question of Othello’s identity, something that can be both complicated and better understood through the numerous animals he “becomes” in the play. What I do here is not adding animals to the conversation of early modern race. It is moreso that they were always there but have not yet been discussed in critical detail in this discourse. Likewise, gender discourse, too, is foundational for this project, specifically early modern conceptions of masculinity. The current discourse on early modern masculinity indicates that it had specific characteristics, but they were often at odds with one another. Anna Suranyi, for example, examines masculinity alongside violent colonialism in the period, saying that “[m]asculinity was seen as inherently warlike.”10 However, Laura Gowing has commented on the anxiety that was early modern masculinity, noting that it was “absurdly vulnerable, at risk from the promiscuity of women, impotence and cuckoldry.”11 Many scholars have talked at length about the many complexities of early modern masculinity.12 And it certainly matters for the plays I’m working with here, especially Tamburlaine the Great. Just like racial difference, animals may often code for gendered notions, too. There is 10 Anna Suranyi, The Genius of the English Nation: Travel Writing and National Identity in Early Modern England, U Delaware P, 2008: p. 140. 11 Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England, Cambridge UP, 1996: p. 2. 12 See Mark Breitenberg, Andrew P. Williams, and Diane Purkiss for examples of this. 13 actually a fair bit of research—including that done by Peter Edwards and Kevin de Ornellas—into early modern masculinity and horse-riding specifically. However, these scholars are rarely, if ever, evoked when it comes to scholarly conversations about constructions of masculinity in the period, especially within literary studies. There is a clear gap where animals often become a vehicle for voicing notions of early modern masculinity, yet they are rarely examined at length. In my chapter on Tamburlaine, I specifically examine the ways that horse-riding becomes not just a masculine pursuit for the eponymous warrior-lord but also a means of exerting and enforcing strict definitions of masculinity over himself, those he conquers, and his own children. Through a reading of animals into early modern masculinity, I am able to build on the work done by Gowing, Breitenberg, and others to further shape the understanding of the early modern man, not just as a warlord, but also as a rider of horses and what that can imply for our reading of early modern men. In engaging with Tamburlaine, another field that comes up immediately is that of nationalism. Throughout this dissertation, I struggled with and grappled with many of the international conflicts happening in the plays. When I saw dominance happening of one nation over another, I had to really question what I was seeing. Was it colonialism? Was it imperialism? Was it nationalism? Something else entirely? And the book I kept going back to was Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood (1992). Helgerson speaks at length in the introduction to the varied ways that England perceived of itself, ultimately constructing “England’s identity,” often in geospatial and literary ways.13 Helgerson provided a lens for beginning to question English identity in these plays, and the nationalism (or counter-nationalism) expressed in these plays is, of 13 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 1992: p. 2. 14 course, complex.14 But perhaps predictably at this point, animals matter, too, for early modern constructions of nationhood. I evoked Tamburlaine in the previous paragraph. Questions of nationalism certainly matter for that play. What does it say that an English playwright, writing for English audiences, tells the tale of a warlord who was both praised and critiqued by England, was not born in England, and conquers other non-English people? Through an analysis of both masculinity and nationalism, I find ways that Marlowe was advocating for a more masculine England, especially through the treatment of horse-riding. Likewise, the chapter on Lust’s Dominion tackles similar concerns. After all, again, England is an absent figure, where the Moor Eleazar climbs up the social ladder in Spain. Who were English viewers expected to identify with, and what does that say about nationalism in the play? And when the characters constantly code themselves and each other as animals that English viewers might be even more familiar with than the cultures represented, how does that shift constructions of English identity? In both of these cases—Tamburlaine and Lust’s Dominion—I really build on other scholars of English nationalism and identity, such as Eric J. Griffin, Walter Cohen, Patricia Barry, Emily Bartels, Rebecca Bushnell, and Doyeeta Majumder. 15 Largely, an inclusion of animals into research on English nationalism validates a lot of the extant research, but it also shows how England looked to the natural world—and by extension, the Great Chain of Being—to inform their construction of the Other when juxtaposed against the national Self. The Great Chain of Being has been an often discussed topic when it comes to Renaissance 14 Other major works of early modern nationalism include Lynn Hinojosa, Andrew Escobedo, Phillip Schwyzer, David Loewenstein, Paul Stevens, and John Breuilly. 15 Eric J. Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire, U Pennsylvania P, 2009. Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Cornell UP, 2019. Patricia S. Barry, The King in Tudor Drama, U Salzburg, 1977. Bartels. Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance, Cornell UP, 2019. Doyeeta Majumder, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence in Early Modern Drama, Liverpool UP, 2019. 15 ideologies and cosmologies. For this concept, I rely a lot on Robert Bucholz and Newton Key in Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (2013). Here, they summarize what the Great Chain of Being is, focusing on the hierarchical nature of the universe perceived at the time (and often discussed by E. M. W. Tillyard). And what is important for me, too, is the way that the hierarchy exists on a large scale but also on a smaller scale: “[T]he top rank in every subdivision was analogous to the top rank of every other subdivision—and of the Chain itself.”16 The idea held considerable weight in the fifties, especially seen in W. Barber, for example, and it was debated heavily in the seventies by Jaako Hintikka.17 While the Great Chain is a concept that is falling out of use lately in discussing the early modern period, I argue it has uses here. In this kind of similarity between the subdivisions that Bucholz and Key notice, there is room for a more serious analysis of linguistic “animalizing” of characters in early modern drama. Suddenly, calling a human a specific type of animal means something rather than just making the human “bestial.” Or, put another way, humans were not just called animals at the time. As Laurie Shannon notes in The Accommodated Animal, the word “animal” rarely appears in Shakespeare, but specific animals are a constant throughout his corpus. In her book, Shannon follows the ways that early modern people imagined biodiversity even when they invoked the word “animal,” rather than conflating all animals as having the same status broadly. In this analysis, she sees the Great Chain of Being at work: “...[E]arly modern writing insists on animal reference and cross-species comparison, while at the same time it proceeds from a cosmological framework in which the sheer diversity of creaturely life is so finely articulated, whether as a ‘great chain’ of being or as an 16 Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Moderrn England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, John Wiley & Sons, 2013: p. 24. 17 W. Barber, Leibniz in France, Clarendon P, 1955. Jaako Hintikka, “Gaps in the Great Chain of Being: An Exercise in the Methodology of the History of Ideas,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 49 (1976): 22-38. 16 indication of nature’s virtuosity.”18 The focus on “diversity” appeals to this book as a whole. In thinking of the animal, I immediately envision Derrida’s l’animot, speaking to the biodiversity implied, rather than just the general category. Likewise, I take Shannon’s approach to the literature applied here. The “animal” I envision and mean when I invoke that word is a specific creature or at least species. Put more specifically, humans were not simply called animals in the plays covered in this book. Othello was not merely animalized by being called a “black ram” or a “Barbary horse.” No, he is being called a black ram and a Barbary horse. Those specific animals carry unique weight, especially amid the Great Chain of Being. Questions I ask therefore are, “Where does a horse factor in the animal chain? Where does a Barbary horse rank in the chain of horses? How do rams rank amid other animals? What about black rams specifically?” These questions pull from the work of Bucholz, Key, and Shannon by using their work as a point of departure for questioning the applications of the Chain to animal “labels” applied in early modern drama. And of course, per the name of this project, cultural geography is another field that weighs heavily in this discourse. I immediately think of Teresa Grant’s chapter in A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, “Entertaining Animals.” Here, she talks about the bear gardens next to the theater in London, and she approaches it with this idea of “cultural geography”: This was the cultural context in which the audience of Shakespeare’s stage lived: a world where animal baitings, dancing bears, and performing monkeys were quite commonplace, particularly in London and nowhere more so than on Bankside. This represents both a historical and a geographic remove: the meaning of animals in the drama of the period depends upon its place of first performance, as well as its time. A right reading depends 18 Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespeare’s London, U Chicago P, 2013: p. 8. 17 upon understanding the context of animal acts and their festive uses, so familiar to the audiences of stage plays of the period.19 It is this focus on “place” and “time” that I use the term cultural geography in the early modern period. This period is full of numerous cultures and places and linkages (and slippages) between them. And, as Shannon argues, knowing animals’ “place” as well matters in understanding early modern cultures, and it’s our remove from both time and place that makes us tend to not think of animals immediately. Understanding culture at the time—and cultural relations—relies on understanding how space and geography were occupied by animals. Animals framed the world geography of the early modern period, with specific species being evoked to mark specific areas and cultures. So, I take Shannon’s local idea of cultural geography and apply it to England’s relations with both itself and the world at large. For example, the chapter on The Tempest examines the economic potential perceived in the fish markets of the “New World” and the ways that that perception colors the characterization of Caliban as a “fish-person.” Alongside that connection of fish and the New World, the animal noises, including the roars of bears, is used to mark the island space of the play, even as bears would have been roaring just next door to the theater. Knowledge of animals is essential for understanding this kind of early modern cultural geography. And, in my work on The Tempest, colonialism is certainly a conversation that comes up as well. Work has been done already on colonialism and empires. Virginia DeJohn Anderson does much in Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004) to analyze this connection. She argues that livestock played “an instrumental role in helping 19 Teresa Grant, “Entertaining Animals,” in A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, ed. Bruce Boehrer, Berg, 2011: p. 97. 18 Europeans to establish colonies in other parts of the world. Especially in North and South America, the success of those imperial endeavors depended on the migrations of people and [original emphasis] animals.” 20 She manages to read colonialism as participating in and engaging with contemporary animal narratives. Connecting animals to colonialism is not a common move, and her work is fundamental to this kind of reading. However, the kind of work Anderson does has not been applied to the end of the sixteenth century and start of the seventeenth. In Shakespeare’s corpus as well as other early modern drama, animals matter in the construction of the colony, and largely this intersection has avoided critical study. Understanding early modern colonialism—like much of the work done in Indography— should rely on an awareness of conceptions of the natural and animal worlds, especially as livestock and fauna coded for wealth and economic potential. In my chapter on The Tempest, I more thoroughly explore the potential for colonialism evoked by the island and its fauna. I read many colonial letters and documents that judge and evaluate indigenous peoples both on their local fauna and the ways they handle animals. Because of this, the idea of animal domestication becomes integral to a comprehensive understanding of early modern colonialism. Domestication forms the cultural code by which European colonists Othered indigenous populations and conceptually framed them in terms of economic profit, and the individual species that were understood as able to be domesticated matter in the likewise presentation of what peoples could be domesticated (as well as how they could be domesticated). In The Tempest, we see this through the simultaneous characterization of Caliban as both fish and fisher. And an awareness of domestication’s impact on colonialism is beneficial for our understandings of colonialism in the ways that domestication mattered for the construction of these 20 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Oxford, 2004: p. 4. 19 cultural Others. My dissertation, Black Rams and Unruly Jades: Reading Animals in the Landscape of Renaissance Cultural Geography, seeks to address these gaps. With a combination of case studies and literary surveys, I track multiple ways that reading animals into cultural geography alters our interpretation of many of the period texts in significant ways. Just as Kim Hall works to understand a rhetorical dichotomy of “fair”/”dark” in terms of a contemporary racial discourse and Ian J. Smith reads literary instances of Others’ “barbarism”21 in the construction of cultural difference, I show how the socially constructed image of animals in the Renaissance informed contemporary understandings of cultural geography as evident in primary literature.22 I argue in this dissertation that early modern English people responded to foreign cultures through animal representations of those cultures, largely informed by English relationships with and treatments of specific animals, not only justifying English desire to domesticate and control these cultural others, but also creating a narrative for themselves that defends their natural sovereignty and the inherent violence as still related to their notion of being “civilized.” There are two major methodological approaches I hope to employ in the dissertation. The first is a frequent but intentional change in scope. Each of the main body chapters focuses on a singular work as a case study, honing in on the particulars of language and rhetoric that helped to create a discourse in a work that links culture with animal species. Then, I show how each of these case studies is representative, too, of larger trends in reading animals into cultural geography. For example, in my chapter on Othello, I link some of the horse rhetoric to other Shakespeare plays or 21 For my project, “barbarism” matters greatly, and I lean on much of Smith’s work in my reading of Renaissance barbarism. Rather than just focusing on cruelty and violence of barbarism, I define barbarism as Smith does, with close attention to both race and a perceived lack of fluency in rhetoric. 22 Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 20 other Elizabethan plays in general where similar rhetoric appears. Also, I link primary dramatic works to contemporary animal discourse, often in the form of husbandry manuals, encyclopediae, and manege treatises. This historicist lens allows for the argument that contemporary knowledge of animal-human interactions informed these animal representations of human difference at the time. One of the biggest surprises for me in writing this project, however, was in the specific animal species that came up in the literature constantly. Horses, dogs, and apes thrived in abundance throughout the racial and culturally geographic metaphors of the time. It would be nearly impossible to conduct any productive study of the construction of alterity in this period without addressing these animals’ images. People were rarely called a horse, in fact; moreso a specific type of horse, like a jade, courser, or Barbary horse, even. Likewise, it meant one thing to call someone a hound and another entirely to call them a cur. And apes constantly interplayed with concerns of rhetoric, language, and imitation. Even outside of these specific plays, these images pop up to allude to these kinds of alterity—I immediately think of the “hounds” of The King of Tars. However, it was not just specific animals that kept popping up but also specific animal practices, specific ways of handling and dealing with animals. The French handling of horses, known as manége, kept appearing—whether critiqued or praised—through early modern drama and poetry. For example, we see in Venus’ appraisal of her jennet as following a very non-English philosophy to horse treatment, whereas Adonis, being the typical English hunter, does not care to follow his horse in adopting this mindless, passionate philosophy. These kinds of conversations happen especially in Tamburlaine, too. Likewise, in Othello, standards of sheep herding matter in the naming of Othello as a “black ram.” There is significant agricultural and husbanding 21 knowledge utilized in these plays, and I was amazed at the sheer commonalities between texts on that front. Furthermore, I was surprised at how frequently the discourses in animal texts echoed contemporary political debates. Milton’s construction of the beehive of Pandaemonium echoes apicultural knowledge as well as the political symbol of the monarchical bee. Shakespeare references the pagan-divine animal of the bear in Winter’s Tale, an animal that had been ridiculed for little over a century as being inferior to the lion (touted as a royal symbol by Elizabethan times). Almost every time I encountered an animal in early modern drama, I discovered that the animal was a vehicle for cultural thought, and this thinking always relied on the specific species invoked. It was rarely a case of a person “simply” being animalized. In the chapters that follow, a narrative emerges. Yes, animals appear in these early modern plays. And yes, they matter in the construction of cultural geography and racial alterity. But it is in their specificity that they manage to convey these political implications in the plays, marking these dramatic metaphors as worthy of more than just a gloss at the bottom of the page. They are endemic to early modern dramatic representation of cultural difference and essential to any scholarly conversation about the formation of those differences in early modern England. So, take a seat at the bar. And whether you order horse’s neck with a kick, Hair of the Dog, or a Fish House Punch, you are doubtless in for an interesting time. And after a few drinks, Othello, Tamburlaine, Eleazar, and Caliban might start blurring. They might look more like a couple of anthropomorphic horses, a hell hound, and a fish person. They just might. 22 CHAPTER 1 – Ram-ifications of Cultural Difference: “Natural” Threats in The Tragedy of Othello The rhetoric of animals and cultural difference often matters in understanding subtext in early modern drama. Early modern Europeans relied on their knowledge of and management of animals—coded through animal metaphors—as foundational for their understanding of cultural others. However, what is uniquely compelling is looking at this animal-cultural codification in terms of the threat of invasion from outside nations. Especially in regards to the Ottoman Empire, early modern England read foreign others as active threats to English stability. As Daniel Vitkus states in his introduction to Three Turk Plays: Many of the images of Islam produced by European culture in the early modern period are imaginary resolutions about Islamic wealth and might….A series of Ottoman invasions followed [the battle of Constantinople], including Athens in 1459, Otranto in 1480, Rhodes in 1522, Budapest in 1526, the siege of Vienna in 1529, Cyprus in 1571, and Crete in 1669.23 As Vitkus shows, the Ottoman Empire often posed actual military threats to Europe, and this awareness of danger allowed for unique connotations attributable to the animal-cultural codes in early modern drama: rather than just showing that cultural others were “barbaric” or “inferior,” these codes—often formulated in animal husbandry and equestrian manuals—were used to show the power and might of these outside forces, still employing racist stereotypes while also adding connotations of royalty, dominance, and legitimated violence to these images. 23 Daniel Vitkus, Three Turk Plays, Columbia University Press, 2000: p. 7. 23 The “Turkish plays” often relied on a rhetoric focused on a barbarity–civility binary designed to position England as an emblem of “civilized” and the Ottoman Empire as “barbarous.” However, these plays notably also focus on the cruel military strength of the Empire, portraying them as a viable threat to the security of English “civil” identity. In George Peele’s 1594 The Battle of Alcazar, Abdelemec conquers Barbary through cruelty. In one of the opening dumb shows of the play, the directions read, “Enter the Moor, and two murderers, bringing in his uncle Abdelmunen, then they draw the curtains and smother the young princes in the bed: which done in the sight of the uncle, they strangle him in his chair, and then go forth.”24 This cruelty resembles much of Tamburlaine. The cruelty comes out not only through the act itself but through the spectatorship of Abdelemec: “done in the sight of the uncle.” Abdelemec’s interpersonal barbarity leads to the gaining of his crown, showcasing the kinds of threats early modern England perceived themselves up against. We see more of the military might in Selimus and A Christian Turned Turk, both of which show religion, nationality, and violence intersecting in ways that code the Ottoman Empire not only as barbarous but also threatening or dangerous. Vitkus, too, provides a list of plays that exemplify “Islamic might, murderousness, and wealth”: George Peele’s….Soliman and Perseda (1590), Robert Greene’s Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1588) and Orlando Furioso (1589), The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley (1596), Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion (1600), Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I (1602), Thomas Goffe’s The Courageous Turk (1618) and The Raging Turk (1618), John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Knight of Malta (1618), [and] Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s All’s Lost by Lust 24 George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, London: 1594, I.i.26-27. 24 (1620).25 This list of plays shows how prominent the trope of Islamic cruel strength was in early modern English drama.26 While much of this rhetoric does reinforce the barbarity–civility binary, it also showed contemporary viewers of the plays that the Ottoman Empire was a threat not to be forgotten. William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello utilizes this rhetoric to make similar claims about invasion from the Ottoman Empire. Much of this rhetoric appears in the characterization of the titular character. As Filiz Barin notes in “Othello: Turks as ‘the Other’ in the Early Modern Period”: Othello “turns Turk” in the end by embodying all negative aspects of alleged Turkish behavior: he becomes a barbarian for killing another on a whim, without sound reason; and he is a sexual transgressor, and excessively jealous, which has led to dependence on a woman. Furthermore, Othello damns his soul by his suicide, which is tantamount to converting to Islam in the religious rhetoric of the time.27 Barin—as well as Lara Bovilsky in Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage and Ian Smith in Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors—suggests the existence of “racial nature” in the play, the idea that race is an inherent, almost biological quality in the context of Othello. While Bovilsky only talks about “animal analogies” of race and gender in Iago’s speech in Othello, Smith speaks of the “nature of blackness” in the play.28 These scholars perceive of animals as mere rhetorical devices, not as living facets of nature, breeding, and husbandry in early 25 Vitkus, pp. 2-3. 26 For the sake of this chapter at least, I use the word “Islamic” to cover the contemporary perceived non-Christian peoples along the Barbary coast and covering the Ottoman Empire. 27 Filiz Barin, “Othello: Turks as ‘The Other’ in the Early Modern Period,” MMLA 43.2 (2010): p. 56. 28 Lara Bovilsky, Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage, University of Minnesota Press, 2008: p. 42. Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors, Palgrave, 2009: pp. 136-44. 25 modern England. When Othello is, by the end of the play, portrayed as a “barbarian,” it is not a mere “becoming,” but a return to Blackness, which is coded as barbaric. The play characterizes Othello as always already a Turk who merely “played” at being white with his apparent education in rhetoric and civility, displayed by his skill with persuasion and oration, the skills that allegedly won Desdemona’s heart and persuaded the Senate of his innocence.29 As Dympna Callaghan states in Shakespeare Without Women, “Othello Was a White Man”: Othello’s appearance before the Senate is a defensive simulation of dominant racial and sexual mores. He duplicates the tropes of civilization—deference and decorum: ‘Most potent grave, and reverend signiors. My very noble and approv’d good masters’ (I.iii.76- 77). Having probably (depending on the time sequence) just committed what may be regarded by the Venetian citizenry as gross miscegenation with Desdemona, he attempts to play white and straight, against the aberration signified by both his blackness and by his sexual transgression.”30 As Callaghan shows, the representation of Othello’s rhetoric in his speeches characterizes him as both always already a Turk and performing whiteness. Using Barin’s words, Othello is an “interloper,” a disguised “transgressor” and “barbarian.” And this language often happens to rely on specific animal imagery that further codifies that concept of the foreign threat, especially through connotations of animal husbandry. Whether Othello is called a “Barbary horse” or a “black ram,” the animal images suggest that Othello’s “nature” is unchanging: he is tied intrinsically to his Blackness and his cultural geography, no matter how he acts. Iago’s metaphors do not suggest that Othello is “like” these animals; they suggest that Othello is these animals. Iago claims that 29 Lynn Enterline uses the phrase, “far from ‘rude’ speech” in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012: p. 25. 30 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women, Taylor and Francis Group, 1999: p. 88. 26 regardless of Othello’s speech and performance, he is essentially black. He communicates that through these specifically connoted animals: intruders. As I show later in this chapter, what marks these animals as significant is the specificity Shakespeare attributes to the individual metaphors throughout the play as well as the cultural connotations brought out through contemporary animal husbandry related to those animals. Husbandry manuals at the time were inherently tied to understandings of cultural geography, and they became indicators of cultural difference through animal and agricultural images. So, unwanted types were easy metaphors for the “intruder” image in early modern drama. The ways people handled their animals became a code for talking about peoples of cultural difference, and this code specified what happened when foreign animals were praised, when they were treated with disdain, and when they affected agriculture largely. Husbandry and even equestrianism, therefore, contributed to this animal-cultural rhetoric of foreign invasion. English people used their constructed animal-cultural rhetoric in drama, like The Tragedy of Othello, to discuss and converse with concerns of foreign invasion and racial politics. The rhetoric in the play manages not only to make these specific claims but also to do so with a focus on breed, species, and landrace-types when it comes to these animals. 31 Concerns of invasion appear in the play through themes of crossbreeding unwanted types of animals and equestrian discourses of valuable exotic horses threatening English horse husbandry, for example, and these layers of meaning often emerge from contemporary knowledge of husbandry manuals, where these 31 I use “landrace-type” as that is the dominant category for different types of horses in historical equine research. As Leo Africanus notes in Description of Africa, for example, the horse known at the time as the Barbary horse was really a general term used for any horse in Africa and had numerous anatomical characteristics and really covered a variety of breeds. So, some animal-specific terms like “breed” are insufficient to characterize a category that really is meant to cover any number of types over a geographic area. So “landrace-type” has become the dominant term to encompass numerous breeds in one area. One definition—while I note the terms “landrace,” “landrace-type,” and “landrace-breed” are often interchangeable—is from Tokatlidis and Vlachostergios: “Landraces are heterogeneous populations and their variability goes through continuous alterations because of physical, genetic, and epigenetic procedures exacerbated by the ongoing climatic changes” (p. 29). 27 same levels of xenophobia often appeared. Fear of the East in Husbandry Manuals Concerns of invasion were constantly being framed by contemporary agricultural knowledge, as is seen in husbandry and equestrian manuals. Early modern husbandry manuals served as a contemporary compendium of expertise on agriculture and ways to handle animals. The end goal for these texts was often to maximize capitalistic profit from animals and the land— allowing people who managed land to use these texts’ knowledge to turn their work into the highest amount of financial earnings and make a strong living; however, these texts, like Medieval bestiaries, contained folklore, religion, and cultural biases (like prioritizing English breeds of animals over others simply for the fact that they were English, with no other qualifiers added). Whether these inclusions existed to make agricultural knowledge more accessible or to connect agriculture to cosmological claims, these manuals serve as powerful cultural texts that reveal a lot about the way animals were perceived alongside cultural others. Because Italy, France, Germany, and Spain were at the forefront of animal husbandry, England frequently printed translations of manuals from those countries, especially Conrad Heresbach’s German Foure books of husbandrie, I. B. Gentleman’s French A book of thrift, and Federico Grisone’s Italian Rules of riding. However, many of England’s original manuals are frequently tied to English identity. Gervase Markham is one famous writer who wrote A way to get wealth by approved rules of practice in good husbandrie and huswiferie, containing the foure principall offices which support and maintaine a familie in 1625. An alternate title for the text was The English huswife. Rather than just focusing on the best way to manage animals and the garden, 28 it also focuses on what is “proper” and “civil,” supporting a standard that is designated as English.32 One husbandry-adjacent text, The Scholemaster by Roger Ascham in 1570, connects English etiquette and behavior with “bad” Englishmen who leave their country to travel for recreation.33 He demeans even Italy as a place that has the “Enchantments of Circe….to marr Mens manners in England.” 34 Ascham even eschews the previously mentioned translated texts: “by Example of ill Life, but more by Precepts of fond Books, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop in London; commended by honest Titles, the sooner to corrupt honest Manners.”35 At one point, Ascham speaks against equestrianism, calling it a foreign trade, and compares its popularity to that of education of children: And it is pity, that commonly more care is had, yea and that among very wise men, to find out rather a cunning man for their Horse, than a cunning man for their Children. They say nay in word, but they do so in deed: For to the one they will gladly give a Stipend of two hundred Crowns by the year, and loth to offer to the other two hundred Shillings.36 Ascham’s rhetoric here seems to compare two very different businesses: education and equestrianism. However, when paired with Ascham’s constant anti-traveler rhetoric (discussed later in this chapter), one can see how he targets the horse-riding trade because of its connection to travel. He is concerned that English children are encouraged to travel (an unworthy pursuit, according to Ascham) as opposed to staying home and being educated (the worthiest pursuit, he 32 Gervase Markham, A vvay to get vvealth by approued rules of practice in good husbandry and huswiferie. Containing the foure principall offices which support and maintaine a familie, 33 I say “husbandry-adjacent” because the text’s primary focus is on education. Yet, Ascham is insistently focused on animal and agricultural imagery as metaphor for understanding his interpretation of cultural geography at the time. 34 Roger Ascham, The scholemaster or plaine and perfite way of teaching children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong but specially purposed for the priuate bringing vp of youth in ientlemen and noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such, London, 1571: p. 78. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. p. 19. 29 argues). In this way, animals blend with geography as he constructs a binary of diametric opposition: those positioned within England and those outside. The best example of the use of agricultural knowledge to indicate the violence of the Ottoman Empire is in Leonard Mascall’s The Government of Cattel from 1587. Mascall was well- known for his texts on how to manage land. His translation of Davy Brossard’s L’art et maniere de semer, et faire pepinieres des sauvageaux was frequently reprinted throughout the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and he had other works on fishing, poultry, medicine, and sport. But The Government of Cattle was one of his most popular works, reprinted throughout the seventeenth century, and it dictated many of the common rules of animal husbandry. The book is organized into sections by animal: cows, then horses, then sheep and goats. In each section, there is information on selecting choice animals, breeding them, curing maladies, and caring for the animals in the best way possible. Mascall’s work speaks to the idea that the agricultural world mirrors the geographical one, in the early modern mind. When discussing sheep, for example, Mascall attributes specific colors to landrace-types of sheep: the white colour in shéepe is very good & profitable, as we vse here most in England: For of this colour a man may make many other. And the white will kéepe also his colour long. The blacke and the browne be also well praised, which be much vsed in Italie at Pollentia, and also in high Spaine at Corube. The yellow shéepe bee in Asie, the which they call red sasarned shéepe. Truly tha vse therof we haue had alreadie by diuers and many experiences of those kind of shéepe. For in Africa, where they are brought (from the towne called Gaditane, and there about) are wild rams of strange and maruelous colours, with manie 30 other kind of beasts, which are oft times brought vnto the people to make pastimes.37 Mascall’s description assigns colors to these sheep based on their geographic locations, and a kind of racialization through these assignments: Asia is “yellow,” Africa is “wild” and multi-hued, Italy and Spain are “browne” and “blacke.” And notice the final words there: “to make pastimes.” This strongly contrasts against the white sheep, characterized as “good & profitable.” While white sheep can be used for profit and therefore imply “gode husbandrie,” the “wild rams of strange and maruelous colours” are only good “to make pastimes.” This point recalls Ascham’s preference of the domestic as useful (read, English) while exotic travel is mere recreation that does not better England. As Mascall states, white wool was seen as more profitable, mostly because of its versatility in being easily dyed “many other” colors. Privileging this type of wool mirrors much of contemporary racial discourse that saw racial whiteness as a default from which other races stemmed.38 Mascall’s husbandry, then, argues that animal nature mirrors human civilization as well, ultimately transposing the binaries of civilization/barbarity and domestication/wildness over each other. And regarding “wildness,” Mascall takes a strongly colonialist mindset: [A man] brought one of those Rams of Africke with him into Fraunce, and did put him in his pastures, and when hee became gentle, he made him to bee put vnto his yewes, which ramme begat in the beginning all hearie lambs, and like in colour. But after that the said lambs had beene couered againe once or twise, their wool began againe to be gentle, soft, 37 Leonard Mascall, The first booke of cattell wherein is shewed the gouernment of oxen, kine, calues, and how to vse bulles and other cattell to the yoake, and fell. With diuers approued remedies, to helpe most diseases among cattell: most necessarie for all, especially for husband men, hauing the gouernment of any such cattell. Gathered and set forth by Leonard Mascall, London, John Wolfe, 1587: 205. 38 While much of this race-derivation can easily be seen in the concept of “washing the Ethiope white,”; it can also be found in the two dominant heliotropic views of blackness in the Renaissance: first, that the proximity of the sun to Africa burned their white skin, or second, that that same solar proximity brought the blood closer to the surface of the skin. See Ian Smith for more info. citation 31 and fayre. And at length those lambs engendring with their shéepe, made their fléece and wooll as softe as gentle as ours. This Collumella recorded, that from the nature of the ramme, by the alteration of the place and cattell, they became againe to their firste estate. And by little and little, by good order and gouernment, their wilde natures be cleane changed.39 Here, we see this language of self versus other. The African ram is characterized with “wilde natures,” and “our” ram is “gentle, soft, and fayre.” Mascall manages to communicate that even animals in far-off countries are corrupt and need to be “cleane changed” in order to be valuable. Breaking it down further, the African ram mentioned first is taken from its homeland and brought into Europe and made “gentle,” undergoing a kind of domestication that seems to be connected to the change in location, as if being in Africa is what made the ram “wild.” The breeding aspects of the passage gesture toward discourses of nature versus nurture as well. The ram is not “put vnto” the ewes until he is gentle. And then the breeding is worked in such a way that one could not tell there was the blood of an African ram anymore: “their wilde natures be cleane changed.” Mascall suggests the potential for strong breeding to wipe away nature with enough nurture. This kind of husbandry implies a control of sex in such a way that it translates color selectivity through breeding into profit for the breeder. “Gentle” then becomes a codeword for “domesticated” or “controlled,” and, by extension, a suggestion of class, as one becomes a “gentleman” through acquiring wealth. For a ram to be made gentle means he can be molded into a vehicle for maximizing profit, with enough patience and knowledge. Many might think also of Shylock’s description of Jacob and Laban in The Merchant of Venice in connection with Mascall’s focus on sheep as an instrument of profit. Shylock looks to 39 Mascall, 205. 32 the Biblical story of Jacob learning about sheep husbandry: The skillful shepherd pilled me certain wands, And in the doing of the deed of kind He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes, Who then conceiving did in eaning time Fall parti-colored lambs, and those were Jacob’s. This was a way to thrive, and he was blest; And thrift is blessing if men steal it not.40 Here, the shepherd is characterized as “skillful” for being able to manage the selection of specific color traits in sheep. Shylock is focused on connecting management of sheep with economy. Even in the original story, Jacob’s sheep were described as “stronger.” The intentional breeding allows for Jacob to make a living, a “way to thrive.” Edward Topsell talks about this story in The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes (1607) as well. He summarizes the story of Jacob and Laban, focusing on how the sheep, when they see white in the rods, breed that color of sheep. And for Topsell, this is definitely a racial story: Upon this action of the Patriarch Jacob, it is clear by testimony of holy Scripture, that divers colours laid before Sheep at the time of their carnal copulation, do cause them to bring forth such colours, as they see with their eyes: for such is the force of a natural impression, as we read in stories, that fair women by the sight of Blackamores, have conceived and brought forth black children, and on the contrary, black and deformed women have conceived fair and beautiful children; whereof there could be no other reason given in nature, but their only cogitation of and upon fair beautiful men, or black and deformed 40 I.iii.92-98. 33 Moores, at the time of their carnal copulation.41 Topsell, like Shylock, argues for nurture conquering nature in what he calls “the force of a natural impression,” but how he compares genetic selectivity of animals to the production of raced children speaks to a link of agriculture and cultural awareness. But regardless of how raced these speakers view sheep color, all three—Topsell, Shylock, and Mascall—agree that being able to control a sheep’s color is important for anyone managing a herd. After all, all three would agree that mastery over one’s herd parallels similar control over the household, the family, or even one’s nation. Even when it comes to horses, Mascall continues color-focused rhetoric. He makes a strict distinction between a “blacke” horse and a “cole blacke” horse—while neither of these are attributed to a specific geography, they are all juxtaposed against horses with at least some white on them, which are to be considered a “good and fayre horse.” While the black horse will “doe wel,” the cole black horse, “hauing no white spot on him, which Horse (as some horse maisters say) is perilous to keepe: for if he continue long with a man, it is maruel if he drowne him not, or hurt him by some other way, or els the Horse to come to smal profit.”42 While some blackness might be all right, then, complete blackness on an animal was seen as undesirable at best and dangerous at worst. Being absent of white implied being absent of value for Mascall’s horses, marking “cole blacke” as naturally inferior, while what would have been called a black horse would not have been wholly black and as a result having value. What we see emerging through Mascall is a hierarchy of animals that he compares to cultural hierarchies in England, touting England while viewing the Ottoman Empire as both inferior and a viable threat. This contextual framing reveals that animal hierarchies informed English awareness of 41 Edward Topsell, A Historie of Four-Footed Beastes, London, 1607: p. 470. 42 Ibid., 171. 34 foreign others, as is also seen in the travel narratives and pedagogical texts. This xenophobic animosity is apparent in The Scholemaster from 1570, for example. The treatment of animal hierarchies in The Government of Cattel and The Scholemaster is very specific: these authors read foreign nations as an active threat to England through these hierarchies. And, largely, these were popular texts that informed contemporary thinking about animals and cultural geography. So, when similar hierarchies appear in early modern drama, like Shakespeare’s Othello, it is productive to consider the relationship between animal metaphors and agricultural texts that compare specific animals to different cultures. Cultural Animals in Othello In Othello, Iago constantly refers to people as different animals. In doing so, he iterates a social hierarchy of cultural difference through these animals. This hierarchy becomes a code of value throughout the play that allows not only for humans to intellectually dominate nonhuman animals but also for humans to have positional counterparts among animal types. The Great Chain of Being becomes a productive way to conceptualize this kind of hierarchical thinking, as well.43 The Great Chain of Being was a conceptual hierarchy dating from classical antiquity throughout the early modern period (although the term itself was only invented in the eighteenth century). Robert Bucholz calls it a “comprehensive metaphor” that categorized all life.44 In general, this cosmological hierarchy placed God at the top, followed by angels, man, animals, plants, stones, and the damned respectively. People could take this kind of hierarchy, however, and transpose it 43 While the Great Chain of Being saw much criticism from the new historicists of the 19?18?80s and continues to be debated, it serves as a productive frame of reference for thinking about the categories of human and nonhuman animals, especially with how metaphor disrupts or reinforces those hierarchies. A strong reference for looking at ecocriticism in the debate of the early modern Great Chain of Being is Gabriel Egan’s “Gaia and the Great Chain of Being” (2011). Egan looks at Tillyard, Lovejoy, and work from 21 st century scholars as well. citations 44 Robert Bucholz, Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, Wiley-Blackwell, 2008, p. 23. 35 across other systems of life, which created interesting complications. An easy example of the Chain in action is the nation: “The king was the head; the aristocracy the arms and shoulders; the tenant farmers and poor the legs and feet, etc.”45 The system mapped itself onto the church, the family, each individual socioeconomic class, and, of course, animals. In The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespeare’s London, Laurie Shannon follows the ways that early modern people imagined biodiversity even when they invoked the word “animal,” rather than conflating all animals as having the same status broadly. In this analysis, she sees the Great Chain of Being at work: Early modern writing insists on animal reference and cross-species comparison, while at the same time it proceeds from a cosmological framework in which the sheer diversity of creaturely life is so finely articulated, whether as a “great chain” of being or as an indication of nature’s virtuosity.46 Since the Great Chain of Being necessitates similar order across systems, it is no surprise that there were whole contests to see “objectively” what the king of beasts was.47 For the writers of medieval and early modern literature, these hierarches allowed for multiple types of rhetorical constructions. First, human hierarchies were often used interchangeably with general animal ones. That is, a king could be a lion, and a thief could be a rat, such as appears in Le Roman de Renart.48 Second, human hierarches could be transposed against specific animal hierarchies. An easy example of this is with horse types in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Here, Venus suggests Adonis should act much like his “courser” is doing 45 Ibid. Use shortened citations instead of ibid? 46 Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal, University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 8. 47 For more information on these colosseum tournaments for animals, see Michel Pastoreau. 48 In Le Roman de Renart, members of court and clergy are replaced with animal counterparts. Renard the Fox, trans. Patricia Terry, University of California Press, 1992. 36 toward her “jennet.”49 While a courser is a type of horse typically used by nobility and displays domestic wealth, a jennet is a valued Spanish horse and was worth considerably more than a generic courser.50 A final category is the basic human–animal distinction, when someone is a “true” human while the other is an animal in comparison. In The Scholemaster, for example, Ascham describes a kind of allegorical transformation Englishmen undergo through “sin.” If people are filthy, Ascham says, they will become like swine and will forget all their “learning and goodness.” This will make them an ass over time, and, quick to listen to bad advice, they will soon be fighting for the wrong cause and will cause mischief and disorder, like a fox.51 Each of these cases demonstrates a way that premodern writers employed a hierarchical rhetoric that placed animals alongside and against humans. For Shakespeare’s Othello, this rhetoric becomes a shorthand for Iago to discuss cultural difference alongside species difference. Each species reference—from the “black ram” to the “Barbary horse”— calls attention to contemporary knowledge of the animal world—as seen in animal texts like husbandry and equestrian manuals— and informs our reading of the play by providing additional layers of meaning based on the specific species referenced. The first animal reference in the play is when Iago tells Brabantio that “an old black ram / Is tupping [his] white ewe.”52 At the surface level, these two lines communicate to Brabantio that Othello, a Black man, is having sexual intercourse with Desdemona, a white woman. A little deeper, as some scholars have noted, the lines can be read as animalizing sex, arguing that the sex between Iago and Desdemona is somehow primitive and “uncivilized.” While Janet Adelman calls 49 Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, ll. 259-64. 50 Some texts that display the specificity of the jennet include Squyr of Lowe Degre (1560), Bibliotheca Eliotae (1542), and Huloets Dictionarie (1572). Jonathan Thurston, Horse-handling in Shakespeare’s Poems and Renaissance Codes of Conduct, Middle Tennessee State University, MA Thesis, 2016: p. 43. 51 Ascham, p. 25. 52 Othello 1.i.97-98. 37 the lines “violently eroticizing and racializing,” Joan Larsen Klein believes they prove “Iago regularly sees men and women as little more than animals.”53 However, what signified black rams in early modern England? Neither the claim that the metaphor is just about interracial sex nor that it is a claim to violent, bestial sex relies on the animals being a ram and ewe (even if the lines specify the color of these animals). So why these specific animals? Sheep were of course common livestock animals in the sixteenth century. So, what about the ram stood out to Shakespeare to include as his first racial animal in Othello? Black wool was considered incredibly undesirable, mainly because it was out of fashion at the time. The black ram was seen as a corrupting agent, capable of ruining future generations and their profitability. In this way, a black ram was a danger and a threat to a farmer’s whole welfare. As discussed earlier, Leonard Mascall’s manual on animal husbandry details the significance of the color of wool: Also the white colour in shéepe is very good & profitable, as we vse here most in England: For of this colour a man may make many other. And the white will kéepe also his colour long….The common rules to buy are these, when his wooll is white, faire, and long staple, and plaine. Ye shal neuer choose a very white ram: and yet oftentimes a white ram will get a blacke lambe, but a yellow or blacke ram, wil neuer get a white lambe. Ye must not choose a ram by his whitenes one|ly, but when the pallace of his tongue is of the same colour of his wooll. For when either of these two do not agrée, the lambe is like to be blacke.54 This quote showcases an agricultural belief at the time that reveals early genetics. They understood that black wool formed a dominant allele, and they knew black rams could therefore decimate the 53 Janet Adelman, “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2 (1997): 125. Joan Larsen Klein, “Iago and the Arts of Satan: a Homiletic Reading,” Cithara 52.1 (2012): 22-49. 54 Mascall, 238. 38 potential for capital from a herd if it was allowed to breed. “[A] yellow or blacke ram, wil neuer get a white lambe.” Mascall focuses on the colored rams’ inability to produce a “good & profitable” lamb. The aesthetics of outward color translate immediately into the animal’s economic value. Beyond the economic, the phrase “good & profitable” implies a kind of purity for white rams, creating a baseline for white as “normal” and “yellow or blacke” as an unwanted type. So, the language here does not seek to vilify blackness in isolation; it shows blackness as a threat to future capital. People believed a white ram was best not because of allegorical purity but because of its potential to be dyed easily. And this awareness shaped how people bought rams. When we look to Shakespeare’s Othello, then, our reading of Act 1, Scene 1 changes. In this moment, Iago does not compare Othello to a “black ram” just to point out his race or just to animalize sex. Iago is warning Brabantio not just that Desdemona could be mingling with someone outside her social circles or outside her class; it is all about the future of Desdemona’s bloodline. Iago is working to make Brabantio fear for his own ancestral longevity and this sense of purity of blood. This concept of (im)purity through copulation has heavy implications in terms of conceptions of race in the period. Mascall’s manual shows that “oftentimes a white ram will get a blacke lambe, but a yellow or blacke ram, wil neuer get a white lambe.”55 From this quote, we see that a white ram could birth many different-colored offspring, but a colored ram could not do so. On a surface level, one can see how copulation with a black ram introduces an impurity so that a white sheep could never be produced. But, looking critically at the fact that two white sheep can also get a black sheep reveals notions of transgression based on nurture as opposed to nature. As mentioned earlier, Topsell’s Historie manual reads the Biblical story of Jacob and 55 Ibid. 39 Laban and their husbandry of sheep as a parallel to white women conceiving black children just by thinking about a Moor.56 Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba survey classical and early modern texts dealing with what they call “maternal impression” in Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (2007). They define maternal impression as “the idea that a child’s appearance might be affected by the mother’s imagination at the moment of conception.”57 They show how one of the most popular printed appearances of this concept was in Henry Denham’s version of Pliny’s The Historie of the World, where the story of the Black wrestler Nicaeus is described as having white parents but a Black grandparent. Yet, Pliny claims Nicaeus’ Blackness can only have been due to “the cogitations and discourses of the mind” of either parent.58 Burton and Loomba also note the concept’s appearance in other sources. The Aithiopika, “widely translated in the sixteenth century and freely adapted to different locales,” shows an “Ethiopian royal couple [who] gives birth to a white child because the mother has gazed upon the picture of a white woman during conception.”59 Further, maternal impression appears in Thomas Lupton’s A Thousand Notable Things of Sundrie Sorts (1579), which “featured a ‘noble matron’ of Spain who produced a black child, and was accused of having ‘lain with some one of the slaves of the Saracens’ but ultimately freed because it was proved that she had merely looked upon the picture of a [sic] Ethiopian.”60 The prevalence of the trope of maternal impression in early modern texts reveals a connection of racially discordant children to transgression. While early modern people first thought to “adultery” in these cases, Pliny’s scientific notion of maternal impression persuaded people that mere “cogitation” was likely behind the child’s skin color. 56 Topsell, 470. 57 Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, Palgrave, 2007: p. 45. 58 Ibid., p. 46. 59 Ibid., p. 45. 60 Ibid. 40 If maternal impression is connected to transgressions—be they sexual or mental—then it is worth considering how the transgressions are received in these different cases. In both Pliny’s and Lupton’s texts, there is this instant of confused or anxious identity. Where did this Black child come from? Was sexual transgression involved? And yet, with the Aithiopika, it seems that the royal couple had intentionality behind their actions in order to “get” a white child. That is not questioned as much as the Black children. When we look from a racially discordant child upward (to the parents and then grandparents), these narratives look for sexual transgression and a source of blame in the case of a Black child and a statement of an intended “miracle” in the case of a white child. Comparing this kind of narrative to sheep husbandry reveals a different lens. Rather than focusing on sexual transgression or adultery specifically, animal husbandry manuals look downward (from the parents to the children), instructing breeders to take control over what colors of sheep are allowed to mate. Whiteness falls under control, these narratives show, but blackness is a corruption that cannot be controlled. These elements of control and corruption heavily factor in to the way that we read Iago’s animal language throughout the play and very much relies on this downward perspective. The image of the black ram topping the white ewe is all about corrupting Brabantio’s “herd.” Again, if Brabantio allows this interracial marriage, “the lambe is like to be blacke” too, hence crushing the social capital of future generations. The black ram is more than just an example of a black animal; it is an indicator of agricultural practices, displaying how coloring does indeed factor into profitability and selectivity—as well as formations of thoughts on difference based on color— especially for breeding, creating a complex metaphor for talking about interracial desire at the time. But this knowledge is not mere trivia. It guides us in how to read the next animal image: the horse. 41 The equine imagery starts when Iago calls Othello a “Barbary horse.”61 The line appears near the previous one about the ram and ewe, again as an appellation used by Iago to describe Othello, and it often gets a bit more common treatment from critical editors of Othello. Scholars frequently cite the Barbary horse as being a north African breed of horse. Bevington cites its appearance in Othello as meaning, “from northern Africa (and hence associated with Othello).”62 So, Bevington is focused on Othello’s ethnic origins aligning with the horse and keeps it at that general level of interpretation. This holds true inside the play at another point as well. We see in Act 4, scene 3 that Desdemona talks about her old maid who is also named “Barbary”: My mother had a maid called Barbary. She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake her. She had a song of willow, An old thing ‘twas, but it expressed her fortune, And she died singing it. That song tonight Will not go from my mind. I have much to do But to go hang my head all at one side And sing it like poor Barbary. Prithee, dispatch.63 The figure of Barbary the maid calls to the occupational pigeonholing of Africans in early modern England, which T. F. Earle argues “resulted not only in their exclusion from much of mainstream European life, but also in their denigration.”64 The pigeonholing, as Earle calls it, really manifests in Barbary’s dual role as servant and singer. The name Barbary does not just designate a dark skin color for the main but also the cultural understandings—and stereotypes— 61 Othello 1.i.125. 62 Othello, Hall, 50. 63 Ibid. IV.iii.28-35. 64 T. F. Earle, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, Cambridge, 2005: p. 41. 42 of people from Africa. While the character Barbary has no direct association with the image of the Barbary horse except name alone, both are a call to the exotic manifesting in the domestic. This corresponds well with Bevington’s focus on the “ethnic” when glossing the “Barbary horse.” Pechter’s gloss is not that different from Bevington’s: “the Barbary steed having a particular association with the Moor….The common ground [between the types of horses mentioned in this scene] is bestial contamination.”65 While they both call to a cultural linkage made in the image of the Barbary horse, Pechter, as we see from this gloss, is focused more on exoticism and “bestial” nature. However, even these claims do not correspond completely with early modern understandings. It is true that the Barbary horse was a beast of strength and speed—and certainly status—in the period, both in Europe and in the East. According to the travel narrative by Nicolas de Nicolay, the Aga, a Turkish captain, was said to have ridden on a “Barbarie horse, the saddle, and other furnitures wrought with goldsmithes workes.”66 With the focus on “furnitures” and “goldsmithes workes,” we get the sense that this horse was a symbol of exotic royalty, and it deserved the best fittings that could be made. In the 1609 Perfection of Horsemanship by Nicholas Morgan, a list appears, arranging breeds in order of popularity. While he notes that Great Britain has its own unique breeds (palfreys, trotting geldings, and hackneys), Britain’s horses are not great enough to even appear on the list. And yet, the fourth highest ranking horse was the Barbary horse, only under Arabian, Thessalian, and Neapolitan.67 Even in monetary 65 Othello, Pechter, 7. 66 Nicolas de Nicolay, The nauigations, peregrinations and voyages, made into Turkie by Nicholas Nicholay Daulphinois, Lord of Arfeuile, chamberlaine and geographer ordinarie to the King of Fraunce conteining sundry singularities which the author hath there seene and obserued: deuided into foure bookes, with threescore figures, naturally set forth as well of men as women, according to the diuersitie of nations, their port, intreatie, apparrell, lawes, religion and maner of liuing, aswel in time of warre as peace: with diuers faire and memorable histories, happened in our time. Translated out of the French by T. Washington the younger, London: Thomas Dawson, 1585. 82. 67 Nicholas Morgan, The Perfection of Horsemanship, Edward Allde, Kent, 1609: p. 16. 43 value, there is a significance to the Barbary horse over many British horses. In the late fifteenth century, a “standard mount was 30-40 ducats.”68 Ducats, depending on origin and quality, varied from three to nine shillings for early modern England. According to Sandra K. Fischer, “In the plays, a single ducat or three ducats is a small, trifling sum; forty ducats can buy enough poison for suicide or a beautiful ring; one thousand ducats is a substantial fee; two thousand ducats is the price of a diamond or, per annum, a good marriage settlement.”69 So, a standard horse was rather affordable, being under twenty pounds at the time. Meanwhile, the Barbary horse could cost significantly more, especially by the mid-seventeenth century, as is seen by a price in A True Relation of the Late Expedition into Kent (1642): “wee tooke three Barbary Horses, valued at 200. pound a piece.”70 This valuing is further verified in the Morgan’s Perfection, when he discusses the capital value of the top three horse breeds: “almost al the horsemen & bree∣ders within this kingdome doe much insist herein, so as if a Neapolitan, Arabian, Barbarie or such like bee brought into England, how inestimable hee is valued, prised, and solde, and how all men desire him, who can doubt?”71 Part of their intrinsic monetary value could stem from their far-off origin; however, another reason for it could be their renowned speed. In Leo Africanus’ ninth book of his Historie of Africa, Africanus details all he knows about Barbary horses: “The most certaine triall of these horses [whom Africanus believes to be the same as Arabian horses] is when they can ouertake the beast called Lant or the Ostrich in a race: which if they be able to 68 M.E. Mallett and J.R. Hale, The Military Organization of a Renaissance State, Cambridge University Press, 2006: p. 138. 69 Sandra K. Fischer, Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama, University of Delaware Press, 1985: pp. 69-70. 70 Anonymous, A true relation of the late expedition into Kent by the appointment of both Houses of Parliament. As it was expressed in a letter from a man of good credit, who was in the action, dated from Dover the 29. of August, 1642. Wherein my Lord Roper, and Sir Peter Ricault, were taken into custody and confined unto Upner Castle, and likewise how we tooke His Majesties great ship called the Soveraigne of the Seas, and furnisht her with a sufficient guard. As also newes from Cambridge, and the bringing in of Dr. Wren bishop of Ely, with good store of treasure, in the Tower of London, T. Fawcet, 1642: p. 1. 71 Morgan, Perfection, p. 19. 44 performe, they are esteemed woorth a thousand ducats or an hun|dred camels.”72 There are two major points of interest here. First, the Barbary horse is characterized through this almost mythic speed. Second, its capital value here seems even higher than previously stated, its cost going up to a thousand ducats, a little under 450 pounds depending on the metal used for the coin, comparable to “the price of a diamond or, per annum, a good marriage settlement.”73 We see through these quotes how the Barbary horse was largely seen as a superior and valuable horse breed. This seems to have been common knowledge, not just a bit of trivia for contemporary equestrians. Thinking back to Othello, why does Iago compare Othello to such a prized animal as the Barbary horse? One possible explanation is in Othello’s military station, a Venetian general. Being of the highest military caliber, Othello would make a large amount of money, as is only further indicated by the “fortunes” he had talked to Desdemona about and the “riches of the ship” gained from Othello’s early conquest.74 Comparing Othello to a Barbary horse implies exotic wealth along the Barbary coast, and economic wealth is a theme that appears throughout the play for Iago. He was denied his own promotion, and he manipulates Roderigo for his money throughout, such as in the “Put money in thy purse” dialogue. This manipulation is perhaps most explicit in the line, “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse.”75 Here, Iago shows himself as interested in gaining material wealth in the play. 72 Leo Africanus, A geographical historie of Africa, written in Arabicke and Italian by Iohn Leo a More, borne in Granada, and brought vp in Barbarie. Wherein he hath at large described, not onely the qualities, situations, and true distances of the regions, cities, townes, mountaines, riuers, and other places throughout all the north and principall partes of Africa; but also the descents and families of their kings ... gathered partly out of his owne diligent obseruations, and partly out of the ancient records and chronicles of the Arabians and Mores. Before which, out of the best ancient and moderne writers, is prefixed a generall description of Africa, and also a particular treatise of all the maine lands and isles vndescribed by Iohn Leo. ... Translated and collected by Iohn Pory, lately of Goneuill and Caius College in Cambridge, Eliot’s Court Press, 1600. 339. 73 Fischer, p. 70. 74 Othello, I.iii.151. II.i.92. 75 Ibid., I.iii.426. 45 This mostly one-sided dialogue with Roderigo is this constant clash of images: flashes of money and glimpses of pride in the state. This speech uses the word “Moor” than any other single speech in the whole play. After the second “Put money in thy purse,” Iago says that “Desdemona should [not] long continue / her lover to the Moor.” Two more, and Iago says that “Moors are unchangeable in their wills.” He later speaks of “an erring barbarian / and a supersubtle Venetian,” and he goes on to repeat his hatred for “the Moor.”76 The juxtaposition of the rhetoric of cultural difference (“erring barbarian” versus “supersubtle Venetian”) against the constant reminder to “put money in thy purse” allows for an economic reading of cultural geography in the play: while money is passed around in the play amid the Venetians, Othello is an outsider or trespasser who is not allowed to participate in that economy. Iago does not take issue with this until Othello is “made” through his marriage: “If it prove lawful prize, he’s made forever.”77 While Iago uses an animal image so connected with capital wealth in his rhetoric toward Brabantio, despite acknowledging the high value of the Barbary horse, animals also demonstrate the dangers of foreign wealth. In the case of the Barbary horse, there is a double meaning. On one hand, it is a rhetoric of humility toward Brabantio, saying, “Look how I acknowledge Othello’s worth as a Barbary horse.” However, on the other hand, it is also him playing the role of Ascham: “Look how the Barbary horse comes in to dominate our economy over our own horses.” He hints at the idea of contaminating bloodlines by losing one’s wealth to a Moor. While the image of the Barbary horse shows Iago’s awareness of Barbary treasures, the image of the black ram takes advantage of Brabantio’s fear that future capital in his family will be decimated. 76 Ibid. I.iii.385-447. 77 Ibid. I.ii.61. 46 This kind of animal imagery happens throughout the play though. Even in this same speech when the Barbary horse is introduced, horse types continue to emerge: “you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have / coursers for cousins and jennets for germans.”78 Suddenly, we see the same call to the corruption of generational capital at play. Iago does not tell Brabantio that an act of taboo is at work; he warns that his descendants might be worthless, even more so than Othello himself (neither of the two mentioned types of horses ranking as high on Morgan’s chart of popular breeds as the Barbary, further corroborating the reading of the worth of the Barbary horse as a lie). Iago relies on this rhetoric of animal metaphor as a means of showing the threat of Othello as a force against future capital. Even as well-meaning as Othello is, Iago distrusts him and sees him as breaking up the “natural order” of things, especially when Othello chooses Cassio—another outsider, a “Florentine” (further evidence of Iago’s fear of foreign influence)—over Iago as a second-in-command alongside Iago’s suspicion that Othello has loved Iago’s own wife. While Iago’s motivations are frequently read as a revenge for past actions, what happens if we analyze his rhetoric more closely? What if, instead of focusing on past events, he is looking toward the future? In the same scene, Iago speaks about the potential offspring with more specificity, fearing what such a child would look like: “Ere I would say I would drown myself for the love of a guinea- hen I would change my humanity with a baboon.”79 The guinea hen in particular gets notice as connected to prostitution, such as in Samuel Johnson’s 1765 collection of Shakespeare and George Steevens’ 1793 version. However, in E. A. J. Honigmann’s notes on the same lines, he argues that, per the OED, there was never an explicit found case of the connection between guinea hens and 78 Ibid. I.i.126-27. 79 Othello, I.iii.315-17. 47 prostitution until these lines in Shakespeare, making the claim dubious at best.80 Most of the known appearances of guinea hens in early modern literature actually appear in herbals (because a flower was named after the bird), such as John Parkinson’s Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (1629), John Gerard’s The herbal or general historie of plants (1633), and Ben Jonson’s Praises of a Countrie life (1640). In Rembert Dodoens’ A Nievve Herball (1578), for example, the guinea-hen is described, “a kinde of birde called also Meleagris, whose feathers be speckled lyke vnto these flowers, but not with Violet speckes, but with white & blacke spots.”81 Not much was known about the flowers or the birds at the time, but the two facts that replicated across texts were these: First, the guinea hen was also called the Turkish hen. Second, it was known to be a speckled bird of black and white. Perhaps, then, Iago is not calling Desdemona herself a prostitute as commentators have suggested. Perhaps, he is thinking to the fruits of the “topping [of the] white ewe,” the outcome of the “beast with two backs,” and “coursers for cousins.” Perhaps, he is thinking about interracial offspring or perhaps Desdemona’s already contaminated identity, contaminated by her relations with Othello. As was said of the black sheep in husbandry manuals, when a white sheep lies with a black ram, the white sheep is corrupted to have hybrid or completely Black children. Desdemona is no longer “good & profitable,” line? and so she is a hybridized figure, even as the animal imagery suggests. Further, the play is constantly hinting at the idea of birth around Othello and Desdemona. Early, Iago talks about his motivations and plans with Othello and Desdemona. He ends his soliloquy saying, “Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.”82 Emilia 80 Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Bloomsbury, 1996: I.iii.315-17. 81 Rembert Dodoens, A Nievve Herball, or Historie of Plantes: wherin is contayned the whole discourse and perfect description of all sortes of Herbes and Plantes: their Divers and Sundry kindes: their strange Figures, Fashions, and Shapes: their Names / Natures / Operations / and Vertues: and that not onely of those whiche are here growyng in this our Countrie of Englande / but of all others also of forrayne Realmes / commonly used in Physicke, London, 1578: p. 120. 82 Othello, I.iii.446-47. 48 too speaks of monstrous births, one that on a surface reading speaks of jealousy: “It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself.”83 These lines show a focus on monstrous birth around Othello and Desdemona, and part of that monstrosity happens in the imagining of the animals that offspring would be compared to. Racialized birds are not that farfetched for the time. The guinea-hen could easily be a call back to the similarly speckled magpie that Feirefiz was described as in the intro to Parzival. The opening stanza of the epic reads: If unfaith in the heart find dwelling, then the soul it shall reap but woe; And shaming alike and honour are his who such doubt shall show, For it standeth in evil contrast with a true man’s dauntless might, As one seeth the magpie’s plumage, which at one while is black and white. And yet he may win to blessing; since I wot well that in his heart, Hell’s darkness, and light of Heaven, alike have their lot and part But he who is false and unsteadfast, he is black as the darkest night, And the soul that hath never wavered stainless its hue and white!84 Even in this medieval epic, the multicolored bird stands in as a moral allegory of someone who is not “stainless” as well as a racial code for one who is “black and white.” Likewise, for Iago to speak of a guinea hen, understood to have similar coloration to the magpie at the time, in a play about interracial desire, shows that Iago figures someone—either Desdemona through contamination or the absent offspring of Othello and Desdemona’s coupling—as multiraced character. The image of the guinea hen carries on this long allegoric tradition of using speckled birds to denote racial hybridity, and the image has flown from the Middle Ages through the 83 Ibid. III.iv.182-83. 84 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival: A Knightly Epic, translated by Jessie L. Weston. New York, 1912: ll. 1-8. 49 sixteenth century. However, Iago does not use the image of the guinea hen in isolation. Regarding the baboon, Honigmann notes that the baboon was “sometimes glossed as simpleton, i.e. a fitting victim for a ‘ginny hen.’ Baboons were thought to be particularly lecherous.” 85 However, the baboon, like the guinea hen, has elements of cultural geography entwined with him. According to Edward Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607), the baboon was understood to be the English name for the Medieval animal-human race previously known as Cynocephali, or dog-headed people. Topsell acknowledges that many have mistaken and continued to mistake baboons for actual men. And the physical characteristics of the baboon were frequently compared to that of a dog: “they are black and hairy, rough skinned, red and bright eyes, along Dogges face, and teeth stronger and longer then Dogges.”86 Perhaps, too, it makes one wonder if Iago’s two animal appellations, the baboon and the “Spartan dog,” are inherently connected because of this canine imagery.87 The personality of a baboon indeed seems to imitate Iago’s as well: They are euill manered and natured, wherfore also they are picturd to signifie wrath, they are so vnapeasable. The Latins vse them adiectiuely to signifie any angry, stubborn, froward, or rauening man. They will imitate all humaine actions, louing wonderfully to weare garments, and of their owne accord they cloth themselues in the skinnes of wilde beasts they haue killed, they are as lustfull and venereous as goats, attempting to defile all sorts of women.88 While the quote shows a sexual aggressor in the baboon as Honigmann suggests, we also see 85 Othello, Honigmann, p. 155. 86 Topsell, p. 11. 87 Topsell speaks of the Spartan dog, too. Also known as the Laconian dog, Topsell notes the hunting breed is the product of a “Dogge and a Foxe.” Topsell, p. 224. 88 Topsell, p. 11. 50 “evil….natured” and an imitator of humans here. Iago is offering to trade his humanity for an animal that was, for centuries, believed to be a race of man.89 His choice of an interstitial animal is one that blurred the line between animality and humanity, referring perhaps to his line, “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.”90 He speaks here of a loss of self but also a performativity of humanity on his part, “apeing” humanity, particularly when he says, “I am not what I am.”91 Furthermore, Topsell generally associates the baboon with Egypt—where a handkerchief like Desdemona’s was likely made—describing the baboon in Egyptian art and ritual. In other places, Topsell describes the many places that house the baboon: “The West region of Lybia and Aethiopia….in Arabia, from Dira Southward in a promontorie….and in the continent called Dachinabades beyond Barygaza, and the Eastern Mountaines of the Mediterranean region; and….betwixt the rivers Ganges and Hyphasis.” 92 Largely, these areas correspond to Black populations found in Marco Polo’s Description of the World (c. 1300). With both the baboon’s connection to the monstrous race of the Cynocephali as well as its understood location to be in highly racialized areas, we see that this specific animal has a racial connotation. Reading this contemporary zoocultural knowledge into Iago’s claim, it seems he is saying he would rather be transformed into a decidedly Black figure than “drown [himself] for the love of” a “speckled” or multiracial figure. This means he cares first and foremost about racial “purity.” He would rather be of an inferior race as long as there is no cultural corruption between races than lie with someone tainted like Desdemona. Iago almost sees “impurity” as a corruption of the Great Chain itself, where “hybrid people” must exist outside the Chain and are therefore base. Largely, this claim seems consonant with dominant themes in the play. Both Daniel J. Vitkus and Filiz 89 For more info on the Cynocephali, see John Friedman. 90 Othello, I.i.63. 91 Ibid. I.i.71. To look more at the idea of “apeing” as an early modern concept, see Nandini Das. 92 Topsell, p. 11. 51 Barin discuss the act of “turning Turk” in Othello as a devolution, Othello’s Venetian civility struggling against his Turkish barbarity. Vitkus shows how Othello represents a mix of cultures himself: “Othello, the noble Moor of Venice, is….not to be identified with a specific, historically accurate racial category; rather, he is a hybrid who might be associated….with a whole set of related terms—Moor, Turk, Ottomite, Saracen, Mahometan, Egyptian, Judean, Indian—all constructed and positioned in opposition to Christian faith and virtue.”93 And Filiz Barin notes that while Othello’s early identity is “complicated,” “at the end of the play, Shakespeare ends this ambiguity in Othello’s identity as he returns to his origins by becoming a Turk.”94 The passage Barin refers to is this one: “Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk / Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, / I took by th’ throat the circumcisèd dog, / And smote him, thus.”95 In these lines, Othello compares himself to a dog, calling back to Iago’s connection to the “Spartan dog,” the baboon, and the Cynocephali. The very animals that Iago perceived himself on the edge of being are what Othello identifies as in this moment: while Iago is constantly dancing the line between humanity and animality, especially with his self-aligning with a baboon, Othello calls himself flat-out “the circumcised dog.” Furthermore, this speech is a pivotal moment for animal-culture discourse in the play. In this moment, Othello internalizes the animal-race code that Iago has transposed on top of the figure of Othello throughout the play. He internalizes that metaphorical imagery as integral to his identity. As Barin suggests with the notion of Othello “return[ing] to his origins,” there is a kind of colonization at work related to Othello’s identity, best exemplified in Iago’s line, “Othello’s 93 Vitkus, “Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2 (1997): 159-60. 94 Barin, 51. 95 Othello V.ii.414-17. 52 occupation’s gone!”96 While “occupation” can easily refer to military occupation, it also speaks to Venetian occupation of Othello’s cultural identity, a colonialist occupation of his identity. By the end of the play then, he is using Venetian labels of otherness to define himself, reinforcing colonialist rhetoric to describe foreign threats. He sees himself as an inherent threat to Venice as a figurehead of foreign invasion and influence and kills himself through what could be described as a process of purification. He kills himself not because he thinks he “deserves” it so much as he seeks to cleanse Venice of this trespasser he has found in himself, as both Vitkus and Barin suggest. The play suggests Othello’s most fundamental nature is raced, though his racial characterization is indeed “complicated.” Iago’s animal rhetoric asks us to look closely at the complications of race. As much as he hates “the Moor,” he constantly warns of the unborn progeny of Desdemona and Othello through this animal rhetoric: the “coursers for cousins,” the corruption of the herd from a “black ram,” the speckled “guinea hen.” All these animal images speak to a risk of violation of blood for Iago. Analyzing this rhetoric, we see Iago’s—and perhaps, early modern English viewers’—fears of Turkish invasion. The treatment of animals is not just about racial skin color here but also about foreign cultures that are somehow “threatening,” and Iago’s animal imagery constantly reifies the notion that Othello is a threat by nature, speaking to contemporary English fears and rhetorics of sovereignty. By focusing on the unwanted hybrid child, Iago paints a picture of order disrupted for contemporary English audiences: What if the Turks invade? What if Englishmen “turn Turk?” What if Englishmen have “coursers for cousins?” Iago speaks to these concerns of invasion through animal imagery, yes, but what makes the metaphors most potent is that they all have contemporary agricultural, zoological, or social implications that make them less of a mere metaphor and more of a real example Iago asks people to consider. 96 Ibid. III.iii.409. 53 In the period, the English garden was seen as a display of a person’s wealth but also of their control over nature around them.97 Nature versus civilization is not always a useful dichotomy therefore: nature was appropriated by culture. Put another way, the animals Iago relies on are not mysterious beasts in the woods or sea that are not known well or understood. Rather, he relies on people’s daily interactions or regular hearsay to craft a specific “natural” hierarchy of “cultured” animals. This creates a paradigm of control. It is as if Iago is a husbandry master telling the viewers that one manages society the same way one manages a farm or garden (a claim that was frequently circulated in both gardening and husbandry manuals). Rather than showing the imagined hybrid as “unnatural,” then, Iago speaks to the “good husband” among the crowd. I can envision his speech: “If you let a ‘black ram’ in your midst, the herd will become corrupt over time. If you prize the ‘Barbary horse’ [I imagine Iago taking on the voice of Ascham here] over English ones, you will lose your pure English identity, and suddenly you too will have ‘gennets [a Spanish horse] for germans.’ If you lower your defenses and allow the Turks to enter the country and turn others Turk, we will be a country overrun with ‘guinea hens,’ and I, Iago, would much rather just be a ‘baboon’ than that.” The future that Iago warns of through his animal rhetoric is one of Turkish invasion, and, through animal specificity, he appeals to the husbands of the crowd. He shows the power and might of Islamic force through his rhetoric and begs listeners to “tend to their gardens” and, perhaps, begs England to tend to its garden: “‘Tis in ourselves we are thus or / thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our / wills are gardeners.”98 97 In “Order and Disorder in the Early Modern Garden, 1558-c.1630,” Jill Francis examines the importance of cosmological hierarchy related to the garden. She starts the article by examining a claim in the 1577 Foure Bookes of Husbandry that an improperly kept garden means there’s probably a bad “huswyfe” too. Garden History 36.1 (2008): 22-35. 98 Othello, I.iii.361-3. 54 CHAPTER 2 – Beating a Dead Horse: Multicultural Violence in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine The intersection of animals and violence perhaps most frequently appeared in the genre of Renaissance war plays. For contemporary viewers, seeing war plays was cathartic and often allowed them a space to vent and see played out their desires to see war happen: “At least part of the passion for plays about military conquest during the late 1580s and 1590s,” argues Leah Marcus, “stems from England’s contemporary situation: spectators watching a play about the English wars in France during the fifteenth century could vent feelings of frustration about England’s faltering militarism in the Low Countries of France of their own day.”99 Part of the allure, then, of seeing the violence in many of these early modern war plays, Marcus claims, is in the expression of militantism—and the act of wish fulfillment in seeing these acts of war performed—inherent in such plays. Another part of the appeal of these plays is in England’s nationalistic concern about its own standing. In Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood (1992), the individual chapters focus on the varied ways that nationalism was in flux for early modern England. While some “show the cultural dialectic made available (indeed, made inescapable) by Renaissance humanism, the dialectic between antiquity and the middles ages, at work in both poetry and the law,” others look toward “England’s identity in space, its appearance on the map, whether the map of England itself….or the map of the world.”100 Helgerson’s organization gestures to the ways that England 99 Leah S. Marcus, “Marlowe in tempore belli,” in War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare, edited by Sara Munson Deats, Lagretta Tallent Lenker, and Merry G. Perry, Lexington Books, 2004: p. 299. 100 Helgerson, p. 5. 55 viewed itself in different and often contrasting ways, between past and present, England and Europe, and England and the rest of the world. As Helgerson hints at in his final chapters, the final major layer too is that authors represented the nation in different ways, constructing this concern for a fixed identity amid emerging conflicting ideologies, as I hope to show in this chapter. One militant play invested in nationalist concerns is Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1605-1606). Marlowe’s two-part play covers two timelines: the first before Tamburlaine becomes an emperor—his rise to power—and the second after—his large-scale war for total dominion. The play becomes a compelling model of nationalistic and imperial accomplishment. What at the onset seems a rags-to-riches story quickly becomes an underdog story of how even a shepherd can rise in the ranks and lead an empire to conquest. Even with his imminent death by the end of the play, he constructs a legacy of power for his descendants and his people that clearly reflects a kind of national and cultural strength through the image of a violent empire. As I argue in this chapter, this play has a vested interest in promoting an English identity that is more militaristic, more violent. The play largely does this through the titular protagonist’s multiple layers of complexity. Marlowe envisions Tamburlaine (with the real historical figure he is based on frequently spelled “Tamerlane”) as a Fourquevaux-like conqueror, unafraid to engage in war and equally willing to commit acts of violence to advance his empire. He also acts as a leader of a cavalry. Tamburlaine is depicted as a savage yet successful protagonist in this play, and it is that success that really shapes the way he functions as a nationalist model for readers. Therefore, a tension emerges between civility (and the lack thereof) and successful nation- building. And this tension is further complicated by a kind of gendering of national identity as masculine. Tamburlaine promotes an English model of nationalism that relies on a coding of 56 masculinity through this savage violence and lack of civility, playing with themes of excess and vice. The tense relationship between nationhood, masculinity, and civility shifts constantly throughout the play but ultimately proves that the way the character of Tamburlaine balances these ideas is successful. This tension is clearly visible in the treatment of animals (in relation to humans) by Tamburlaine himself. Horses appear as symbols of military strength and masculinity in the Ottoman Empire perceived by the English. As Daniel Vitkus says in his introduction to Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (2000): From the fifteenth to eighteenth century, the Ottomans posed a sustained threat to Christian rule in Europe. For London theatergoers, the Turk was not an imaginary bogey, and the Turk plays [Selimus, Emperor of the Turks; A Christian Turned Turk; and The Renegado] are not simply fantasies about fictional demons lurking at the edges of the civilized world. These plays and other early modern writings dealing with the Turks express an anxious interest in Islamic power that is both complicated and overdetermined.101 By “complicated and overdetermined,” Vitkus refers to the apparent contradiction between the demonized and exaggerated depiction of Islamic culture in England and the official diplomacy between Queen Elizabeth and Moroccan and Turkish rulers over military aid and encouraging trade without any explicit attempts “to chastise them for their infidel ways.” 102 Vitkus acknowledges the numerous layers to the Islamic image in England: barbarous, infidel, wealthy, and mighty. Marlowe focuses on cavalry size as a means of expressing that Islamic power, utilizing these animals in such a way that they code for strength. His focus on numbers of horses in Part One of the play reveals an awareness of contemporary military tactics, especially through his use 101 Daniel Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England, Columbia University Press, 2000: p. 3. 102 Ibid. 57 of rhetoric when trying to convince others to join his cause (as I will show with the treatment of Theridamas in Part One). The figure of the horse in Part One advances masculine ideals in England, and it does so in a way that early modern English viewers would immediately understand and be able to conceptualize, especially with the narrative the numbers suggest. However, these images sharply contrast those of Part Two, where the figure of the horse takes on so many more functions: metaphors of power dynamics, the object of transformation, and a figurehead for contemporary nationalist discourses of equestrian styles. Tamburlaine’s equestrian knowledge therefore continues in Part Two. Here, we see the suggestion that English treatment in anti-manége discourse is not effective and therefore not masculine, and should be re-thought. This specific discourse involves an English awareness of— and frequent nationalist criticism of—French and Italian styles of horse riding (here, manége). Tamburlaine acts as an advanced equestrian, resisting British anti-manége sentiments of the late sixteenth century to encourage a return to Italian modes of equestrianism. As he lectures his son on his games that play at war—a kind of jousting exercise—he models what “real” horsemanship entails. He models this more explicitly with his treatment of the later imprisoned kings, commenting on distances traveled, necessary gear, and philosophies of treatment of horses, again critiquing British modes of equestrian thought. Much of Tamburlaine’s relationship with equestrianism connects also to frameworks of masculinity, advocating for this relationship with violence to be predicated on how “manly” an individual is. Therefore, the play’s coding of masculinity becomes conflated with barbarity, complicating nationalist discourse through this focus on anti-manége discourse. Because of the many faces Tamburlaine holds in Marlowe’s work, he becomes a fascinating case study in debates over English nationalist identity framed through interactions with animals. After all, 58 Tamburlaine’s strength is impossible to be conceived of at the time until his armies are identified through a number of cavalrymen. The connection for English viewers between Tamburlaine and themselves is not made explicit until we see the resistance to anti-manége discourse in Part Two, and, as Tamburlaine educates Celebinus, English viewers would have seen themselves also being lectured to about their own horseriding practices and masculinity. In this way, Marlowe negotiates concerns of masculinity and violence alongside Tamburlaine’s treatment of both men and horses, complicating a nationalist model of England through the savage and violent figure of Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine the Conqueror To start an analysis of these tensions, I look first to the violence of the titular character— and then his success—in the play as this shapes the way we read expressions of nationalism later. The complexity of Tamburlaine’s violent character, too, factors in England’s late-century thoughts on what Doyeeta Majumder (2019) calls “lawmaking violence.”103 Just as sovereign violence104— a possibility from both the “evil monarch” and the “illegitimate monarch”—was a real and common topic of political discourse for early modern English audiences, so too was it perceived as a necessary violence by many.105 The figure of Tamburlaine is one that embodies these multiple violences, asking viewers to engage in a discourse of which violences are necessary. If Tamburlaine is just following the conduct of Fourquevaux, for example, is what he does acceptable in the line of the founding of empires? In other moments in the play, does he participate in a lawmaking violence? Are certain violences of Tamburlaine’s unnecessary, and would they 103 Doyeeta Majumder, Tyranny and Usurpation: The New Prince and Lawmaking Violence in Early Modern Drama, Liverpool University Press, 2019: p. 3 104 For more information on sovereign violence in early modern England, see Armstrong, Barry, Bevington, Bushnell, Cormack, and Dollimore. 105 Ibid., pp. 1-3. 59 “displeaseth God” as Whetstone suggests? These categories of violence are far from mutually exclusive and work to show the complexity of the character. The use of violence in Tamburlaine suggests a moral ambiguity that ultimately allows the titular figure to be used for various nationalist ends, contributing to this larger cultural discourse. The nationalism of Tamburlaine’s reception relies on this idea that Tamburlaine’s conquest as a “scourge of God” is a kind of wish fulfillment for contemporary viewers, marking Tamburlaine as the kind of leader-hero England needs. After all, in early modern England, “a warlike national character,” Anna Suranyi says in The Genius of the English Nation (2008), “was preferable to an ‘effeminate’ [Thomas Palmer’s words {1606}] one.”106 Palmer attributes effeminacy to various attributes of a culture: Whereof let a Trauailer ground his obseruation vnder these three heads: name∣ly, whether the people be effeminate or warlike through naturall complexion….Secondly, whe∣ther the people be effeminate for want of good disci∣pline, as commonly those are where either vices, or great excesse abound; these being great withdraw∣ers of mens courages, weakening and poisoning the powers of soule and body, so as without discipline such men are vnapt for the warres altogether. Lastly, whether the people be warlike through the feare of Ty∣rannie, or by good discipline.107 Palmer was clearly invested in examining masculinity and femininity in cultural landscapes, associating gender with relationships to vice, excess, tyranny, and even skin color. Tamburlaine displays these virtues of masculinity as a leader, gendering his whole empire as masculine, something England was struggling with themselves. Suranyi clarifies this notion of national gendering in terms of its masculinity: “Masculinity was seen as inherently warlike, which implied 106 Anna Suranyi, The Genius of the English Nation: Travel Writing and National Identity in Early Modern England, University of Delaware Press, 2008: p. 140. 107 Thomas Palmer, An essay of the meanes hovv to make our trauailes, into forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable, London: 1606, p. 75. 60 both virile activity as well as the potential to invade and colonize other countries.”108 This warring leadership Tamburlaine models ties into his perceived masculinity as a national figure. Tamburlaine manifests in the plays as an extremely violent general. As Nina Taunton suggests in 1590s Drama and Militarism (2001), “Marlowe is known to have included chunks of almost-verbatim information on fortification from Paul Ive’s [translation] of Fourquevaux’s Instructions.” 109 Tamburlaine seems to take Fourquevaux’s policies of violence—such as the advice to be cruelest to traitors and a list of offenses punishable by death—“ad extremum” with his murder of his son Calyphas and his “horsification” of the imprisoned kings in Part Two. For English viewers, Tamburlaine represents a kind of militarist extreme, especially in terms of his capital severity, as I discuss in greater detail in the next section of this chapter. Paul J. Voss (2001) called Tamburlaine’s actions “ruthless….shocking, even grotesque.”110 Part of the evidence for these monikers of violence stems from the multiple murders Tamburlaine commits throughout the play. But another part stems from Tamburlaine’s “treachery, ambition, and infidelity” as well as his marker as an “exotic outsider.”111 But, despite all the violence and “grotesque” attributes of the titular protagonist, he becomes a model for England, playing off of contemporary nationalistic concern. The title page text for the 1605 edition (Part One) says that Tamburlaine, “who, from the state of a Shepheard in Scythia, by his rare and wonderful Conquests, became a most puissant and mighty Monarque.”112 Meanwhile, the 1606 sequel describes Tamburlaine thusly: “With his impassionate furie, for the death of his Lady and Loue fair Zenocrate: his forme of exhortation and discipline to his three 108 Suranyi, p. 140. 109 Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayals of War in Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare’s Henry V, Ashgate, 2001: 59. 110 Voss, p. 171. 111 Ibid., 170-171. 112 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, London: 1605, i. 61 Sonnes, and the manner of his owne death.” 113 Both plays are therefore explicitly invested in concerns of empire and conquest through Tamburlaine’s battles, seen through his “rare and wonderful Conquests” and his new role as a “most puissant and mighty Monarque” in the first part and his “triumphs” and “progress” in the second part’s prologue. In some ways, Tamburlaine is just another Marlovian over-reacher, like Faustus and Barabas, the Jew of Malta: he is overly ambitious, seeing that ambition single-mindedly and ignoring the risks, and eventually meeting his end. As Paul J. Voss notes in Elizabethan News Pamphlets (2001), Barabas, Faustus, and Tamburlaine are all these ambiguous “hero/villains” that are “attractive and appalling, courageous and cowardly.” 114 But Marlowe shows in Tamburlaine a particular interest in empire and militarism. As Alan Shepard claims in Marlowe’s Soldiers (2002), Marlowe’s work with war is far from a “war is hell” image. 115 Marlowe’s interest in militarism is rather specific in Tamburlaine: Perhaps Doctor Faustus is the preeminent example of Marlowe’s acute interest in the nuances of nationalism and the concomitant use of contradictory representations of historical personages by various parties for ideological gain. But Marlowe can also be as apparently inattentive as Peele to the ideological intricacies of displays of nationalism, as in Tamburlaine, where the principal hero installs puppet leaders to safeguard the national boundaries of nations his armies have just trounced and now rule under terms of occupations….Tamburlaine is ultimately less interested in what has been won or could be won than in the immediate circumstances of its winning.116 113 Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, London: 1606, i. 114 Paul J. Voss, Elizabethan War Pamphlets: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and the Birth of Journalism, Duquesne University Press, 2001: p. 164. 115 Alan Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada, Ashgate, 2002: p. 23. 116 Ibidem. 62 The nationalism Shepard speaks to comes out through his analysis of Marlowe’s “heroes,” the soldiers “to whom Marlowe gives voice….[who] are more often caught up in defending turf, even if it be a Mediterranean island and the hero every bit as much of an opportunist as [George Peel’s protagonist Tom] Stuckley.”117 What Shepard concludes with, that Tamburlaine as a character is interested more in “the immediate circumstances of winning,” seems to go against the empire- building model I am arguing for in the play as a whole. However, as I argue later in this chapter, the call to war for the English serves as a model for contemporary colonialism and serves to really showcase the play—and its titular protagonist—as a hopeful model for the English. The militarism expressed through Tamburlaine’s relationship to cruelty is one that romanticizes and glorifies violence as inherent to masculinity, as I will show later in this chapter. However, the national characteristics of the play need to be contextualized alongside an understanding of the nationalities of the titular character as well as how this story could be a model for England. Tamburlaine is introduced as a Scythian shepherd. While he becomes a warrior and “monarque” later, his roots are rather humble. This concept is especially fascinating given the animal and class implications. While he begins managing sheep as a mere “Shepheard in Scythia,” he later becomes an equestrian and lectures others on how to manage horses. Socioeconomic class is definitely communicated through this advancement or “promotion.” Being a shepherd in England meant being a lower-class person living in the rural areas, while equestrian work was seen as much more refined.118 Horses were associated with fine and precise displays of skill, hunting (a 117 Ibidem. 118 The idea of class differences tying into husbanded animals relies on an understanding of class at the time. As Bucholz gestures to in Early Modern England, while wool was a dominant industry in England throughout the sixteenth century, a lot of the wealth happened in terms of rural to urban, going from the shepherds and their children to farmers to adventuring merchants to town merchants and tradesmen to factories. And, connecting to Bucholz’ class systems related to the Great Chain of Being, we see the rural cottagers near the bottom of the chain trading wealth with husbandmen and working its way up the chain and into the city. Even seeing how traveling merchants often had more access to wealth than shepherds indicates the focus on horses as a sign of wealth over 63 classist sport itself), and mounts for traveling nobility. This move from shepherd to horseman implies a literal rags-to-riches story. To further complicate matters, early modern reception of the figure of “Tamerlane” was highly nationalist. Alan Shepard notes in Marlowe’s Soldiers the many ways that Tamerlane was instrumentalized for nationalist causes: [He] was in use as a ready prop, an eastern hero borrowed by western writers eager to promote various nationalist causes – defence of the coastline and other borders; nostalgia for the medieval crusades against infidels; offensive warlike maneuvers to strengthen England’s opportunistic patrol of sea routes; and the ad hoc efforts to expand the nascent empire.119 While Shepard certainly conflates the narrative of Tamerlane by calling him an “eastern hero borrowed by western writers,” assuming he is labeled a hero in the east as well as assuming a kind of cultural appropriation at work, Shepard hints at the many cultural complexities inherent in Tamerlane’s history. The specific uses of the figure are truly varied, from John Smythe’s invocation of the defeat of Bajazeth to defend longbows (In Certain Discourses Military), to Geoffrey Gates’ lauding of “Tamerlane’s scourge of Bajazeth and his infidel Turks” (The Defence of Militarie Profession), and George Whetstone’s use of Tamerlane’s story to encourage soldiers that they could become something great, too, but that Tamerlane’s method of viciousness “displeaseth God” (The Honorable Reputation of a Souldier).120 Clearly, the figure of Tamerlane is a complex one in the early modern period, and this means establishing a racial identity for the character is difficult at best, first by examining the nationalistic reading of Tamburlaine and then sheep. And again, while wool was a major industry, it is perhaps that commonness that makes the sheep lesser on a symbolic scale of class and masculinity than the horse. Bucholz, pp. 173, 24-25. 119 Shepard, p. 21. 120 Ibid., 21-22. 64 complicating it with race—whether the English can see themselves in Tamburlaine. So, when we look at Tamburlaine the Great through this complex cultural lens as early modern England, we see a disconnect: England sees itself neither as an outside spectator, nor as an allegorized character in the drama. Rather, the narrative presents an ideal for England, one that viewers would have aspired to. Perhaps, part of the reason on Marlowe’s end for this choice is a furthering of that wish fulfillment, depicting war even when the war in England was not going so well. It further fits in to the “in-betweenness” of Othello. Marlowe is careful to frame these struggles as not involving England at all, leaving contemporary viewers to negotiate the “like us but not like us” elements of Tamburlaine. Marlowe as a writer generally seems to have no interest in England, with Edward II as his sole play on England, and even that is far from a flattering portrayal of the nation, as previously discussed through Shepard. That creates an inherent difficulty in reading England into Tamburlaine. However, as I argue here, Tamburlaine appeals to English viewers’ perceptions of self in the play as a means of conversing about larger international politics and relations, especially around war. Marlowe invites these readers to observe the masculinity and strength of this Eastern warlord, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the most contemporarily relatable image Marlowe evokes to comment on this masculinity is the species of the horse, the most frequently appearing animal species throughout either part of the play. Marlowe’s play invites contemporary viewers to question what kinds of people can or should become “beasts of burden” as well as what kind of treatment is “inhumane.” As the play’s characters are Turkish, Scythian, and Persian, one sees a kind of behavioral cataloging that mimics many of the travel narratives. Racial identity stays problematic throughout the play, rendering it impossible—and perhaps unproductive—to try to read Tamburlaine as restrictively either white or non-white. 65 Instead, Tamburlaine reads simultaneously as an interstitial character for British viewers: like “us” but not like us, much as figures like Shakespeare’s Titus and Othello are. The main three cultural groups in the play are the Ottoman Turks, the Scythians/Tartars, and the Persians. 121 The geography of the plays imagines fourteenth-century Persia to be ruled by “ethnic Persians” as opposed to the actual Mongols or the numerous petty kingdoms after the Mongol Empire was broken up, as Peter Lukacs notes in his annotated version of Tamburlaine.122 To the north and west of this racialized Persia is what would have been North Asia, an area that historically was occupied by the Mongols but instead is populated by the “still-vaguely understood” Scythians in Marlowe’s work, imagining Tamburlaine as strictly Scythian, not “necessarily” the Mongol the real-life Tamburlaine was. 123 Even in the Prologue to the play, he is introduced as “the Scythian Tamburlaine.”124 “Scythian” is often accompanied by negative modifiers throughout the first part of the play: “Scythian thief,” “that paltry Scythian,” and “Scythians rude and barbarous.”125 The language is often similar in Part Two as well: “cursed Scythian,” “poisoned brains of this proud Scythian,” “these barbarous Scythians,” and “cruel Scythians.”126 While the Scythians and their servants often call themselves “noble,” the other groups tend to read the Scythians as barbarous, cruel, and cursed. In the early modern period in England, Scythia was depicted as this noble—using the same word that the Scythians characterize themselves in the play—warring place. Even while it also has that common connotation of “barbarous” depicted in Tamburlaine or even characteristics of 121 The three groups are seen most easily in ll. I.i.17: “Now Turks and Tartars [used interchangeably by Marlowe with “Scythians”] shake their swords at thee [Persia].” 122 Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, edited by Peter Lukacs, ElizabethanDrama: 2020, pp. 5-6. 123 Ibid., p. 6. 124 Ibid., Prologue, l. 4. 125 I.i.41. I.i.59. III.iii.356. 126 Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, edited by Peter Lukacs, ElizabethanDrama: 2020: III.ii.61. III.ii.75. III.iv.26. III.iv.55. 66 “ignorance,” Scythia is typically respected and looked up to by early modern English writers. Llodowick Lloyd speaks to the history and culture of Scythia in The Consent of Time (1590): These Scithians who were rude and slauish people, without maners or nourture, excelled farre the Greekes which with great care and diligence, studied to attaine knowledge and vertue: for by howe much the more the Scithians were more ignorant then the Greekes, so much more the Scithians excelled the Greekes in vertue: their hardinesse and courage in warres was such, that they were accompted amongst all other nations the most inuincible people of the worlde, that it is doubtfull….whether the men or women of Scithia be more famous.127 Leaning on the uncertainty of whether “men or women….be more famous” there, I will later connect queer and gender theory with the cultural representations of masculinity in Lloyd, but what makes it interesting to note now is that women are characterized alongside a military-coded masculinity. Even the women are great warriors. Here, Lloyd focuses consistently on the strength, courage, and invincibility of the Scythians despite being “rude” and “slauish,” constructing an image of masculinity that is rooted in lack of self-control. Masculinity is coded through a connection of attributes stereotypical to male strength and signs of progress as a society: “rude and slauish” and “without maners or nourture” stands beside “excelled.” “Warres” is characterized by “hardinesse and courage.” Violence and ignorance are coded as excellence and bravery, constructing this masculine code of excess, carnality, and even barbarity. The idea of early modern masculinity is one I have hinted at throughout the introduction to 127 Llodowick Lloyd, The Consent of Time Disciphering the Errors of the Grecians in their Olympiads, the Vncertaine Computation of the Romanes in their Penteterydes and Building of Rome, of the Persians in their Accompt of Cyrus, and of the Vanities of the Gentiles in Fables of Antiquities, Disagreeing with the Hebrewes, and with the Sacred Histories in Consent of Time. VVherein is also Set Downe the Beginning, Continuance, Succession, and Ouerthrowes of Kings, Kingdomes, States, and Gouernments, London, 1590: p. 192. 67 this chapter, and it is an inherently complex one. To use Mark Breitenberg’s word, masculinity was “anxious” at the time.128 England was anxious about their masculinity in relation to other cultures. Laura Gowing reads this anxiety as meaning that “Early modern popular culture often makes men’s power look absurdly vulnerable, at risk from the promiscuity of women, impotence and cuckoldry.”129 Literary representations of masculinity therefore often focused on the risks to masculinity, even as we see in Tamburlaine through Tamburlaine’s anxiety around his sons and what kinds of men they will grow up to be, something I will discuss later in this chapter. As Andrew P. Williams suggests in his introduction to The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature (1999), in this period of literature, “there is no one way to be a man.”130 Gowing claims that while masculinity was so complex at the time, “self-sufficiency and successful householding would be the most identifiable aspects” of early modern England masculinity.131 However, despite that apparent complexity, there were individualized aspects of masculinity that are worth critical analysis. Diane Purkiss argues that despite the multifaceted ideal of masculinity, it is important to address singular ideals that were advocated for: “Any pocket of masculinity—a regiment, a republican group, a Cavalier drinking-party—will try to pretend that its ideology of masculinity is the only possible one, that to fall below it is to yield to the shame of femininity. It is part of all masculinities to deny this plurality of ideals, to wish to appear single, whole, unitary, and well armoured.” 132 Purkiss notes the period’s focus on masculinity being attributed to the republic and notions of patriarchal authority.133 She further looks at ways that 128 Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, Cambridge UP, 1996: p. 2. 129 Laura Gowing, Gender Relations in Early Modern England, Pearson, 2012: p. 5. 130 Andrew P. Williams, “Introduction,” in The Image of Manhood in Early Modern Literature, ed. Andrew P. Williams, Grenwood Press, London, 1999: p. xi. 131 Gowing, p. 5. 132 Diane Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War, Cambridge UP, 2005: p. 1. 133 For more info on representations of anxious masculinity alongside patriarchy, see Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus. 68 masculinity was seen as something that could be held in excess: “It was possible for unruliness to be portrayed as a problematic hypermasculinity, or as defective masculinity because it demonstrated a lack of self-control. It was also possible for too much disciplinem, too much control, to be portrayed as an effeminisation because it resembled the stricter rules of conduct for girls. Milton was called the Lady of Christ’s.”134 It is this line, this “possib[ility] for unruliness” that interests our reading of Tamburlaine. Is the titular protagonist characterized as hypermasculine or the ideal of masculinity? Where is the line between those in this play? In order to answer these questions, we should consider masculinity’s intricate relationship with the concepts of virtue and vice. As Bruce Smith notes in Shakespeare and Masculinity, there is a linguistic connection between virtus and vir, that the “link between the two consists in the root sense of virtue as inherent power or efficacy.”135 However, this idea was often complicated at the time through a romanticism around vice. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell argue that “activities that resisted or revised patriarchal ideals—like binge drinking at taverns, dicing at gaming houses, flaunting apparel in the middle aisle of St. Paul’s, and trafficking in false wares at the city limits—also became incorporated into the cityscape.” 136 In the case of drinking, for example, Gina Bloom argues that there was a “recreational discourse of binge drinking, a discourse that competed with moral condemnations of the vice to provide an alternate view of the relationship between excess and masculinity.”137 This idea of excess connecting with masculinity relates a lot to Tamburlaine’s own excessive violence, the ways that he tortures people for sheer sport or personal enjoyment, not to mention the frequency of that violence which makes it further 134 Purkiss, 16. 135 Bruce Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, Oxford UP, 2000: p. 42. 136 Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, “Introduction,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550-1650, ed. Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell, Palgrave, 2010: pp, 7-8. 137 Gina Bloom, “Manly Drunkenness: Binge Drinking as Disciplined Play,” in Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice: pp. 22. 69 excessive. One could easily read Bloom into Tamburlaine as revealing a deepened sense of masculinity through his engagement with excess. The focus on numbers gestures to a focus on size, prioritizing strength as a gesture of masculinity in Tamburlaine’s characterization. The kind of man Lloyd alludes to in The Consent of Time corresponds to the characteristics of manliness that appear in The Office of Christian Parents (1616), focusing on how a young man is “most sensible, full of strength, courage and activeness.” 138 As Alexandra Shepard says in Manhood in Early Modern England (2003), there is a hierarchy of courage-based masculinity that intersects with perceived gender: “Topping the hierarchy were the lusty, valiant men, literally and metaphorically fired up to courageous action. At the bottom of the scale were the men undignified by heat, accorded the insult of being little better than women.”139 So, for the women in Lloyd’s quote to be equally brave indicates a gendered manliness for the women. A. W. Barnes notes that this juxtaposition, of anxious masculinity against the “body of Woman,” is characteristic of Breitenberg’s theories, and also suggests a reading of masculinity against the “figure of the sodomite.”140 Looking at Lloyd through Barnes reveals a kind of cultural gender, the idea that Scythia, because we do not know “whether men or women of Scithia be more famous,” is a “manlier” culture than others, possibly even manlier than England itself. At the end of Lloyd’s quote, he claims dubiousness over whether men or women there “be more famous,” suggesting that even the women of Scythia hold these masculine virtues to heart. In another of Lloyd’s texts, The Pilgrimage of Princes (1573), he says of Scythia, “Though Scithia was bare, yet was shee [sic] stoute: though rude and barbarous, yet valiant and manful [my 138 The Office of Christian Parents: Shewing how Children are to be Governed throughout All Ages and Times of their Life, Cambridge, 1616: pp. 135-36. 139 Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, Oxford UP, 2003: pp. 59-60. 140 A. W. Barnes, Post-Closet Masculinities in Early Modern England, Bucknell UP, 2009: p. 22. 70 emphasis].”141 For Lloyd, Scythia was a place that was “backward” in some ways and yet better in others, especially in terms of its masculinity, being “manful.” He paints it as a place that links masculinity to being “valiant” and existing alongside being “rude and barbarous.” When we look closely at Tamburlaine’s origins and relationship with gender, we see not just a place—Scithia—but also a race. While Tamburlaine is occasionally referred to as a “shepherd,” his beginnings are more often in the play associated with the label of Scythian. As Leah Marcus (2005) notes in “Shakespearean Editing and Why It Matters,” his race is complex: Tamburlaine is a Muslim warrior-hero described in Marlowe’s text as “pale of complexion” and amber haired, with “arms and fingers long and snowy”….The editorial tradition [of emending “snowy” to “sinewy”] has suppressed a potentially unsettling similarity in skin and hair color between the barbarous “alien” Muslim and the British who formed the core of Marlowe’s early audiences.142 So, we see in Tamburlaine’s character this juxtaposition: he would “look” like the typical white hero of an English play, but he would have a nationality and religion that demarcate him as a racial other. This makes reading the character a lot harder to read in simple English/non-English terms. Emily Bartels makes note of this seeming contradiction in Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (1993): “What resulted [from the ‘like us but not like us’ mentality toward the East] were subjects who were to be emulated and [original emphasis] feared, not because their apparent civility would at any moment devolve into barbarism, but because that civility was also coupled to barbarism.”143 This idea calls largely to Ian J. Smith’s Barbarian Errors and the racialization that happens at the language and cultural levels. Bartels notes that, 141 Lloyd, The Pilgrimage of Princes, Penned Out of Sundry Greeke and Latine Aucthours, London, 1573: p. 9b. 142 Leah S. Marcus, “Shakespearean Editing and Why It Matters,” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005): p. 3. 143 Emily Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993: p. 57. 71 even in Tamburlaine, at least part of the difficulty in reading race in this text is in that disruption— but not dissolution—of the civil/savage dichotomy. Tamburlaine is both/and rather than self/other. Racial alterity, as Benjamin Tuck says in Race, Form, and Tamburlaine (2018), figures in the play as this ambiguous force that both encourages and resists transposition of the English self onto the figure of Tamburlaine: “[Tamburlaine] posits no clear, binary racialization to latch on to, nor does the evocation of race allow contemporary critics to sufficiently examine the anxieties of an early modern England in a complex geo-political climate.”144 With race being such a fluid concept in the early modern period, it is not hard to imagine how Tamburlaine was such a versatile figure and really could code as both similar to and different from English viewers. Race is further complicated in Tamburlaine through the multicultural formations of military. As Nick de Somogyi notes in “Marlowe’s Maps of War” (1996), at the start of Part Two, a force of “Hungarians, / Sclavonians, Almain Rutters, Muffes, and Danes” join together with Orcanes’ host of “revolted Grecians, Albanese, / Sicilians, Jews, Arabians, Turks, and Moors, / Natolians, Sorians, black Egyptians, / Illyrians, Thracians, and Bithynians.”145 The initial force, of “Hungarians,” etc., is made up of Europeans and appears at two separate points in the play. “Sclavonians” refers to Slavonia, an area to the east of the Adriatic Sea, and “Almains” is a word for “Germans.” “Muffes” means the Swiss, and Danes are from farther north. These are all presumably white forces. Meanwhile, Orcanes’ host is full of a much more ethnically diverse group. The “revolted Grecians” refers to Greeks who joined the Turks. “Albanese” refers to Albanians. “Sorians” are Syrians. And the latter three groups compose the north-south border between Asian and Europe. This loosely mirrors England’s contemporary moment in war, with “English troops fighting for the Protestant cause….rubbing shoulders with Dutch, Swiss, Scottish, 144 Benjamin Tuck, Race, Form, and Tamburlaine, Honors thesis, Skidmore College, 2018: p. 8. 145 Marlowe, Part Two, Lukacs, I.i.21-22, 61-64. 72 or French soldiers.” 146 While there is much less ethnic diversity in what is happening with England’s wars, there is the idea that England knew what it was like to find a common cause in unlikely allies even as they marched against the country of those same people. And even the language of war in England, with words like ambush, alarm, squadron, infantry, cavalry, and artillery, was what de Somogyi called an “Esperanto of War,” words that were glossed for English readers even in the late sixteenth century because they were so new and so foreign.147 People in these factions—literary or real—were still united by causes invested in constructing an English self situated against a non-English other. However, as is seen through the figure of Tamburlaine, the self-other dichotomy is disrupted often. Especially because Tamburlaine himself looks the part of an Englishman—white— Marlowe’s prioritizing of violent, essential masculinity, seen especially in the education of Tamburlaine’s children in Part Two, suggests that viewers could—and perhaps, should, Marlowe argues—see themselves in the figure of Tamburlaine and should encourage England to adopt similar practices of violence, dominance, and masculinity. The model of Tamburlaine’s violence envisions a more militaristic, colonial England, and that model encourages viewers to wonder, what if England could be more masculine? Much of this could be read as Marlowe’s resistance of rising discourses of gender. Goran Stanivukovic claims in Knights in Arms (2016) that there is a “redefinition” of masculinity happening in early modern England, “from chivalric and combative to reflective and hospitable.” He further argues that this redefinition “reduces the social gap between a Christian merchant and a Muslim sultan, a relationship that is offered to the reader as a 146 Nick de Somogyi, “Marlowe’s Maps of War,” Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, edited by Peter Roberts and Darryll Grantley, Scolar Press, 1996: p. 104. 147 De Somogyi., 104-15. 73 proto-bourgeois, not chivalric, version of masculinity.” 148 As I show in this chapter, that redefinition is critiqued by Marlowe, advocating for a return to the masculine past. Animals factor into this portrayal of barbarity in war. In Julius Solinus’ The Excellent and Pleasant Work (1587), Scythia’s predilections toward war manifest even in the size and behavior of its animals: “The dogges that are bredde in this Countrey, excell all other beastes, for they pull downe Bulles, kill Lyons, and whatsoeuer they are put at.” They supposedly grew to a “very large syse” and could roar louder than any lion.149 The characteristics of these animals reflect those attributed to these “manful” people. Elizabeth A. Foyster speaks to the early modern gendering of animals in England, linking specifically men to animals: “One contemporary proverb,” she says, “ran that ‘a man without reason is a beast in season.’”150 Perhaps, it is in the further belief that women, too, were inferior when it came to reason that Scythian women were considered as “bestial” and just as “famous” as the men. Even when masculinity was not about bravery or violence necessarily, it was often about a kind of patriarchy that relied on subjugation of those considered inferior. As early modern gender scholars Jacqueline Van Gent and Susan Broomhall say, “Patriarchal manhood received its theoretical legitimation as the normative form of masculinity from a number of sources,” including the Bible, Classical sources, and the treatment of the Commonwealth as representative of the family structure.151 Masculinity took many forms at the time, and they all relied on this notion of power over others and exercise of that power. Scythia 148 Goran Stanivukovic, Knights in Arms: Prose Romance, Masculinity, and Eastern Mediterranean Trade in Early Modern England, 1565-1655, U Toronto P, 2016: , p. 135. 149 Julius Solinus, The Excellent and Pleasant Worke of Iulius Solinus Polyhistor Contayning the Noble Actions of Humaine Creatures, the Secretes & Prouidence of Nature, the Description of Countries, the Maners of the People: With Many Meruailous Things and Strange Antiquities, Seruing for the Benefitt and Recreation of all Sorts of Persons. Translated Out of Latin into English, by Arthur Golding, London, 1587: ch. 24. 150 Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage, Taylor and Francis, 2014: p. 55. 151 Jacqueline Van Gent and Susan Broomhall, Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period, Ashgate, 2013: p. 113. 74 and Scythians held this metaphorical image for early modern English writers of being the epitome of masculine strength. While the real-life Tamerlane came from Mongul stock, Marlowe attributed Tamburlaine to this idealized, hyper-masculine culture, where even the animals are more manly. Tamburlaine the Cavalryman Much of the tension with nationalism, violence, and masculinity appears through close reading the cavalries of Part One, where horses appear mostly as a means of characterizing military strength and size. It is the one measurement that remains constant throughout the part, and the numbers themselves add to the story, specifying the growth that Tamburlaine undergoes in a very concrete way. Breed or landrace-type does not seem to matter much in the context of this part, but it is clear in the first part that horses become instruments or weapons of war and statistical indicators of capacity for violence. The first appearance of horses in this part is in Act 1, scene 1, when the Persian lord Meander notes that Theridamas had been given “a thousand horse, to apprehend [Tamburlaine].” 152 A thousand horses is a fairly realistic number for the time. The Calvinist Coligny had three thousand horses ridden by arquebusiers (a kind of mounted infantrymen) in 1570. Henri IV (of France) had between fifteen hundred and two thousand horsemen when he marched against southern France in 1586. At the battle of Amiens in 1597, Henri commanded twelve thousand horses.153 With that as a kind of scope, it can easily be seen that Theridamas’ army is relatively small. A thousand horses are certainly enough to quell a small uprising suggested by Tamburlaine’s power, or at least it would have seemed so to Theridamas and Mycetes. 152 Marlowe, Part One, Lukacs, I.i.52. 153 Ronald S. Love, “‘All the King’s Horsemen’: The Equestrian Army of Henri IV, 1585-1598,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 22.3 (1991): 513, 522-23. 75 The thousand horses are mentioned a few times in the first act alone, suggesting an importance to that number. It is at one point used as a militaristic measure of strength: “A thousand horsemen! – We five hundred foot!” says Tamburlaine of his army.154 And this number, its relative smallness, is crucial in Tamburlaine’s rhetoric in persuading Theridamas to join his cause: “I see the folly of thy emperor. / Art thou but captain of a thousand horse, / That by characters graven in thy brows, / And by thy martial face and stout aspect, / Deserv’st to have the leading of an host!”155 Tamburlaine continues to focus on that number throughout his soliloquy: “If thou wilt stay with me, renowned man, / And lead thy thousand horse with my conduct, / Besides thy share of this Egyptian prize, / Those thousand horse shall sweat with martial spoil / Of conquered kingdoms and of cities sacked.”156 The flattery relies on an understanding of army size, particularly in terms of horsemen. He leans on that number’s smallness in such a way that Theridamas feels compelled to agree. When Theridamas does agree, Tamburlaine ironically responds with “A thousand thanks.”157 While Tamburlaine’s army increases over the play, it comes to a head against Bajazet who is said to have “ten thousand Janissaries / Mounted on lusty Mauritanian steeds.”158 This number is massive, especially to the early modern English viewer. This is the first line where we see a kind of clear definition of Bajazet’s might, and that definition appears through a number of horses. However, as Tamburlaine defeats the Ottomans and moves on to Damascus, to finally tackle Bajazet, his cavalry has grown: “[W]hat power hath he?” says the Soldan of Egypt. “Three hundred thousand men in armour clad, / Upon their prancing steeds disdainfully, / With wanton paces 154 Marlowe, Part One, Lukacs, I.ii.130. 155 Ibid. I.ii.208-212. 156 Ibid. I.ii.229-232. 157 Ibid. I.ii.306. 158 Ibid. III.iii.16-17. 76 trampling up the ground,” says his messenger.159 Over the span of just an act, Tamburlaine’s army has come out on top. The image of the “thousand” as a measuring unit matters so much for the play and portrays a linear narrative of expansion. At the start of the play, it is introduced as a means of measuring smaller “hosts,” and is once played off of in “a thousand thanks.” As the number of horses grows throughout the play, indicating an exponential growth in military size and strength, the final “thousand” is spoken by Zenocrate at the end of the play: “A thousand sorrows.”160 Just close reading the multiple “thousands” that appear throughout the play, the word tracks this journey of a rising masculine force that ends in sorrow and pain for those who would oppose it. Tamburlaine the Equestrian However, perhaps more telling and more useful for an analysis of these concerns of nationalism, civility, and masculinity is a reading of the ways that anti-manége discourse—which was dominant in England—is itself critiqued as being both ineffective and feminine in the play. The discourse of cruelty in the second part of the play transposes animal images of foreign social hierarchies (for example, conquerors and their prisoners of war) to advance notions of English “natural sovereignty,” especially through the subtextual critique of Eastern equestrian practices in the play. While the English have dominion over others—be they human or animal—this play distinguishes a cruel dominion (that of Tamburlaine) from a civilized one (such as England). Again, while England is an absent figure even in this part, the readers and writer of the play, all English, have a vested interest in the characterization of foreign cultures, as they often reference contemporary political debates that revolve around animals. 159 Ibid. IV.i.22-27. 160 Ibid. V.ii.388. 77 The first case of equestrianism that appears in Part Two is through an explicit display of horsemanship by Tamburlaine’s youngest son Celebinus. After Tamburlaine critiques his sons— “they are too dainty for the wars”161—his wife Zenocrate praises Celebinus for his horsemanship skills: “Not long ago bestrid a Scythian steed, Trotting the ring, and tilting at a glove, Which when he tainted with his slender rod, He reined him straight, and made him so curvet, As I cried out for fear he should have fall’n.”162 To this, Tamburlaine responds: “Well done, my boy, thou shalt have shield and lance, Armour of proof, horse, helm, and curtle-axe, And I will teach thee how to charge thy foe, And harmless run among the deadly pikes. If thou wilt love the wars and follow me, Thou shalt be made a king and reign with me, Keeping in iron cages emperors.”163 The starting lines of Zenocrate’s speech indicates that Celebinus has been practicing jousting techniques: “trotting the ring, and tilting at a glove.” “Tilting at a glove” was a frequent exercise in aiming—“tilting”—a lance at a specific point—like a glove—and requires great precision. Once he touched—“tainted”—the glove, he reined the horse in hard, and the horse leapt, making 161 Marlowe, Part Two, ed. Lukacs: I.iii.30. 162 Ibid., I.iii.41-45. 163 Ibid., I.iii.47-53. 78 Zenocrate scream with worry. Tamburlaine reads this as Celebinus courting martial masculinity in the form of jousting exercises, and so he encourages Celebinus further, offering gifts to show his pride. Jousting at the time mattered a lot for masculinity. Emma Levitt argues that, due to tallied “cheques” of scores at jousting tournaments, the cheques were useful measures “masculinity because the scores can tell us much about the correlation between the men who displayed expertise in the tiltyard and those who achieved high status manhood in the political sphere.” 164 The quantifiable masculinity evoked here relates not just to the treatment of Celebinus but also to the measurements of army sizes in Part One. And jousting itself was a recently revived practice in England. Lewis Einstein talks about jousting as an example of the Italian Renaissance in England: The revival of the [jousting] tourney was still another courtly practice which England copied largely from Italy. Jousting as a court amusement became fashionable once more in Elizabeth’s time….At Urbino and Ferrara, jousting had long been regarded as an amusement of the court; even Castiglione had advised his courtier how to conduct himself at the tourney; never, for instance, to be last in the lists, since women, especially, paid far greater attention to the first than to the last.165 Here, the masculinity implicit in the joust is related to sexual appeal, and so we see virility attached to the game and perhaps read more into the already phallic image of the lance itself. Einstein looks closely at Sir William Segar’s Honor, Military, and Civil, a treatise on family, war, and sport at the time (1602). Segar spends three chapters of his work talking about jousting. The way he proposes heralds begin a tourney involves a focus on the female gaze over the jousting men: Be it knowen to all men by these presents, that by au∣thority of the most high, most 164 Emma Levitt, “Scoring Masculinity: The English Tournament and the Jousting Cheques of the Early Sixteenth Century,” international Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, conference presentation, 2014. 165 Lewis Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England: Studies, University of Michigan, 1902: p. 76. 79 excellent, and most puissant Prince H. by the grace of God King of England, France, and Ireland, &c. That of those which haue Iousted on the Challengers side, A. B. hath deserued the prize, and to him let the same be giuen as due, by the censure of the Queene, with the assent of her Ladies, Gentlewomen, and all others of her Highnesse Court here present.166 Here we further see that focus on jousting as an extension of heteronormative sexual ideals, quantifying masculinity through performance in sport. While I would not suggest reading too much sexual tension in Tamburlaine’s criticism of Celebinus, the masculinity at stake with Celebinus’ training makes more sense given this context. Furthermore, Tamburlaine promises to “teach [Celebinus] how to charge” and “harmless run among the deadly pikes.” For Tamburlaine, being a king requires one to “love the wars,” and he sees that love in Celebinus because of his willingness to further his equestrian skills, furthering a pun with “reign with me.” And his speech ends with that callback to what has happened with Bajazeth: “Keeping in iron cages emperors.” This passage is a great summary of the horse dialectic in the two parts of the play: it encompasses the violence, the military aspects, and the call of social and cultural identity. We see in this speech Tamburlaine’s use of these militaristic words: “reign” and “wars,” focusing on that specific pro-war sentiment, especially with that horse pun of “reign.” The “iron cage” for “emperors” gestures to Tamburlaine’s ambition to conquest as well as the idea that people who are too weak—read, too effeminate—are to be treated like animals in a cage. This speech really showcases the animal militarism of the plays. Furthermore, we see a repeat of “Scythian,” that word that does not appear that often throughout either part. Plus, the Scythian horse was not a commonly referenced landrace-type of horse with very little information on what would have characterized this type of horse at the time. 166 Sir William Segar, Honor, Military, and Civil, London, 1602: Ch. 49. 80 When we see the word “Scythian” appear in either part of the play, it is merely to denote Tamburlaine’s origin. But, in thinking about his origin story, it might remind us that Tamburlaine was originally a “Shepheard in Scythia,” further evidencing the claim that Tamburlaine’s history is not just one of class but also one of animals, as he is specifically a “Shepheard.” For him to move from a Scythian shepherd to the master of a “Scythian horse” indicates a move across socioeconomic classes through a more advanced management of animals. And perhaps, by extension, he elevates himself to a more masculine role as well and wishes the same for Celebinus here. “Shepheard” itself comes with a number of implications. While the term had a strongly Christian association, with the “Lord is our Shepherd” as a commonly cited verse, it also was a fairly femininely stereotyped occupation in early modern England, at least compared to the horseman. Whether examining Thomas Collins’ 1615 The teares of love….a (passionate) pastorall elegie or Richard Brathwaite’s 1614 The passionate shephearde, there is this clear narrative at work that shepherds belong to this poetic, bucolic space where they cannot engage in truly masculine pursuits and in fact pursue effeminate ones by giving into their passions as the above mentioned works suggest. While early modern English masculinity entailed violence and dominance, it still advocated for control of the passions. As Karen Nelson suggests, “The civility literature generally assumes that even when singing love songs in the presence of women, young men will remain control of their passions and their demeanor….In negative commentary on music—where it is treated with circumspection or qualification—it is the potential of losing control of emotion that inspires caution.” 167 The shepherd is often deemed a profession that effeminizes a person by removing that person from the civic and the military, stripping them of 167 Nelson, 178. 81 any opportunity for honor. This is even further evidenced by the more blatantly homoerotic shepherd tales like Richard Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd (1595), which Raymond-Jean Frontain called the “homoerotic appropriation of the Song of Solomon.”168 Frontain often points to the effeminizing aspects of the pastoral in the period to show how the shepherd role was one that allows for queer theory discourse more easily than many civic roles at the time. Jennifer C. Vaught, too, looks at the Book VI Proem of The Faerie Queene as an example of the feminine nature of the pastoral setting, noting that “courtesy originates within a secluded space associated with a feminine body and mind….Such pastoral romance settings enable [knights who eschew their “militaristic, chivalric duties”] to fashion more androgynous or feminine sensibilities.”169 For Tamburlaine’s elevation from shepherd to horseman, we see he is becoming masculine through his handling of more masculine animals. He is moving from this feminine, pastoral, “more androgynous” space into a more “militaristic, chivalric” one by becoming a horseman. He enters a space of masculine power. Masculinity and horses have a long history together. Much of masculinity’s role in England’s equestrianism focused on notions of superiority. Peter Edwards notes in Horse and Man in Early Modern England (2007) that “[h]orse racing was essentially a masculine sport. It therefore reflected ideas, then current, about the relationship between man and horse and between men and women.”170 Edwards shows that men “dominated all aspects of the business, from breeding and purchasing horses to racing them and betting on the outcome of a contest.”171 He uses Defoe’s characterization of the racing town Newcastle as an example of this equestrian masculinity. Defoe 168 Raymond-Jean Frontain, “‘An Affectionate Shepherde sicke for Love’: Barnfield’s Homoerotic Appropriation of the Song of Solomon,” in The Affectionate Shepherd: Celebrating Richard Barnfield, ed. Kenneth Boris and George Klawitter, Susquehanna UP, 2001: p. 99. 169 Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature, Ashgate, 2008: pp. 138-39. 170 Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England, Bloomsbury, 2007: p. 95. 171 Ibid., 96. 82 says: I fancied myself in the Circus Maximus at Rome seeing the ancient games and the racings of the chariots and horsemen, and in this warmth of my imagination I pleased and diverted myself more and in a more noble manner than I could possibly do in the crowds of gentlemen at the weighing and starting-posts and at their coming in, or at their meetings at the coffee-houses and gaming-tables after the races were over, where there was little or nothing to be seen but what was the subject of just reproach to them and reproof from every wise man that looked upon them….Pray take it with you, as you go, you see no ladies at Newmarket, except a few of the neighbouring gentlemen’s families, who come in their coaches on any particular day to see a race, and so go home again directly.172 Here, the races are characterized as very masculine, compared to the chariots and games of Ancient Rome, while the author makes that note that women have no play in this masculine, horse-filled space. Edwards also discusses women riding horses in general, summarizing Cavendish: “Some women rode astride their horses. William Cavendish rather scathingly wrote that he had seen women run and gallop their horses as well as any men. Cavendish directed his scorn at the men but others criticized ladies who rode in such a masculine fashion and in male attire.”173 The original quote Edwards is speaking of here is from Cavendish’s New Method: I wonder how men are so Presumptious, to think they can Ride as Horse-men, because they can Ride forward from Barnet to London, which every body can do; and I have seen VVomen to Ride Astride as well as they: They do not think of any Art, or Trade, as they do of Horse-manship, where they are all Masters: Which doth not Prove so, when they 172 Daniel Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed., P. Rogers, Harmondsworth, 1971: p. 99. 173 Ibid. 76. 83 Ride. I think I have Proved sufficiently their Errour, and Ignorance; and as fully Proved, That there is no Ʋseful Horse but those that are Made in the Mannage.174 Here, Cavendish claims the riding without the use of manége is something anyone can do, “Women….as well as [men].” This inferior equestrianism is characterized through “Errour and Ignorance,” and the fact that women could do it seems to further qualify that inferior nature. Later, Cavendish adds to the idea that manége is sophisticated: “And I have seen many Wenches Ride Astride, and Gallop, and Run their Horses, that could, I think, hardly Ride a Horse Well in the Mannage.”175 So, through the idea of scorn even directed at men for women’s skill we can see that equestrianism was not something believed to be inherently innate for men but something that “real” men worked at to achieve their dominance—further speaking volumes to Tamburlaine’s appeals to Theridamas claiming he deserved to manage more horses. That is, Tamburlaine appealed to Theridamas’ masculinity. For Celebinus, too, Tamburlaine sees an emergent masculinity in his son’s desire to learn proper equestrianism (read, not that soft stuff taught in England). As Anthony Dent says in Horses in Shakespeare’s England (1987), the English ideal in horsemanship had nothing to do with efficient performance….military service….hunting….[or] racing. It had everything to do with display, with ‘magnificence,’ with what the modern show judge calls ‘presence’ in horse and rider. It was above all theatrical and its presentation either to a select audience of the Prince and his court or less frequently to the eyes of the vulgar.176 I want to place emphasis on that word “theatrical.” In early modern drama, the theatricality of masculinity is often exaggerated. In Laura Levine’s Men in Women’s Clothing (1994), Levine says 174 William Cavendish, A New Method and Extraordinary Invention to Dress Horses, London, 1671: p. 11. 175 Ibid., 47. 176 Anthony Dent, Horses in Shakespeare’s England, J.A. Allen, 1987: p. 89. 84 of Antony and Cleopatra, “[W]hile this is a world that believes things in general fail to exist apart from their own theatricalizations, it seems to be masculinity in particular, masculinity more than anything else, that needs to be enacted and compulsively re-enacted in order to exist.”177 Just as equestrianism was a theatrical performance, so too was early modern masculinity very often. And, as Levine also claims, anti-theatrical sentiments were popular in the period as well. Marlowe suggests through Tamburlaine a shift of ideals, to one in which “display” does not matter as much for masculinity as military strength. When Tamburlaine expresses pride in Celebinus, it is with the quid pro quo that his son will move on from pretenses of war—this jousting game—to actual war to prove his masculinity. Karen L. Nelson speaks to this masculinity found in excess in early modern England, arguing that commonly perceived negative traits—even charged ideas like “violence”—“might be recast as good fellowship or valor” in cultural texts like Tamburlaine.178 So this display of violence and strength in war codes for a kind of nationalist masculinity in the discourse of contemporary equestrianism. Looking at the ways Celebinus managed his horse, one can see an immediate correspondence with English equestrian Gervase Markham’s instructions on taming and training a young horse: ….hol∣ding hys head vpright, and his body straight, marke out a large Ring, being at the least forty yardes in compasse, a∣bout the which walk him vpon your right hand three times, then drawing the right hand rayne a little more firme, and laying the calfe of your left legge closer to his side, pace out within your Ring two halfe cirkles, the first on your right hand, 177 Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and effeminization, 1579-1642, Cambridge, 1994: p. 71. 178 Karen L. Nelson, Masculinities, Childhood, Violence: Attending to Early Modern Women—and Men, Rowman and Littlefield, 2011: p. 85. 85 the latter on your left, which will be a plaine Roman Esse.179 Here we see the “ring” mentioned in Zenocrate’s speech, and we also see the attention to “drawing the right hand rayne” straight, much as Celebinus does. While Celebinus’ horse rebels, a contemporary viewer of the play would assume that was no fault of Celebinus and moreso the fault of the horse. This claim is further evidenced by Celebinus’ ability to “trot” the horse. Even in early modern equestrianism (like today’s), horses have different gaits, to be managed and controlled by the rider. Markham suggests not trotting in the above exercise: “In this manner would I haue you for foure or fiue daies to practise your Horse, not suffering him to trot or gallop, but onely to pace, to stop, and goe backe.” 180 But in this quote alone, we can see Markham making distinctions between these different gaits: “trot,” “gallop,” and “pace.” Knowing the differences between the gaits, how to manage them, and when to implement them is a mark of a superior equestrian at the time. While Celebinus is going through a standard exercise, in such a way that would not alert contemporary viewers to something being done wrong, there is of course the implication that an adult, maybe even Tamburlaine, could have tamed the horse to not “curvet” as well. Unafraid to express an equestrian masculinity that England eschews, Tamburlaine has equestrian knowledge deemed superior in Marlowe’s work (as will be shown more in the next section), suggesting perhaps that the English are not “real men” because they only “play” at war. We see in Celebinus’ exercise of the horse a practice decidedly English. Far from the French showy and elegant hunts which focused on the horse’s ability to perform or the Italian focus on equestrian tack that sought to punish the horse (more on this later in the chapter), England 179 Gervase Markham, A discource of horsmanshippe Wherein the breeding and ryding of horses for seruice, in a breefe manner is more methodically sette downe then hath been heeretofore. With a more easie and direct course for the ignorant, to attaine to the same arte or knowledge. Also the manner to chuse, trayne, ryde and dyet, both hunting-horses, and running-horses: with all the secretes thereto belonging discouered. An arte neuer heeretofore written by any author, London: 1593, p. 24. 180 Ibid. 86 focused on simpler exercises like the one above. Celebinus stands in here as a representative of England: a mere child before Tamburlaine who needs that “true” masculine guidance to excel. As I argue later in this chapter, Celebinus’ equestrianism is markedly different from Tamburlaine’s later non-English violent equestrianism toward the imprisoned kings. But what we see in Celebinus is a model of “gentleness,” one who is trying to be a good son and a good rider—good by English standards, and therefore insufficient by Marlowe’s. Presented as a young rider of English style, Celebinus might have been seen as fairly competent to contemporary viewers. He managed the ring. He got his horse to a steady trot. He knew how to use the reins, and, at least not explicitly, he managed to stay on his horse. On the onset, it seems like this English equestrianism becomes one of the most decidedly English parts of the play. What this scene does, though, is it establishes the context for a coded discourse throughout Part Two: England was having printed debates about what qualified as “true” or “good” horsemanship, and, by extension, what qualified as English horsemanship. These debates allow for characters to be coded as either English with their style or Other and therefore “cruel” or “masculine” as discussed previously. The idea that cruelty factors into contemporary equestrian discourse, especially in Tamburlaine, is further evidenced in the second half of Part Two, with the treatment of the later captured kings of Trebizond, Soria, Natolia, and Jerusalem. When talking with the other kings about the upcoming battle, Tamburlaine says, directly to Callapine but intending it for all of them: I’ll hang a clog about your neck for running away again. You shall not trouble me thus to come and fetch you. But as for you, viceroy[s], you shall have bits. 87 And, harnessed like my horses, draw my coach: And when ye stay, be lashed with whips of wire. I’ll have you learn to feed on provender181 And in a stable lie upon the planks…. Diet yourselves; you know I shall Have occasion shortly to journey you.182 The threat here, at least for me when I first read it, might seem metaphorical, a vague threat of animalizing a prisoner of war. While a morbid imagining on Tamburlaine’s part, it seems to be just that: imagining. The tenses focus on a potential future: “I’ll” and “shall” lace the passage, plus there is the phrase “like my horses,” that implies similarity but not exactitude. Yet, in the next act, Tamburlaine comes on stage in a chariot drawn “by the Kings of Trebizond and Soria with bits in their mouths: in his right hand he has a whip with which he scourgeth them, while his left hand holds the reins.”183 The stark visual is followed by a soliloquy covering what he has done and the extent of his equine cruelty. Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia! What! can ye draw but twenty miles a day, And have so proud a chariot at your heels, And such a coachman as great Tamburlaine, 181 Provender, while not particularly interesting for this project, was most commonly given to a male horse, while grass was for mares. Provender could be any number of the following: hay, straw, oats (white, black, yellow, and Skeg), barley, wheat, fitches, pease, beans, bread (made up of chisel [coarse flour] or bran). However, these feeds would have been understood to not be in abundance in the Ottoman Empire. So even as Markham notes, foreign horses (especially “Turkes, Ienets, [and] Arabians”), these horses likely had other diets and would need to be slowly weaned off of them in order to stay healthy. Gervase Markham, Cauelarice, or The English horseman contayning all the arte of horse-manship, as much as is necessary for any man to vnderstand, whether he be horse-breeder, horse- ryder, horse-hunter, horse-runner, horse-ambler, horse-farrier, horse-keeper, coachman, smith, or sadler, London, 1607: book 5, pp. 8-12. 182 Marlowe, Part Two, ed. Lukacs: III.v.120-27;38-39. 183 Ibid., IV.iii. 88 But from Asphaltis, where I conquered you, To Byron here, where thus I honour you! To make you fierce, and fit my appetite, You shall be fed with flesh as raw as blood, And drink in pails the strongest muscadel; If you can live with it, then live, and draw My chariot swifter than the racking clouds; If not, then die like beasts, and fit for nought But perches for the black and fatal ravens.184 Clearly, the threat from Act III was not a mere imagining but an actual punishment that was enacted. And it is in the specifics that the real horror comes out. To start, the appellation Tamburlaine gives the imprisoned kings is “pampered jades.” Jades, as I discuss more in my chapter on Lust’s Dominion, are an unwanted behavioral type of horse, one that is believed to be tied intrinsically to the horse’s nature. The jade goes “wilful-slow” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 51, for example. Calling the imprisoned kings “jades” speaks to their resistance to being handled, their slowness, and overall inability to perform a horse’s expected tasks. These kings do not even meet the expected masculinity of a good horse. So, the kings effectively are transformed into ineffective and therefore emasculated horses.185 To further the idea of the “masculine horse” versus the more feminine jade, one only needs to close read Sonnet 51 deeper for an example. As the “poor beast” is unable to advance their rider’s desire—”swift extremity can seem but slow”—he abandons the jade for the metaphorical horse of desire which is able to surpass the jade easily—“Then should I spur, though mounted on 184 Ibid., IV.iii.1-23. 185 William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 51,” Oxquarry Books Ltd., 2014. 89 the wind, / In winged speed no motion shall I know, / Then can no horse with my desire keep pace. / Therefore desire, (of perfect’st love being made) / Shall neigh, no dull flesh, in his fiery race.” Desire, as a horse, responds to the spur, can meet the required speed, and is physically superior, with “no dull flesh.” This horse meets the masculine ideal as opposed to the jade. What happens in this sonnet is a play on gender through the comparison of these two horses. In both cases, a reader could easily engage in a psychosexual analysis of the horse as an extension of the phallus. The talk of “flesh,” “desire,” “spur,” “extremity,” and “need” creates a narrative of sex that almost reads like an early modern advertisement for Viagra. Look at the “poor beast” and his “slow offence.” Look at the “dull bearer.” Now with Viagra, you can abandon your “jade” and be “mounted on the wind” and ride “in winged speed.” Masculinity happens in this poem through a kind of virility, an elevation to this “winged speed” and “mounted on the wind.” The masculine horse is constructed through a kind of equestrian performance here read as sexual performance. The feminization of Tamburlaine’s kings / “horses” is a political act. As Thomas A. King puts it: Through the late seventeenth century in England, effeminacy [original emphasis] described not a falsely gendered or sexual subjectivity but a failure of, or lack of access to, the public representativeness of those men and exceptional women who were statesmen, citizens, and householders. Accordingly effeminacy named the occupation of a position of dependency within the extended household or network of alliance, on the one hand, and a misoccupation of social spaces—including the space of the body.186 What happens here is this feminization of the kings is more than just a simple “You are not man enough to be king,” but rather a “lack of access to” the spaces and occupations of power that a 186 Thomas A. King, The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750, Vol. 1: The English Phallus, U of Wisconsin P, 2004: p. 67. 90 man should hold, rendering them in this “position of dependency.” We see this through Tamburlaine’s assigning people to care for the horses, attention to the feed, focus on the tack and gear. Tamburlaine renders them dependent on him for survival in this “extended….network of alliance” while also having a “misoccupation of….the space of the body,” often through the use of that gear and tack. The tack of equestrianism has a bearing in contemporary equestrian discourse, portraying these scenes as particularly cruel. The geographic indicators add to that cruelty, and we see Tamburlaine characterized less of just an emperor and more as a culturally coded equestrian, one that is coded as very masculine, as I argue below. To start, these scenes are full of material objects. Tamburlaine is not invested in lofty themes—though he does make comparisons to divine horsemen like Hercules and Apollo—but rather the very real objects involved in managing and owning horses: “clogs,” “bits,” “harnessed,” “whips,” “provender,” “stable,” and “pails.” Each of these terms represents an object found in equestrian life. So rather than just sticking to mythological allusion, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine forces these men into the actual working roles of horses in early modern times. Each bit of tack used has certain cultural implications for early modern English viewers, and those connotations matter for the larger discourse of equestrianism at the time. Bits, for example, are frequently used to help manage a horse while they are being ridden. In Thomas Blundeville’s The Arte of Ryding and Breakinge Greate Horses, English riders are criticized for using a specific bit too aggressively: “our Englyshe horsemen….vse to ryde their yonge horses euen at the firste with so roughe a brake or bit as may be gotten, which is one of the chiefest causes why we haue so manye head-strong Jades.”187 Again, we have jades appearing. 187 Thomas Blundeville, The Arte of Ryding and Breakinge Greate Horses, London: 1560, 2Cr-v. 91 This time, rather than focusing on speed, the qualifier is “head-strong,” again leaning on the unwanted behavioral type of the jade. The author here argues the prevalence of jades in England can only be attributed to unlearned “Englyshe horsemen.” The bit in question is actually the most common one, the basic iron bit, frequently used to “curb” horses. In John Derrick’s 1581 The Image of Ireland, one illustration shows the curb or iron bit used to show differences between England and Ireland, as Kevin de Ornellas notes in The Horse in Early Modern English Culture: Bridled, Curbed, Tamed (2014): [T]he iron-bitted warhorses of Henry Sidney’s English cavalry are seen easily outrunning and outperforming Ireland’s snaffle-bitted resistance. As well as military efficiency, there is an obvious undertone of colonial superiority latent in Derricke’s woodcut. Being iron- bitted and more controlled, the Sidney horses represent the mythical Elizabethan English order as opposed to the wild indiscipline of the more loosely reined Irish animals. To “curbe,” then, takes effect as a particularly virulent verb meaning to violently and completely physically dominate and restrain.188 Here, we see further elements of masculinity associated with riding practices. While the illustration reveals a superiority when it comes to finesse and control, the Irish has an implicit superiority when it comes to pure strength and speed. While De Ornellas reads the illustration as revealing a presence of masculinity in the English riders, contemporary viewers could just as easily have seen the Irish readers as someone to be admired for not needing the additional restraints. The illustration invites viewers to question which is more “masculine”: who is the real man among the equestrians? The more newly-developed snaffle bit is what Blundeville advocates for in his text, but 188 Kevin De Ornellas, The Horse in Early Modern English Culture: Bridled, Curbed, and Tamed, Farleigh Dickinson Press, Lanham Maryland: 2014, p. 60. John Derricke, The Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne, ed. David B. Quinn, Belfast: Blackstaff, 1985: plate IX. 92 that was still not popular yet. Very likely, the bits used on the various kings in Tamburlaine were these iron bits, making the kings “more controlled,” as De Ornellas says. Comparing Blundeville’s characterization of the iron bit to Derricke’s reveals an interesting discourse in early modern England: was the iron bit excessively cruel or just a show of control over one’s animal? This debate shows that Tamburlaine’s likely use of it demonstrates his desire for total control even at the risk— probably a bonus for him—of the kings’ discomfort. These bits were notorious—and later, increasingly critiqued, especially by Markham—for literally cutting the horse’s mouth to the bit.189 “[H]arnessed like my horses” is another interesting phrase in the play. What did it mean to be harnessed like horses in this time period? In another text by Markham, Cavalarice from 1607, Markham details the process of what it takes to harness a horse, specifically a coach horse (which is how the kings in Tamburlaine are treated, pulling Tamburlaine’s chariot): Now for the harneysing or attyring of Coach-horses, you must haue a greate care that the long pillowe before his brest, be of gentle leather, full, round and verie soft stopt, and that the little square pillowes ouer the point of his withers and tops of his shoulders, bee likewise verie soft, for they beare the weight of his harnesse, and some part of his draught, you shall see that the hinder part of your harnesse which compasseth the neather part of his buttocks, and rests aboue the horses hinder houghes bee easie and large, not freiting or gauling off the hayre from those partes, as for the moste part you shall see amongst vnskilfull Coachmen, the draught breadthes or Coach treates, which extend from the breast of the horse to the bridge tree of the Coach, must bee of exceeding strong double leather, well wrought and sewed, which (till you bring your horse to the Coach) you must throw ouer your horses backe cros-wise, your headstall and reynes of your bridle, must likewise bee 189 Barbara Nelson, “Shakespeare’s Use of Horsemanship Language,” Master’s dissertation, Sul Ross State University, 1990: pp. 124-25. 93 eyther of strong leather, or els of round wouen lines, made of silke or threed, according to the abilitie of the owner, or the delight of the Coach-man: yet to speake the truth, those lines of silke or threed are the better, because they are more nimble, and come and goe more easily.190 What we see here is a lot of attention to care through the focus on pillows and softness. Despite those foci, the harness would clearly be incredibly heavy with so much leather, even “double leather.” While it is impossible to know how much of this Tamburlaine puts into effect, especially with his intent to make the kings suffer or to belittle them in order to show that they could not handle the life of one of Tamburlaine’s men—effectively emasculating them—it is likely, through the phrase, “harnessed like my horses,” that the kings wore very bulky harnesses that would have been immensely heavy. Tamburlaine generally works against Markham here, with the implication that Marlowe finds these soft pillows and care too “soft” or gentle, advocating again for the more Italian method of training horses which does not require so much of a focus on comfort. To be a conqueror, Tamburlaine perhaps suggests, one must be willing to push the horse to its utmost, just like the men riding them. Regarding the “whip of wire,” we get to see some of the real aspects of perceived cruelty in Tamburlaine’s equestrianism. Markham, in Cavalarice, says that one shall “by no means use Whippe.” 191 Blundeville does not focus on the whip as a correctional measure in The Arte of Ryding, but he does mention it in The Fower Chiefyst Offices Belonging to Horsemanshippe, recommending it as a remedy for tiredness in horses, and even then it is often referred to as a cord rather than a wire.192 Another English equestrian from the time, William Cavendish, also critiqued 190 Markham, Cauelarice: p. 52-53. 191 Ibid., 29. 192 Blundeville, The fower chiefyst offices belongyng to horsemanshippe, London, 1561: p. 15. 94 the whip as an effective means of managing a horse: “[the whip or switch is] rarely used as a means of punishment, though it has manifold uses as an aid. It is more often an ornament than a necessity....If you choose to depend upon it in the training of the horse, your understanding may be said to be as ephemeral as the swish of the switch itself.”193 Clearly, this is a point that English equestrians do feel strongly about. Rather than merely leaving it up to riders’ discretion, English riders believed the whip was generally unnecessary, and when it was used, it was to be used “as an aid” or “an ornament.” But Tamburlaine promises to “lash” them with “whips of wire” when the kings “stay.” Tamburlaine is invested in using the whip as a punishment, especially noting the fact that the whip was made of “wire.” Wire in England at the time was actually managed by a singular monopoly: the Company of Mineral and Battery Works. While wire size varied from 0.024 to 0.324 inches in diameter, the 0.324 inch diameter was the most common. “In 1597 the cost of cast iron was about £3, 6s. 8d. per ton and osmund iron three times as much.”194 So small amounts of wire would have been relatively cheap. Richard West in The Court of Conscience (1607) claims a good punishment for merciless “tyrants and villaines” involved “Three yards of wire and whip-cord in a whip”.195 John Burges likewise describes what was called a “scorpion” in a sermon: “whips which have wires in the lashes ends.” 196 The wire whip was certainly an instrument of cruel punishment and, at least within the database of Early English Books Online, seems more connoted with human punishment rather than something used on horses. With this 193 William Cavendish, Méthode et invention nouvelle de dresser les chevaux, London, 1658. Translated in Hans Handler, The Spanish Riding School- Four Centuries of Classic Horsemanship. Translated by Russell Stockman. London, MacGraw-Hill Book, 1972: p. 70. 194 M. B. Donald, Elizabethan Monopolies: The History of the Company of Mineral and Battery Works from 1565 to 1604, Oliver and Boyd, Ltd.: Edinburgh and London, 1961, pp. 100-101. Donald’s info was pulled from both Exchequer Deposition by Commission (134/39 El. Hil. 23 C32.(10) and Lansdowne MSS 56/36 and Hist. MSS. Comm. 77 No. 388. 195 Richard West, The Court of Conscience or Dick Whippers Sessions, London: 1607, “Merciles Tyrants and Villaines.” 196 John Burges, A Sermon Preached before the late King James His Majesty at Greenwich the 19 of July 1604 together with Two Letters in Way of Apology for his Sermon, London, 1642: p. 5. 95 context, one can see how the wire whip would further the notion that Tamburlaine was an aggressive and violent equestrian here, with that violence being attributed directly to his success as a military leader. Tamburlaine represents a foreign type of equestrianism that goes against English riding standards, and Marlowe advances Tamburlaine as a figurehead for a return to these non-English standards of riding. Especially with the way that English viewers idolized the figure of Tamburlaine and the fantasy of the English finding common ground in Tamburlaine, it is clear how Tamburlaine’s non-English equestrianism serves as a response to and critique of English riders like Blundeville and Clifford. We see in all these kinds and types of tack that further the ways that Tamburlaine’s equestrianism is cruel. The iron bit would have been less comfortable. The harness would have been immensely heavy. The whip was unnecessarily used and was of an unnecessary material. While we cannot know the specific make-up of the provender or the precise make-up of the tack, it is clear that Tamburlaine’s equestrianism relies on these material components in a way that brings out his cruelty. Read against the nationalist fantasy of Tamburlaine’s character, this cruelty toward horses is something to be envied of France, Italy, and Spain. The cruelty is what manages to allow Tamburlaine to cover so much distance with humans for horses. We see in the play Tamburlaine’s attention to aggression and cruelty a potent efficacy that English riders would crave. The material aspect of this exchange in the play speaks to these rising discourses of more comfortable bits and the needs of a whip. They show that Tamburlaine fits on a specific side of the discourse, one that prioritizes punishment and discomfort, a side that seeks to re-define England’s role in equestrianism in terms of being more aggressive and violent, as opposed to less so. Perhaps more extreme than the tack though is the distance implied in the travels of 96 Tamburlaine and his “horses.” Lukacs claims the distance traveled is “about 450 miles,” basing the distance on the Ortelius maps of Palestine and the Turkish Empire, going between the Dead Sea—explicitly called Asphaltis in the Ortelius map of Palestine—and Byron—marked Byron in the Ortelius map of the Turkish Empire, just north of Baghdad. A quick Google Maps search reveals the distance is a little over 700 miles, but early modern cartography was still an imprecise science.197 So, Tamburlaine and his “horses” travel across deserts and mountains to get to Byron. Markham notes that ten miles a day is common for a traveling pace, but “twenty, or thirtie, or fortie mile together” is “rid[ing] violently” especially back to back. And yet, Tamburlaine says, “What! can ye draw but twenty miles a day?”198 It is clear that Tamburlaine is pushing his horses well past the recommended amount for English equestrians, furthering the notion that aggressive riding practices show clear results. Rather than relying on the sensitivities encouraged by English equestrians, Marlowe encourages the return to Italian, Spanish, and French standards. The distance and speed of Tamburlaine’s own horses suggest that either his horses would be stronger and better adapted to such distances than England’s or that his own training of them makes them able to cover those distances. In Tamburlaine’s treatment of the imprisoned kings, there is a judgment of the kings themselves. As they are unable to continue on, he has them hanged to death. Tamburlaine associates their inability to keep up with a man’s (or a horse’s) work a sign of their emasculation and their inferiority to his own men who manage the work just fine. This further suggests that Tamburlaine’s real horses and real men are more masculine than these imprisoned kings, further validating Tamburlaine’s display of masculinity. The significance of analyzing these elements of Tamburlaine’s equestrianism comes in the 197 Marlowe, Part Two, Lukacs: pp. 71-72. Abraham Ortelius, Palistinae Sive Totivs Terrae Promissionis Nova Descriptio Avctore Tilemanno Stella Sigenensi, in Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, London, 1606: plate ii. Ortelius, Tvrcici imperii descriptio, in Theatrum, Antwerp, 1570: map 50. 198 Marlowe, Part Two, Lukacs: IV.iii.2. 97 fact that England was struggling to find civil identity in the way it managed its horses. Italy, Spain, France, and Germany were far ahead in equestrianism compared to England. And a major part of England’s response to this being behind was to instead chastise the other countries as not being good horsemen at all. A large part of that rhetoric manifested in the way that they perceived other “master” horsemen, like Federico Grisone. In The Rejection of the Manege Tradition in Early Modern England, Elizabeth Pope Simmons speaks to the English perception of cruelty in other European equestrian practices: The manege style of riding originated during the Renaissance as a resurgence of the ancient principles on classical horsemanship. Supposedly using ‘enlightened’ methods of the revered ancient masters, early Italian riding masters exercised horses in the movements of the manege, but horses often experienced the infliction of oppressive training devices. Total subjugation of the horse was necessary, in the masters’ minds, to achieve results [something Tamburlaine seems to hint at with the treatment of the imprisoned kings]. Many early riding masters like Federico Grisone and Vincentia Respino resorted to terrible methods of ‘persuasion’ such as tying a hedgehog or ‘shrewd’ cat to the horse’s tail or in between the horse’s thighs in order to make the animal perform various maneuvers of the manege.199 While English equestrian riders like Markham and Blundeville often spoke of dominance and control, they frequently critiqued the other cultural ways of managing a horse as being inferior, if only because of their cruelty. Especially critiquing Grisone, the horse writers John Astley, Gervase Markham, Thomas Blundeville, and Christopher Clifford all worked to focus on a relationship of love between horse and rider. They derided riders who adopted the methods of the main continent 199 Elizabeth Pope Simmons, The Rejection of the Manege Tradition in Early Modern England: “Equestrian Elegance at Odds with English Sporting Tradition,” Master’s thesis, University of North Florida, 2001: p. 97 98 as being “violent,” and they helped to construct a loose assemblage of English nationalist equestrianism tenets that prioritized “humanity” and ethics over advanced maneuvers and techniques.200 When Tamburlaine performs this kind of foreign equestrianism—displayed through his cruelty, overemphasis on tack, and extreme distances—he is a decidedly anti-English figure, one that demands to be judged—and favored—by English audiences not for the sheer blood or creativeness of his punishments but through the efficacy of his aggressive and violent horsemanship. Blundeville himself, who had translated Grisone for English audiences in 1560, brought ideas of equine torture guised as “control” to England: “ideas involving punching horses in the face to stop them from running away and burning them with blazing straw….and t[ying] strings around their horses’ scrotums as a way to get results.”201 Yet, twenty years later, when Blundeville wrote his own horseman texts, he was one of the first to say, “the chiefest point of a horsekeeper is to love his horse and to seek to be loved again of him.”202 As Simmons notes in one brief footnote, “It begs the question: where was the line drawn between ‘training’ and ‘ignorance’?”203 For viewers of Tamburlaine in the 1580s, it was becoming commonplace to call practitioners of Italian, Spanish, French, or German equestrianism “violent” and “cruel.” Tamburlaine himself was clearly not belonging to any of these nationalities. But for him to behave in ways that were decidedly and increasingly non-English and utilize equestrian methods that can be coded loosely—as in not specific to any one country, be it continental European or Ottoman— as non-English, Tamburlaine’s character would have been perceived of as being incredibly 200 John Astley, The Art of Riding, London, 1584. Christopher Clifford, The Schoole of Horsemanship, London: Thomas Cadman, 1585. Markham, Cavalrice. Blundeville, Fower. 201 Simmons: p. 102. 202 Alan B. Rogers, Tudor Horsemanship, PhD dissertation, Emory University, 1992: p. 103. 203 Simmons: p. 102. 99 masculine, specifically for his equestrianism. In the time of rising concerns of equine welfare when it comes to horsemanship, we see in the play Tamburlaine an advancement of foreign—non- English—modes of equestrian thought, especially through Tamburlaine’s treatment of war prisoners, calling for an end to anti-manége sentiments. 100 CHAPTER 3 – Gorilla Warfare: Lust’s Dominion and Animal Appellations One element of animals and cultural geography that has not appeared in this dissertation yet is that of appellative metaphor, comparing people to animals as a means of compliment or insult. On the surface, this rhetorical practice might seem fairly innocuous, calling someone “sly as a fox” or “busy as a bee,” but for early modern England, calling someone an animal was an interpretive act, naming someone’s similarly positioned place in the animal chain of being as a means of either elevating or denigrating someone for their perceived social, cultural, or moral status. Lynn Enterline observes that comparison, even to animals, was a regular exercise in the Renaissance schoolroom, entitled comparatio, and that Shakespeare’s Venus relies on Ovid’s belief that “animals are useful exemplars when teaching humans about sexual practice,” suggesting that there is more than just a metaphorical connection between animals and humans. 204 The rhetorical act of comparatio is far from simple, especially when it comes to insult. One example of this degradation occurs in the representation of disability in Shakespeare’s Richard III. As Katherine Schaap Williams notes, “Richard describes himself as ‘cheated of feature,’ ‘deformed,’ and ‘unfinished;’ Anne and Elizabeth deride him as ‘diffused infection of a man,’ “hedgehog,’ ‘bottled spider,’ and ‘foul bunch-backed toad,’ terms which all link insult to anomalous and inhuman body.”205 Williams’ analysis of this language reveals an awareness of negative connotation, connecting “insult” to “inhuman” but not equating them. Rather than arguing 204 Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012: 20, 63. 205 Katherine Schaap Williams, “Enabling Richard: The Rhetoric of Disability in Richard III,” Disability Studies Quarterly 29.4 (2009): para. 1. 101 that to animalize is to insult, she shows that the specific animal appellations are what make these descriptors an insult. In this way, what constructs these connotations is often the contemporary cultural, political, zoological, mythological, economical, and agricultural contexts known intimately at the time around these specific animals. The idea of animal appellation (naming humans after specific animals) brings us to the concept of the Great Chain of Being. While certainly a complex subject, what makes the Chain a necessary function of understanding metaphorical animals is the belief that there are parallel hierarchies. As Robert Bucholz and Newton Key say in Early Modern England (2013), animals participated in this hierarchical metaphor: “[W]as not the lion the king of beasts? Was not the eagle a nobler bird than the sparrow? The whale a greater animal than the codfish?”206 The connection between a human and their animal “counterpart” is ontological. Bucholz and Key at one point lean on the word “analogous” to describe the connections between different hierarchies: [T]he top rank in every subdivision was analogous to the top rank of every other subdivision—and of the Chain itself. That is, the father in the family, the king in the kingdom (and, of course, the professor in the classroom!) were analogous to God in the universe. They represented him; they wielded his authority; they were the unquestioned heads of their respective links and spheres of activity within the Chain.207 Here we see that ontological connection in effect. Just as the lion “wields” the same authority as a king or a familial father, so too does the cur (as I will show later in this chapter) possess the same lack of authority as a beggar in the streets compared to other dogs. While I use the word “counterpart” to characterize this analogy between humans and animals, note that I am speaking 206 Robert Bucholz and Newton Key, Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History, John Wiley & Sons, 2013: p. 24. 207 Bucholz and Key, p. 26. 102 to this ontological layer of the comparison, this idea that humans and animals of the same chain in their respective hierarchies wield the same kind of power and authority (or lack thereof). With this basic premise in mind, rhetoric allows for individuals to have an animal counterpart in metaphor based on their class, race, station, and even gender at times. This gives further credence to Williams’ early observation of Richard III: it is not enough that Richard is compared to animals, but which animals. He is named after disfigured animals like the “bunch-backed toad” and the “bottled spider.” So, a rhetoric of insult that prioritizes animal imagery would need to rely on an awareness of specific species. One text that easily demonstrates this focus on specific animal species and their human counterparts is Thomas Dekker’s play Lust’s Dominion, first published in 1657 but supposedly written in the early 1600s. The play, then, would have been fresh from the tail end of the Anglo- Spanish War which ended in 1604. Leaning on that context, the play focuses on the prince of Fez— Eleazar—captured by the Spanish army and his manipulations that move him from prisoner of war to becoming the new King of Spain. Only the younger Prince Philip is able to use similar trickery to beat Eleazar at the end. Per the original title and the alternate title for the play—The Lascivious Queen—one could imagine one of the primary antagonistic forces in the play is lust. Eleazar takes advantage of people’s lust for one another and manipulates that to his advantage throughout the play, and the narrative concludes with a return to order. That is, the kingdom of Spain returns to Philip’s family, and the Moors are exiled. With that heavily racial and racist ending in mind, it is not hard to see how race is a major factor of the play. Mostly represented by Eleazar, the Moors are portrayed as an invasive culture in the play. What becomes fascinating for study here is who racializes whom, who animalizes whom, and what the connections are between racialization and animalization. While Eleazar is 103 racialized-animalized by the Spaniards, he also racializes-animalizes his attendants Zarack and Baltazar.208 He racializes-animalizes the Spaniards in different ways altogether, and he racializes- animalizes himself. Of course, these statements of race ultimately appeal to a sense of English whiteness and civil identity. What marks the discourse of racializing-animalizing in Lust’s Dominion as interesting is the ways that these characters perceive of and communicate about race through animal metaphor and appellation. The combined exoticization and making of identity discussed in the previous chapters worked together to create an animal shorthand in early modern English drama, allowing for animals to be used as socioeconomic and sometimes racial demarcations in rhetoric, such as Lust’s Dominion’s animal hierarchy: horses for royalty, dogs for commoners, and apes for subalterns. The play speaks to English desire to see themselves transposed in the animal chain of being, further shaping their need for “civilized” treatment of animals. So what is constructed here is a very intentional animal hierarchy seen through these three separate case studies. This hierarchy speaks to English perceptions of race and cultural geography at the time, particularly in England’s relationships with Spain and Moors. In England’s view of the world, these specific animal species and types—apes, curs, hounds, jades, and young, hot- blooded horses—easily can be transposed onto their human counterparts and vice versa. We see in the portrayal of the interactions between Spaniards and Moors an ontological coding at work: Spaniards are dichotomized as horses, the type depending on their behavior. Anyone can be labeled a dog, depending on the perceived “class” of the dog. And only the Moors could be named apes. These rules correlate to England’s negotiations with Hispanophilia and Hispanophobia, showing 208 For this chapter, I use the phrase “racialize-animalize” to talk about the ways that characters would, with one word or phrase, animalize and racialize others. While this often is a rhetorical move used to denigrate, that is not always the case as you will see throughout the chapter. 104 respect for Spain while also being comfortable degrading Philip II. In many ways, what happens with this animal imagery involves a simple reduction of these “real” people into easily understood animal images that bear a lot of cultural weight. Rather than seeing Spaniards and Moors as equal “enemies” of the nation of England, what is productive for analysis here is reading the relationship of Spain with its Moors as a reflection of and response to what is happening in England with its Moors. Animals, Humans, and the Chains that Bind Them Because the Great Chain of Being relied on parallel hierarchical structures, animals reflected humans. I use the word “reflected” intentionally here. As Peggy McCracken notes in In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France, “The notion that animals may mirror human behavior is a grounding premise of exemplary literature….but it also has a broader theological importance in the notion of God’s creation as exemplary.” 209 Animals, therefore, perform an example God set during Creation, an example that humans naturally enact. McCracken later quotes from Allain de Lille’s Rhythus de natura hominis fluxa et caduca: “Every creature in the world is like a book and a picture to us, and a mirror; a faithful representation of our life, our death, our condition, our end.”210 Early modern people saw animals as having similar societal inclinations as people, despite philosophical debates about the true differences between the two groups. This claim of similitude between humans and animals appears most visibly through the animal court trials of the early modern period. In Jen Girgen’s “The Historical and Contemporary 209 Peggy McCracken, In the Skin of a Beast: Sovereignty and Animality in Medieval France, University of Chicago Press, 2017, p. 123. 210 Ibid., 124. 105 Prosecution and Punishment of Animals,” she tracks court documents over time featuring animals who are called to the stand. While individual animals—often accused of destroying a crop or accidentally hurting someone—stood trial at secular courts, often people relied on the divine to distribute justice. In those cases, trials came to ecclesiastical courts. “Complainants named whole groups of natural pests as defendants. Moles, mice, rats, snakes, birds, snails, worms, grasshoppers, caterpillars, termites, various types of beetles and flies, and other unspecified insects and ‘vermin’ were prosecuted by the church during the Middle Ages and later. Even species as seemingly innocuous as eels and dolphins were prosecuted.”211 In many of these cases, for fairly obvious reasons, no animal was actually present in the court. However, for the secular trials, the individual animal did stand trial (reminiscent, perhaps, of a Parisian’s print shop’s Great Cat Massacre of the late 1730s, in which the workshopmen slaughtered “sackloads” of cats and “gathered round and staged a mock trial, complete with guards, a confessor, and a public executioner”).212 While the punishments at the ecclesiastical level could only go as extreme as official anathema, the secular courts treated animals the exact same as human criminals.213 And often, animals and humans would occupy the same cells in prison. In the words of the law at least, the two operated on the same playing field. Girgen offers numerous possibilities for the legal justifications for this as it was not a conversation explicitly had in legal treatises at the time. She claims the legal treatment of animals in the courtroom stems from early Hebrew law where animals are held “accountable for their transgressions.”214 Girgen lists out the numerous Bible verses where God punishes animals or demands an animal be punished. But in the early modern period 211 Jen Girgen, “The Historical and Contemporary Prosecution and Punishment of Animals,” Animal Law Review (2003): p. 101. 212 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Basic Books, New York, 1984: p. 77. 213 Girgen, 112. 214 Ibid., 115. 106 specifically, often the reason for holding these trials was the firm belief in the natural order of law. The court could provide incapacitation (eliminating a social danger), deterrence (“to dissuade would-be criminals—both animal and human—from engaging in similar offensive acts”), or a warning to a guardian of either humans or animals. 215 These different solutions reveal an underlying assumption about what the judicial system could do when it came to the natural world: “[T]he animal trials were derived from a search for order. People needed to believe that the natural universe was lawful, even when certain events, such as a pig killing a human child, seemed to defy all reasonable explanation. So they turned to the courts.”216 So by the standards of early modern law, the court was a space where humans and animals seemed to be on equal footing; defining the early modern human then relies on an understanding of these material interactions with animals. But the law did not always treat humans and animals the same, even if the trial etiquette was comparable for both. In Erica Fudge’s monograph on the appearance of animals in early modern English wills, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes (2018), Fudge tracks the legal practices that went behind the treatment of animals in these legalistic texts. She notes that domestic animals were “ownable,” and “their stealability was what marked them as property.”217 To show this, she reads into William Lambarde’s 1592 explanation of the legal status of domestic animals: Money, plate, apparell, housholde-stuffe, Corne of any sort (or haie, or fruit) that is seuered from the ground, horses, mares, coltes, oxen, kine, sheepe, lambes, swine, pigges, hens, geese, ducks, peacockes, turkies, and other beasts, and birds of domesticall (or tame) nature, are such, as felonie may bee committed in the taking of them.218 215 Ibid., 118-19. 216 Ibid., 119. 217 Erica Fudge, Quick Cattle and Dying Wishes: People and Their Animals in Early Modern England, Cornell UP, 2018: p. 95. 218 William Lambarde, Eirenarcha: or the office of the iustices of peace in foure books, London, 1592: p. 267. 107 In many ways, the figure of the animal has a complex place in early modern law: participating in the “natural” order as equal agents under a judge’s gaze but also able to be stolen and therefore property that is required to be nameless in the executed wills of the time. Clearly, the definitions of categories like “human” and “animal” were experiencing shifts. They had overlaps at some points and strict boundaries at others. So a strict thesis of “To animalize is to dehumanize” does not easily apply to the Renaissance in England. As is even seen in earlier chapters, particularly my analysis of Tamburlaine, the categories blur on numerous levels: rhetorical and practical for certain. However, while the general categories blur together, the specific animals and specific humans experience unique connections and patterns. In thinking of these slippages, I recall the Great Chain of Being and the idea that animal and human hierarchies are analogous to one another, constructing an ontological connection between a human and their animal “counterpart.” What interests me is when these counterparts are named, frequently through the act of insult or praise, e.g. calling Elizabeth the Pelican Queen or an “infidel” a cur. In these cases, the language of simile is absent: people are not compared to their animal counterparts but named them. A focus for this chapter, then, is on the concept of “transposability,” the idea that specific categories of humans can be transposed onto specific species of animals for various contextual reasons. I use the word “transpose” because of the specific image it creates. I imagine a see-through cut out of a human placed (“posed”) across (“trans”) a cut-out of an animal, making this ontological werecreature. When we enact this practice on early modern English society (and the characters they create), it changes the oft used argument that an animal appellation merely dehumanizes / animalizes the subject. In this paradigm, everyone has an animal counterpart. What becomes more interesting is what the specific animal is and what is being said about the person (or their involved communities) because of that specific species. 108 The people of early modern England defined “human” in the same terms that they defined “animal,” so being human meant having an animal counterpart to one’s station in life. Whether it was the Pelican Queen Elizabeth I—again white and close to God as a bird—her Ermine Portrait, where the queen is shown “with a [white] ermine running up her skirt, a reference to her virginity,” the knight Feirefiz—called a magpie for his being biracial—or the Renaissance English charivari, a ritual of dancing around a cuckold’s house with stag horns, early modern people understood themselves as functioning in a “natural” cosmology that placed them alongside comparable animal hierarchies.219 However, these side-by-side reflections did not just happen on a representational level. It is valuable, too, to see how animals and humans lived together in such a way that would color those representations. Animals and Racial Epithets As King of Tars suggests with its animal imagery, these appellations frequently worked to demarcate racial alterity. At the John Milton Conference in 2019 in Alabama, I gave a short talk on Milton’s exoticized and racialized animals. A professor in the audience asked me then if I had seen that kind of racializing before the Renaissance or if it was still relatively new. I was quick to respond that it had been happening for centuries, and I cited the fourteenth-century romance The King of Tars. Throughout the text, animal imagery appears to racialize characters. The Black sultan 219 Part of the reason for the stag being associated with the cuckold was based on natural observation. As E. Cobham Brewer notes, “In the rutting season….one stag selects several females, who constitute his harem, till another stag comes who contests the prize with him….If beaten in the combat, he yields up his harem to the victor….As stags are horned, and made cuckolds by their fellows, the application is palpable.” Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival: A Knightly Epic, trans. Jess Weston, London: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1912, p. 1. Kevin de Ornellas, “‘Fowle Fowles’?: The Sacred Pelican and the Profane Cormorant in Early Modern Culture,” A Cultural History of Animals in the Renaissance, ed. Bruce Boehrer, Berg, 2011, p. 31. Victoria Dickenson, “Meticulous Depiction: Animals in Art, 1400-1600,” A Cultural History, p. 195. Linda Kalof, Looking at Animals in Human History, Reaktion Books: 2007, p. 95. E. Cobham Brewer, “Horns,” Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898, via Bartleby, https://www.bartleby.com/81/8465.html. 109 is called a “hethen hounde” and a “hounde black,” while the white princess is called a “bird that was so bright.”220 The professor asked me, “But how is that really racial-animalization if both people are represented by animals? They’re both seen as inferior.” While I agreed that they are both animalized, I spoke at length about the importance of understanding the ontological transposability of the Great Chain of Being. The sultan is compared to his animal counterpart in the Great Chain of Being, a dog. Likewise, the white princess is compared to a white bird, an animal who takes flight and is naturally closer to God than a dog could ever be. Representations of animals in the early modern period relied on this idea that the cosmological hierarchies, if placed side by side, would be ontologically equivalent. When examining the figure of the princess in King of Tars, we see not just a racialization with the white bird but also an intersectionality with gender as well. Whiteness in English identity was a gendered concept in the early modern period. In Kim Hall’s Things of Darkness, she shows how the “fairness” of a woman’s skin directly correlated to her perceived beauty by Englishmen. She argues that the “polarity of dark and light is most often worked out in representations of black men and white women,” where blackness’ opposite is characterized as “fairness” or “beauty.”221. But women’s whiteness has effects on men’s perception of their own skin color as well, as Mary Floyd-Wilson shows in English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003): [S]ince it was understood that the ideal male complexion should be shades darker than the woman’s ‘fair,’ establishing the superiority of whiteness on the basis of female appearance raises a host of problems for white masculinity….[T]he construction of northerners as youthful in vigor and appearance in early modern ethnology cannot be separated from the 220 John Chandler, ed. King of Tars, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2015, ll. 93, 420, 389. 221 Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England, Cornell UP, 1995: p. 9. 110 humoral corollary that their spirits are thick and their wits slow. Moreover, as northerners, excluded from temperance, white English males could be effeminized by the red and white of their complexion, both internally and externally. Indeed, in The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Thomas Wright seems torn between praising the northern males’ blush as ‘a good commencement of Vertue, because it proceedeth from a judgement disliking of evill, which is an apt beginning of good’ and urging them to attain a more masculine carriage by imitating the darker Italian and Spaniard.222 We see in Floyd-Wilson’s work an attention to masculinity (and femininity) tied to perceived differences in skin color. While women could never be “too white,” men could find a kind of political or spiritual power in “imitating the darker Italian and Spaniard.” As I show later in this chapter, the English perceptions of skin color and masculinity in Spain become rather complex and nuanced, especially in the context of the Anglo-Spanish War, especially given Elizabeth’s edicts to trade “Moors” for prisoners of war in Spain. Reading Lust’s Dominion for concerns of masculinity and race relies on a closer examination of specific animals, as those species contribute to these larger conversations of race and gender for early modern England. Throughout the play, characters are named as animals, and the specificity of those animals certainly speaks to the characters’ perceived identity—particularly their nationality, ethnicity, and gender—in the play.223 There are three dominant animal images in Lust’s Dominion: horses, dogs, and apes. Jades and wild horses are monikers for the Spanish royal family. As I will show in this chapter, dogs are distinct from curs in the play’s logic, labeling Eleazar and his attendants one while calling Philip and the Cardinal the other. And Eleazar’s own attendants are called apes. What 222 Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama, Cambridge UP, 2003: p. 83. 223 Lust’s Dominion is far from the first work to do this in the period. A great example of another play doing it is Ben Jonson’s Volpone, plus there is the whole beast fable tradition, including Aesop’s Fables, Ysengrimus, and Le Roman de Renard. 111 interests me in this chapter are the following four italicized elements: who gets called what by whom and why? Horses: Hispanophilia/phobia and Masculinity First, horses. The horse appellations in the play correspond frequently to early English rankings of horses in economic value, mirroring the hierarchy of Spanish royalty in the play. In Act I, scene i, Eleazar speaks to Alvero, calling King Philip a “Spanish Tyrant” in the same breath he says, “He that can loose a kingdom and not rave, / He’s a tame jade, I am not, tell old Philip / I call him Tyrant.” 224 The horse attribution to the royal family continues later when Eleazar compares Prince Philip to an uncontrollable horse: “….[T]hat spur / Galling his sides, he will flye out, and fling, / And grind the Cardinals heart to a new edge / Of discontent.”225 In both cases of the horse imagery, it is Eleazar speaking, naming the Spanish royal family. In both cases, it is also a gendered appellation, only describing men, contributing to the equine masculinity referenced in the chapter on Tamburlaine. But what interests me is not just that the Philips are called horses but the specific types of horses. The main equine tropes depicted here are in the specific wildness and value of the horse. As Philip is called a “tame jade,” it is worth understanding what a jade is. A jade is typically glossed as a kind of “tired horse” or a “worn out, useless horse.”226 In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 51, the jade becomes a central metaphor in the narrator’s desire: “But love, for love, thus shall excuse my jade— / Since from thee going, he went wilful-slow, / Towards thee I’ll run, and give him 224 Thomas Dekker, Lust’s Dominion, in Thomas Dekker’s Dramatic Works, vol. 4, ed. Fredson Bowers, Cambridge University Press, 1961: I.i.160-162. 225 II.ii.54-57. 226 As glossed in the Oxquarry Books Ltd. Commentary of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 51.” 112 leave to go.”227 Here, “jade” represents a barrier to the narrator’s pursuit of his desire, and this makes sense given the contextual info about what a jade is: “willful slow.” The first definition the OED provides explains the word “jade” as a “contemptuous name for a horse; a horse of inferior breed, e.g. a cart- or draught-horse as opposed to a riding horse; a roadster, a hack; a sorry, ill- conditioned, wearied, or wornout horse; a vicious, worthless, ill-tempered horse; rarely applied to a donkey.” The entry cites authors like Chaucer, Palsgrave (who, like Shakespeare, specifically calls the jade a “dull horse”), and King Charles II, who all connect the jade with derogatory and defaming connotations.228 So, the jade is not a specific breed or landrace-type but rather a generally understood “inferior breed” characterized by behaviors perceived to be negative. For King Philip to be called a “tame jade,” it would seem that Eleazar is throwing a doubled insult. On one hand, Philip is weaker by nature than Eleazar who is “not” a jade, he says. This is in response to Philip’s “loos[ing] a kindom and not rav[ing].” In Eleazar’s mind, Philip has already lost the respect of his people and is already a ruler without power but does not have the energy or strength or even power to control his people, merely a “tame jade.” This moment is an interesting point for the narrative. What is Eleazar’s role in this horse metaphor? Rather than stepping outside it just to call Philip an animal, he intentionally brings himself into it: “I am not [a tame jade].” By making this distinction, he defines himself through a negative—Whatever I am, at least it’s not a tame jade. Because of Philip’s inability to or lack of will to take control over his kingdom, Eleazar believes Philip is basically a tyrant. To further complexify these ideas, it is important to remember this is an English play, where England is way behind on equestrianism compared to countries like Italy, France, and, of course, Spain. For a Moor written by an Englishman to call Philip a “tame 227 Ibid., ll. 12-14. 228 Jonathan W. Thurston, Horse-handling in Shakespeare’s Poems and Renaissance Codes of Conduct, Master’s thesis, Middle Tennessee State University, 2016: 27. 113 jade” is a deep insult, perhaps allowing a space for contemporary audiences to share feelings of anger toward the Anglo-Spanish War of the end of the sixteenth century. As Alan Shepard says in Marlowe’s Soldiers (2002), Spaniards were stereotyped and caricatured right alongside Turks: It is still easy to find in the handbooks not only the xenophobic treatment of Spain, France, Italy, and the Turks, but also attacks on various version of ‘the Other,’ whom the writers occasionally ask us to imagine could be—probably is—lurking within England’s borders….respond[ing] to the crises induced by Spain’s attacks and threats of attack by endorsing militarism as the preemptive blueprint of national life.229 While Shepard’s analysis is reductive, thinking solely in terms of self and other, we see in Shepard’s work the idea that British audiences would have placed these exaggerated caricatures of non-English peoples alongside this call to militarism rather easily. While I would not go so far as to say the “tame jade” appellation would have been read as a “pot calling the kettle black” situation, it would seem the insult to Spain would have been greater for the race of the insulter. England’s conflict with Spain has a long history, and its complexity is relevant in a reading of Lust’s Dominion, particularly regarding its international representations. When Elizabeth I began her reign of England, she had to address religious tensions between Spain and England, and the struggle that began was not as simple as either/or: “Elizabeth was confronted,” John Loftis says in Renaissance Drama in England & Spain (1987), “by the threat of a Spanish invasion supported by a rebellion of English Catholics.”230 What became known as the Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) ended with Spain losing against the superior Anglo-Dutch navies and the 1604 Treaty of London, during which time “the red lines of each kings were [sic] were clearly drawn. On the 229 Alan Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada, Ashgate, 2002: p. 7. 230 John Loftis, Renaissance Drama in England & Spain: Topical Allusions and History Plays, Princeton UP, 1987, p. 71. 114 English side, it was the official tolerance of Catholicism. On the Spanish side, it was the access to its overseas domains. None of these lines were crossed.”231 England’s involvement in the war, though, is what shapes the context for Lust’s Dominion. Eric J. Griffin in English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain (2009) argues that “the anti-Spanish discourse known as the Black Legend of Spanish Cruelty—which ‘ethnopoetically’ made or marked [original emphasis] Iberians as essentially ‘other’—was far more pervasive in early modern English public culture, and more important to England’s emerging sense of nationhood, than we have tended to recognize.”232 Griffin reads into English Renaissance drama a combined “Hispanophobia,” coded as the “Spanish other [being] essentially incompatible with an emerging sense of English nationality,” and “Hispanophilia,” seen through the fact that “Iberia’s continuing accomplishments, especially, though not exclusively, in imperial and colonial matters, generated substantial admiration and imitation, even among those who were most emphatically opposed to Spanish policy.” 233 And these polarized relationships toward Spain mattered, too, for English perceptions of Africa. During the “‘golden age’ of la leyenda negra, the period between the Armada crisis and the Stuart succession, not only does proximity to and relationship with Africa become an index of Hispanicity, ‘Africa’ begins to signify in such a way as to play into the conjuncture’s growing obsession with miscegenation.” 234 As Spain was concerned with its own purity of blood during the Spanish Inquisition, England was quick to “denigrate Spain by pointing to its ‘mixed’ origins,” and, under Elizabeth I, “would replicate the quintessentially Iberian sin of expulsion by deporting the ‘Negroes and blackamoors’ residing in 231 Óscar Alfredo Ruiz Fernández, Royal Love, Diplomacy, Trade and Naval Relations, 1604-25, Bloomsbury, 2020, p. 8. 232 Eric J. Griffin, English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain: Ethnopoetics and Empire, U Pennsylvania P, 2009, p. 2. 233 Ibid., pp. 2-3. 234 Ibid., p. 10. 115 the realm, even as her polemicists and propagandists were vilifying Spain for the same sort of policy.”235 So, for Lust’s Dominion to so explicitly have its primary characters be Spaniards and Moors seems to be an indication of this relationship with England’s simultaneous Hispanophilia and Hispanophobia. Emily Bartels in Speaking of the Moor (2009) reads Dekker’s play as an “incriminat[ion of] Spain as ‘lust’s dominion,’” while also insisting that the dominion of lust and the banishment aspects of the play are far from unique to the Spanish Moor’s tragedy or the Spanish Moor himself.236 While the play portends of civil war for Spain and criticizes the Queen Mother for her giving in to lust, it vilifies the Moor as the cruel manipulator who orchestrates these events (narratologically more of an Aaron or Iago, even though he racially takes the role of Othello in the latter play). When we think of the way that Eleazar calls King Philip a “tame jade,” then, something that Eleazar claims he himself is “not,” we perhaps see a defense of Spain: while England would likely not support Philip II due to the relationship with the Spanish Armada, they also would not have wanted a Moor at the helm of that Armada, having just (as I will discuss later in this chapter) executed an order of banishment of Moors in England itself around this time. Furthermore, England was succeeding with an alliance with Morocco now known as the Anglo- Moroccan alliance which was aimed directly against Philip II. As Bartels argues, “When Abd el- Malek came to power in 1576, he pushed for a significant increase in the arms trade, insisting that the English not sell the saltpeter they acquired in Morocco to Portugal or Spain. Whatever his intentions, in Hogan Abdelemech sets the English explicitly against the Spanish.”237 England had a history of this animosity toward Spain whether that was intended from the get-go of this alliance 235 Ibid., pp. 10-11. 236 Emily Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello, U Pennsylvania Press, 2009: p. 123. 237 Ibid., p. 27. 116 or not. However, as Philip III would prove to be more willing to negotiate than Philip II in the real interactions between the two countries, it is no wonder that the character of Prince Philip has to come in and save Spain, not just from the villainous figure of the Moor but also from the “tame jade” who has ruled Spain in the meantime. The next major horse image proves to be fairly similar in its rhetoric, labeling the Spanish royalty a horse yet again. In Act II, scene ii, Eleazar plots with the Queen Mother of Spain, Eugenia, to defame her son, Prince Philip, as a bastard. In their plan, Eleazar claims that Philip’s subsequent lack of claim to the throne will be like a “spur / Galling his sides, he will flye out, and fling, / And grind the Cardinals heart to a new edg / Of discontent.”238 We see in this characterization two aspects of horsemanship: first, the use of a spur, and second, a horse reacting wildly to that, out of control. While spurs were falling out of favor in the English rise of “kindness” toward horses, we see a return to Italian, French, and Spanish treatment of horses increasingly in the seventeenth century, with William Cavendish eventually saying the following of the spur: The Rowels should contain Six Points, for that Hits a Horse Best; Five Points are too Few: And the Rowells should be as Sharp as possible can be; for it is much Better to let him Bleed Freely, than with Dull Spurrs to raise Knobs and Bunches on his Side, which might give him the Farsey; but Bleeding can do him no Hurt, when Dull Spurrs may: Besides, there is nothing doth a Horse so much Good, as to make him Smart, when you Correct him: There is, therefore, nothing like Sharp Spurrs, being used Discreetly, to make all Horses whatsoever Know them, Fear them, and Obey them; for until they Suffer, with Obedience, the Spurrs, they are but Half Horses, and never Drest.239 238 Dekker, II.ii.54-57. 239 William Cavendish, A New Method, and Extraordinary Invention, to Dress Horses, and Work them According to Nature as also, to Perfect Nature by the Subtility of Art, which was Never found Out, but by…. London, 1667: 182 117 Here, Cavendish advocates for a level of violence toward a horse that leads to “Bleeding” and “Fear,” saying that any horse who is not knowledgeable of spurs is really just a “Half Horse.” For Cavendish, what makes a horse is a horse’s reliance on a rider.240 For Eleazar to focus so much on his use of spurs on Prince Philip indicates a level of control gesturing that Philip belongs to Eleazar. These are his (Eleazar’s) designs at work. However, Philip’s actions are to “flye out, and fling,” not exactly positive response to the spurs. Eleazar suggests here that he is a good horseman but Philip just is not a good horse. This equestrian relationship speaks to the level of control Eleazar has over Philip and his intent to use Philip’s resistance against himself. Overall, these multiple horse images work for Eleazar to code both King Philip and Prince Philip as horses connoted for their relationships with their riders. While King Philip is a “tame jade” for his passivity, Prince Philip is characterized as too wild, “flye[ing]” out from the use of spurs “galling his sides.” We see in the characterizing of the two Philips an attention to age that is complicated by the horse imagery. King Philip is caricatured as the feeble old man through the “tame jade,” and Prince Philip the energetic hot-headed young man. It is important to note the prevalence of this image. Even in Shakespeare, the young Hotspur is characterized through his impetuousness and militaristic aggression, equally evoking the generous application of “hot spurs,” similarly “galling his sides.” The image is an inherently sexual and gendered one. As we see in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 50-51 and Venus and Adonis, the horse’s speed, responsiveness to the spur, and general age contribute to an understanding of perceived masculinity and sexual potency.241 England had very specific treatment of horses considered old or incapable of work. As Peter Edwards notes, “In a critical portrait of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, written in about 240 For more info on the idea of a horse’s definition being tied to their rider (especially in the eighteenth century), see Mattfeld. 241 For more on this concept, see Thurston. 118 1584, the author likened his conduct towards his old friends to the treatment given to a retired horse, left to graze on a ditch bank or sold for 40d. to a dogmaster.”242 And many old horses, as hinted at by Dudley, ended up as dog meat for the hounds….On 16 September 1674 Thomas Edwards, an agent of Sir Thomas Myddleton, received 3s. 6d., the sum he laid out for a horse to be slaughtered for his master’s hounds….In a letter to [Daniel Eaton’s] master, the Earl of Cardigan, on 3 December 1726, he reported that attempts to cure the mare were proving ineffective and that, as she was suffering from glanders, as well as being broken winded, she was virtually worthless. He sealed her fate with the words, “I fear the dogs must have her in a short time.”243 So, the horse imagery does not just contribute to the idea that King Philip was old and feeble but actually comments on his lack of value through his lack of further use. To further the importance of animal metaphor in the play, there is this working interplay between people who are dogs and people who are horses. As King Philip’s legacy is metaphorically devoured by both Eleazar (as a tyrant) and later Prince Philip (as rightful heir), it is a direct call to old horses being sold for dog meat. The three different levels of specificity matter for Eleazar’s characterization of the two Philips here. Most generally, he labels the two an animal, implying they are bestial and not fully capable of reason and logic due to their impulsive emotions. Eleazar’s characterization of the two indicates he believes they cannot even control themselves at this rate, that they are not able to be more than just animals. At a more specific level, he is calling them specifically horses, not just any animal. This of course plays off the elements of control at the higher level. These animals need 242 Peter Edwards, Horse and Man in Early Modern England, Hambledon Continuum, 2007: p. 32. 243 Ibid., p. 33. 119 a human rider to be elevated in a sense. Yet, they are among the highest valued and most important animals for English viewers of the play. They take priority in both contemporary travel narratives (like those of Samuel Purchas) and zoological encyclopediae (like those of Edward Topsell). We see in this play a reliance on an understanding of the human-rider relationship. As Peter Edwards states, owning a horse was a luxury: “Most people at the time, affected by rising prices and competition for jobs and land, experienced declining living standards and could not have afforded a horse.”244 It was a distinctly upper-class animal connected with “indulgence.” All the same, the upper class “did not work their horses”; rather, the close association they developed resulted in “the forging of a special relationship between horse and rider. They were given a name, were known by their character and were often described in anthropomorphic terms.”245 However, Edwards notes that horses were also tied to gambling, especially with racing. “[H]orses, by their very nature, were susceptible to exploitation. As heat was the dominant humour, it produced animals that were brisk, free and proud, but also ones that were ‘more easily apt to be forced by their Riders and Drivers.’”246 This heat connects to the idea of the “hot spur” again, but it also shows how the horse-rider image was a fairly unique one that relied on masculinity, humoral theory, and a specific power dynamic where the controlled and subjugated object also served as a reflection of the rider. This concept might also best be summarized by a brief examination of the horse image in Shakespeare’s Richard II. Here, the horse is often invoked to represent the state. When Richard II’s own horse is taken by Bolingbroke, the horse is named by his landrace-type of “Barbary” and causes dismay for both Richard II and a stablehand. The stablehand says, “Bolingbroke rode on 244 Edwards, p. 2. 245 Ibid., p. 23. 246 Ibid., p. 55. 120 roan Barbary, / That horse that thou so often hast bestrid, / That horse that I so carefully have dressed.”247 And Richard responds by asking how Barbary fared “under” Bolingbroke. The groom responds that Barbary rode “proudly as if he disdained the ground.”248 Richard then calls the horse a “jade” for his behavior. This moment could easily be read in terms of English nationalism. As De Ornellas argues, horse stealing was seen as a “nuisance in the commonwealth, a pesky, bug- like trouble. Horse theft was, however, sometimes seen as more than a mere nuisance: occasionally, equine skullduggery can be seen to threaten the very existence of the Elizabethan state.”249 He goes on to show how contemporary viewers of these plays “would have known that robbery was so frowned upon in the sixteenth century that those caught could not even plea for leniency” from the clergy.250 In this moment, stealing the horse from Richard—as well as the horse’s own implied betrayal—suggests an ultimate betrayal of the state itself. And at another point, Richard refers to himself as Phaëton, seeing the way he rules over “kings [who] grow base” as similar to managing “unruly jades.”251 He figures himself as a god— but a lesser god than the Sun, instead as the “Sun’s son, suggesting he has no natural right to the throne. This connects at least partially to the Great Chain, where the Sun is the king of the planets. Richard suggests here that his unnatural, non-divine handling of the throne has driven the state into the ground, literally in the myth of Phaëton. His flaw then is in his management of his subjects, his “jades.” Much of this moment echoes the symbolism of Elizabeth’s entourage before the citizens of Norwich in 1578: The magnificence of the Queen’s equine entourage stresses the projection of an informed, 247 Shakespeare, Richard II, V.v.80-82. 248 Ibid., V.v.85. 249 De Ornellas, p. 15. 250 Ibidem. 251 Richard II, III.iii.183-85. 121 mobile bureaucracy; the ugliness of the remnants of the airbrushed horses’ digestive habits is removed to foster the city’s national reputation as a salubrious participant within the body politic. Both ruling elite and ruled citizens use either the horse’s presence or its absence, to ventilate a public-relations friendly visage. The horse is mobilized to unite the visual power of London/Westminster with the cooperativeness of the country’s second city. Horses’ movements are controlled, subsumed within and subject to very human concerns of dominion and reign.252 For De Ornellas, this moment signifies the horse’s immediate troping as a “dominated sot,” alluding to concerns of “dominion and reign.”253 For Shakespeare’s Richard (and Dekker), then, the horse—whether focusing on the specific type or a specific behavior—is a gesture toward the state and his (mis)management over it. The horse is a call to class, and it is a call to the management of the state. It was frequently advanced as this political image of the government’s power over its people and the subjugation expected of those people. This specific animal figures in the construction of power relations in both plays in ways that another animal could not do. The political metaphor is tied intrinsically to the image of the horse. Eleazar, through his species choice, acknowledges the Philips’ royalty and value as Spanish upper-class people even as he is degrading them as needing management. More generally, this species choice also speaks to the wealth of the Spanish state at the time as one of the most powerful nations in the early modern world (as I will discuss at more length shortly). At the most specific level, the two Philips are characterized as behavioral classes of horse. Prince Philip is characterized as a too-wild horse, needing control, and King Philip is a jade for his slowness, playing off 252 De Ornellas, p. xiv. 253 Ibidem. 122 contemporary common knowledge of horse behaviors and inviting viewers to judge the differences between the two rulers with that knowledge. The horse is only used to describe these two characters in the play, and so we get the sense that this highest of animals connects with the royal, European status of the two while also appealing to anti-Spanish sentiments—or at least anti-Philip II and pro-Philip III—in England that still allow viewers to laugh at the treatment of the older king. This connects to a lot of the changes being seen in both England and Spain at the time, what Walter Cohen called a “period of crisis,” referring to both England and Spain changing leadership in the first decade of the seventeenth century.254 He shows how “The sixteenth century ended in disaster for Spain.”255 As the two countries experienced similar changes in leadership and similar economic problems, as Cohen shows, it may not be too far-fetched, as I will argue, to see how English viewers may have seen themselves in the portrayal of Spain in Lust’s Dominion. But in reading Spain in its contemporary cultural moment, we see Dekker responding to the times, too. Dekker appeals to contemporary viewers’ disapproval of the current cultural relations with Spain by taking issue with the old royalty, depicting how easily it was manipulated by a Moor, and allowing for that Hispanophilia by ousting the Moors with a new, more “sensible” though more hot-spurred Philip III. Hounds and Curs: Consumption and Vice However, horses are not the only animal image in the play. From the horse, we move on to the dog. The dogs—a much more complex animal image on the premodern English stage due to the diversity and versatility of its monikers (cf. the hounds of Venus and Adonis, the cur of The Merchant of Venice, and the hounds of King of Tars)—maintain that symbolic diversity throughout 254 Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain, Cornell UP, 1985: p. 255. 255 Ibidem. 123 this play, but it becomes a means of communicating and labeling cultural alterity, all the same. There are three major canine terms that appear throughout the play: “cur” (which appears twice), “hound” (thrice), and “dog” (seven times). In Act I, scene ii, Eleazar names himself a series of racial epithets before Alvero: “A Moor, a devil, / slave of Barbary, a dog.”256 So, here, Eleazar calls himself a dog. Later, in Act II, scene iii, Eleazar has his henchmen follow friars who have just left: “Zarack and Baltazar, / Dog them at th’ hee’ls.”257 In this moment, Eleazar is calling his own men dogs. Right before Eleazar stabs King Fernando, he says, “Fire and confusion / Shall girt these Spanish curs.”258 For once then, Eleazar is calling the Spanish part-dog. Shortly after this, he repeats it to the more general public: “[L]ook on Philip, and the Cardinall: / Look on those gaping currs, whose wide throats / Stand stretch’d wide open like the gates of death, / To swallow you, your country, children, wives.”259 Here the image of cur stays with the Spanish royalty but is made even more monstrous, swallowing the people and the nation. Later still, Cardinal Mendoza realizes he has been tricked by Eleazar and the Queen, and he tells Eleazar—whom he calls a “hellhound”—and his henchmen to back away when they close in on him: “Dam’d slave my tongue shall go at liberty / To curse thee, ban that strumpet; Doggs keep off.”260 Here then, we have a lot of word play happening. Calling Eleazar a “dam’d slave” indicates he has a “dam,” a female dog he is tethered to, in this case, the “Lascivious Queen.” Furthermore, the idea of “dam’d” plays off the notion of the hellhound, referring literally to damnation to hell. Also, with “ban” and “dog” so close together evokes the word “bandog,” meaning a mastiff—characterized at the time as “violent” and “fearfull.”261 As Charles Bergman argues in “A Spectacle of Beasts” (2011), 256 Dekker, I.ii.6-7. 257 Ibid. II.iii.74-75. 258 Ibid. III.ii.152. 259 Ibid. III.ii.209-212. 260 Ibid. V.i.137-138. 261 John Caius, Of Englishe dogges the diuersities, the names, the natures, and the properties, London, 1576: p. 25. 124 “[t]he force and power of the mastiffs was prodigious. They could kill a bear or a lion. As a result, Henry VII ordered all mastiffs hanged, ‘because they durst presume to fight against the lion, who is their king and sovereign.’”262 In the Cardinal’s words, we see the recognition that Eleazar and his crew are threats to the Spanish nation, that Eleazar has gone well beyond his naturally appointed station and managed to do so solely through that “force and power” Bergman mentions. But here, we get the case of someone besides Eleazar calling Eleazar and his men “dogs.” When Isabella later pleads with Eleazar to spare others, she calls him a “Hell-hound,” and Philip calls him a “dog.”263 Each of these cases reveals specific contextual degradations, demeaning the person who is labeled a dog. However, unlike the horse, the label of the dog is one that applies to both the Spanish and the Moors, a rather different animal metaphor for the play. Dogs were a common animal in early modern England, often so common they were considered a nuisance; other times a novelty. John Caius in his treatise Of Englishe Dogges (1576) talks about the valuing of foreign dogs against English ones: The natures of men is so moued, nay rather marryed to nouelties without all reason, wyt, iudgement or perseueraunce, Outlandishe toyes we take with delight, Things of our owne nation we haue in despight. Which fault remaineth not in vs concerning dogges only, but for artificers also. And why? it is to manyfest that wee disdayne and contempne our owne workmen, be they neuer so skilfull, be they neuer so cunning, be they neuer so excellent. A beggerly beast brought out of barbarous borders, frō the vttermost countryes Northward, &c. we stare at, we gase at, we muse, we maruaile at, like an asse of Cumanum, like Thales with the brasen shancks, like the man in the Moone.264 262 Charles Bergman, “A Spectacle of Beasts: Hunting Rituals and Animal Rights in Early Modern England,” in A Cultural History, p. 59. 263 Dekker, V.ii.55, 264 I talk about this idea of the “beggerly beast” more in the chapter on The Tempest. Caius p. 37. 125 Caius uses dogs here as a means of responding to contemporary debates of trade and nationalism. He calls the outside dog “a beggerly beast” from “barbarous borders,” something to be “stare[d] at” and “maruaile[d] at.” The outside dog is demonized in this way and called a mere “toy” as opposed to being valuable intrinsically, focusing in on the word “artificers” as well. Caius relies on an awareness of dog trade to critique the treatment of English workers who are “contempt[ed]” over the foreign workers. And much of Caius’ critique is fascinated with the “dumb gaze”: “we stare at, we gase at, we muse, we maruaile at, like an asse of Cumanum.” In this way, the foreign (whether people or dogs) become the objects of spectacle. This contributes to the idea that canines were often seen as novelties especially when it comes to trade. Caius’ analysis begs us to examine Lust’s Dominion with a focus on who is called what kind of dog. When both Spaniards and Moors are called dogs, are they seen as “toys” or practical dogs? Caius further argues there are three types of English dog: “A gentle kind, seruing the game. A homely kind, apt for sundry necessary vses. A currishe kinde, meete for many toyes.”265 This categorization reveals many of the uses attributed to dogs in early modern England, from hunting to companionship to a kind of trophy or “toy.” As Caius’ language suggests throughout his treatise, the language of canine types is rather specific for the time, even though that specificity does not translate well to today’s standards of dog breeds. The first word of interest is that of “cur,” as that appeared as a categorizer for both of the Philips by Eleazar in Lust’s Dominion. Caius’ third type of dog, the “currishe kinde,” is one that has very specific behavioral traits that separate it from other types of dogs: “they bee stoute and stubberne dogges, and set vpon a man at a sodden vnwares. By these signes and tokens, by these notes and argumentes our men discerne the cowardly curre from the couragious dogge the bolde 265 Ibid. p. 2. 126 from the fearefull, the butcherly from the gentle and tractable.”266 Here, the cur is characterized as stout, stubborn, violent, unpredictable, cowardly, and butcherly. These images are coded as a kind of uncivilized lack of masculinity. The general sense of the word is that it is an undesired type. In 1657, one man was fined for “keepinge a mungrell Curre unmusled.”267 Curs were also associated with plague and disease, as is seen when an author compares gaolers to dog-killers, calling gaolers, “a dogge-killer in the plague time to a diseased curre.”268 These animals were handled in three major ways. First, they were often whipped to be kept outside of town. Second, they were muzzled so they would not pose a threat to the public. Finally, there were often calls for flat-out extermination of the animals.269 The connotations of the unwanted type of the cur reveal an interesting complexity to Eleazar’s naming the Spanish royalty curs. Rather than just calling them simply a dog, Eleazar is attacking their use of power. To perhaps abuse a pun, he claims they are all bark and no bite. He claims they are unpredictable, stubborn, and cowardly. We see this especially when Eleazar calls them “those gaping currs, whose wide throats / Stand stretch’d wide open like the gates of death, / To swallow you, your country, children, wives.” Here, there is that focus on appetite, on consumption, and it is a very visceral image especially for a culture that would have associated curs with public threat—via either disease or violence—making the word “cur” far from an idle, general insult but a specific critique of the Philips’ abuse of the Spanish people. In many ways, this focus on “consumption” calls further to Spanish wealth in the early modern period. Spain began to acquire immense wealth through its colonization efforts in the 266 Ibid. p. 32. 267 J. G. de T. Mandley, ed., The Portmote or Court Leet Records of the Borough or Town and Royal Manor of Salford, 1597-1669, vol. 2, Manchester, 1902: p. 156. 268 “Nouus Homo,” Certaine Characters and Essayes of Prison and Prisoners, London, 1618: D2V. 269 Emily Cockayne, “Who Did Let the Dogs Out?—Nuisance Dogs in Late-Medieval and Early Modern England,” in Our Dogs, Our Selves: Dogs in Medieval and Early Modern Art, Literature, and Society, ed. Laura Deborah Gelfand, Brill, 2016: p. 54. 127 Indies: “American treasure began to reach Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and in larger quantities from 1535 onwards,” says Marjorie Grace Hutchison in Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740 (2015).270 Due to the ensuing trade boom, there became, over time, a “lack of goods, an excessively high price level, and a crushing burden of taxation.” 271 But the Anglo- Spanish War itself was decimating for Spain in terms of its wealth: “The load of debt inherited by Philip II became increasingly heavy in the course of his reign and forced him to make ever more imperious calls upon the purses of his subjects. And it was not only the Crown that found itself in debt. The revenues of the noble families also failed to keep up with prices.”272 We see in the economic situation of the Anglo-Spanish War the attribution of the blame to Philip II as decimating to the people of Spain, vilifying him to both England and Spain. In this characterization, the consumption seen in the figure of the dog in Lust’s Dominion reveals perceptions around the Spanish royalty “swallow[ing]” the “country,” as Eleazar says. Perhaps, too, we see allusions to usury (read through the interest on the Spanish debt). One term for usury as Jean Calvin noted was the Hebrew neschech, meaning a “biting” usury, one that Stephen Deng codes as “destructive.”273 This idea too easily connects to the characterization of Shylock (in Merchant of Venice) as a cur, hinting at that “biting” usury. The next major type of dog imagery used is that of the hound, specifically the hell-hound. In one 1685 ballad, the word was taken to mean the “impious brood / Of Cerberus” and was used as a moniker for various Others in early modern England: Jews, Presbyterians, Moors, slaves, and 270 Marjorie Grace-Hutchison, Early Economic Thought in Spain, 1177-1740, Liberty Fund, Inc, Indianapolis, 2015: p. 96. 271 Ibidem. 272 Ibid., p. 146. 273 Stephen Deng, “Money, Ritual, and Religion: God’s Stamp and the Problem of Usury,” in A Cultural History of Money in the Renaissance, Ed. Stephen Deng, Bloomsbury, 2019: p. 73. 128 Quakers.274 The OED places the word “hound” as far back as 888 CE, actually used to describe Cerberus, too. As Wendy Steiner notes in The Scandal of Pleasure (1995), the name “Mahound,” often used at that time for the prophet Mohammed, is often believed to be an amalgamation of Mohammed and “hound,” associating the prophet with “Satan and the hounds of hell.”275 And one cannot help but think of Mark Antony’s words in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “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.”276 Here, dogs (as a harbinger of war) are associated with revenge, tyranny, and Ate (a Greek deity of despair) who has come “hot from hell.” So, clearly, the word has multiple religious associations, both with a literal hell—be it Judeo- Christian or classical Greek—and negative connotations with Muslim faith. While the word “hound” itself comes from Old Germanic, hund, the same word for “hunt,” in Renaissance England, the term held degrading implications related to a person’s religion or otherwise perceived alterity. While “hound” does not appear often in Lust’s Dominion, it is valuable to see who calls whom a hound. Eleazar is called a hell-hound twice in the play, once by the Cardinal and once by Isabella. As a character identified as a Moor, Eleazar fits the mold of what would constitute a “hound” for early modern codes of insult. He is a racial and religious other, and that sets him apart as being this specific kind of dog, as opposed to a cur. While the implications of the appellation of “hound” do not rely much on actual hound-human interactions at the time, the insult speaks to contemporary semantics around the animal type. The case of the hound speaks to the larger discourse of naming someone a dog. This 274 Anonymous, A pack of hell-hounds, to hunt the devil: set forth in a new ballad, to an old tune, London, 1685: stanza 16. 275 Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, University of Chicago Press, 1995: p. 104. 276 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Ed. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, III.i.296-99. 129 practice is generally perceived as negative, and in the context of the play it is an appellation that gets thrown around by both sides at each other. While the specific words “hound” and “cur” have equally specific meanings and connotations, the general category of “dog,” when used in the play, speaks more generally to a perceived, pathetic aggression or even subservience on the part of the named. We see that when Eleazar yells at his own men to hurry, calling them dogs, leaning on that idea of being pathetic, inferior, and subservient. The Cardinal calls Eleazar and his men dogs as they close in on him, following similar rhetorical moves, critiquing the three as base and violent. So, the imagery of the dog is specific here. The characters are not just animalizing with their tossing around “cur,” “hound,” or “dog.” They are speaking to very specific beliefs about what a dog is and what a nuisance a dog can be. Apes: Rhetoric and Imitation Finally, apes are used to comment on the Moors’ “ineptitude” with speech, logic, and rhetoric, as the characters “ape” politics in the play. The one explicit mention of the word “ape” is powerful in that it sets the scene for the animal imagery in the play as Eleazar calls his attendants apes: Lock all the chambers, bar him out, you apes. Hither a vengeance; stir, Eugenia, You know your old walk under ground, away! So down bye to the King, quick, quick, you squalls; Crawl with your dame, in the dark; dear love, farewell, One day I hope to shut you up in hell.277 277 Dekker, I.i.146-151. 130 This one speech names Baltazar and Zarack apes while also establishing a clear power dynamic between Eleazar and his attendants. He uses the informal “you” and speaks in a succinct imperative: “Lock all the chambers, bar him out”; “quick, quick, you squalls.” And that imperative alongside the name-calling of “apes” and “squalls” reveals Eleazar’s impatience and, given the auditory connotation of “squalls,” the attendants’ incoherent blabbering as they either decide what to do or are slowly doing what they are asked. Edward Topsell has apes as one of the first entries of A History of Four-Footed Beastes, and his work on them features their geographical location, their behaviors, and often their cultural significance. He starts by claiming they can be found in “Lybia….Egypt, Aethiopia….and that part of Oaucasus which reacheth out to the red Sea.”278 As he gives examples of different types of apes, he occasionally throws in cultural anecdotes, like this one: “[S]o many [apes] shewed themselves to Alexander standing upright, that he deemed them at first to be an Army of enemies, and com∣manded to joyn battel with them, untill he was certified by Taxilus a King of that Countrey then in his Campe, they were but Apes.”279 This story shows how apes were mistaken to be human, a recurring theme in Topsell’s narrative. He later clarifies the statement with an explicit reasoning for the perceived similarity between apes and humans: “And as the body of an Ape is ridiculous, by reason of an indecent likeness and imitation of man, so is his soul or spirit; for they are kept only in rich mens houses to sport withall, being for that cause easily tamed, following every action he seeth done, even to his own harme without discreti∣on.”280 The rather real ability of apes to mimic and perform many actions previously considered to be human-only led early modern English people to view the ape as a bestial mimic of humanity, a shallow imitator. 278 Topsell, p. 2. 279 Ibidem. 280 Ibid., p. 4. 131 We see this focus on shallow imitation throughout early modern English literature. It often appears as a raced image, coding for black people. For Sir Thomas Herbert, the black people of the Cape of Good Hope are “Troglodytes, and he questions their humanity due to their different speech from his own: “Their words are sounded rather like that of Apes, then men, whereby its very hard to sound their Dialect, the antiquitie of it whither from Babell or no.”281 Here, blackness is tied to animality through language and communication. In John Elliott’s Mr. Moore’s Revels, an anti-masque from 1636, white child actors in blackface put on ape costumes in their royal performance.282 In Robert Burton’s 1652 The Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton includes black men in a list of “a thousand ugly shapes”: “Headless bears, black men, and apes.”283 Here again, race is conflated with animals, specifically apes. One aspect of aping that is being hinted at in these examples is the focus on “language.” Ian Smith, in Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (2009), claims that “Where color has been privileged in our modern, racial, pigment-based theories of the body, the African’s language in the Renaissance is an equally important site that mediates the racial fictions of differential identities.”284 In our understanding of cultural geography, language factors into that discussion, and in early modern practices of othering, linguistics forms a structure of oppression. As Linda Dowling says in Language and Decadence in Victorian Fin de Siecle (1986), “the very idea of a ‘barbarian’ is, of course, a linguistic notion. If the term originally expressed the Greeks’ disdain for those un-Hellenic outlanders who stammered (i.e. said barbar) when they spoke,” then its “linguistic force” was far from lost when used to characterize people outside Britain at the time.285 281 Sir Thomas Herbert, A relation of some yeares trauaile begunne anno 1626. Into Afrique and the greater Asia, especially the territories of the Persian monarchie: and some parts of the orientall Indies, and iles adiacent. Of their religion, language, habit, discent, ceremonies, and other matters concerning them, London, 1634: p.16. 282 John Elliott, Mr. Moore’s Revels, London: 1636. 283 Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, edited by Democritus Junior, London: 1652, author’s abstract. 284 Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors, Palgrave, 2009: p. 15. 285 Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence in Victorian Fin de Siecle, Princeton UP, 1986: p. 93. 132 Even in Leo Africanus’ A Geographical History of Africa, Africanus describes the African “toong [as sounding] in the eares of the Arabians, no otherwise then the voice of beasts, which utter their sounds without any accents.” 286 Here, this kind of racial awareness is predicated not just on language but also on animality. Racial difference was often perceived through understanding of language, and the image of the “ape” matters for analysis of this focus on language. Nandini Das (2009) talks at length about apes in early modern England in “‘Apes of Imitation’: Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to India.” Especially in a culture whose education focuses on the concept of imitatio, the imitation inherent in the ape image, Das argues, is a negatively connoted imitation, a failure of sorts: “The ape, however, represents a failure of transformation in all contemporaneous discussions of imitatio. A creature whose very similarity to humans made it both a figure of anxiety and ridicule, it repeatedly functions as an image of the inept imitator’s passive submission to the model and resulting loss of identity.”287 So, we can see how “aping” is considered a performance of humanity, especially in Lust’s Dominion. What Das gestures to is the idea that calling someone an ape implies a kind of perceived seeing-through-the-performance. Again, while the word “ape” only appears once in the play, it is an image that shadows over other parts of the play as well, especially when it comes to this concept of aping language. In Act II, scene I, the Queen defends Eleazar before the Cardinal, Fernando, and Prince Philip. In this conversation, Eleazar only has single-lines, while other character get full stanzas of speech. The Queen participates in this, speaking for Eleazar: “‘Twas rage made his tongue erre.”288 We have this very explicit use of what Ian Smith calls “barbarian errors.” Eleazar giving in to his passion— 286 Leo Africanus, A Geographical History of Africa, London, 1600: II.6. 287 Nandini Das, “‘Apes of Imitation’: Imitation and Identity in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy to India,” in A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion, Ed. Jyotsna Singh, John Wiley, 2009: p. 118. 288 Dekker, II.i.77. 133 and his perceived nature—contributed to this idea that Eleazar is apt to make these “barbarian errors.” He does not have the same ability with language that “normal” people have, the play argues here. As Smith says, the “failed language” of “barbarians” codes heavily into early modern race discourse: “[England has an] anxious mobilization of language to demonstrate a coming of age in vernacular achievement in order to dispatch its own barbarous linguistic past and broker a race exchange, substituting the expedient African in the Renaissance multinational contact zone.”289 The focus on barbarian error reveals how ineffective language—especially coming from a person of color—became a popular racial and racist belief of early modern England. Figuring this into Lust’s Dominion shows how the moment of the Queen excusing Eleazar’s speech as an error is really a racial moment tied into perceptions around cultural language. When Eleazar further calls his own men “apes,” he acknowledges and perpetuates English stereotypes around his inability to speak “properly,” merely “aping” language. These animal images allow for all characters to be animalized, but the English identify the Spanish more with the regal horses and transpose the foreign East against the barbaric ape as a means of advocating for a “civilized” treatment of animals and elevating their own social status as natural sovereigns. Even while the Spanish royalty are characterized as jades, that is elevated well above the cur or the ape in this play. This relationship is best evoked through the ending of the play, in a final note, where the Moors are banished ultimately from Spain. Philip says in the final two lines of the play, “And for this Barbarous Moor, and his black train, / Let all the Moors be banished from Spain.”290 This heavily echoes Elizabeth’s similar banishment of blacks in England. In her letter to the Lord Mayor of London and other related officials, Elizabeth wrote the following: Her Majesty understanding that there are of late diverse blackamoors brought into this 289 Smith, 8. 290 Dekker, V.iii.182-83. 134 realm, of which kind people are already here too many, considering how God hath blessed this land with great increase of people of our own nation as any country in the world, whereof many for want of service and means to set them on work fall on idleness and to great extremity. Her Majesty’s pleasure therefore is that those kind of people should be sent forth from this land.”291 In this order, Elizabeth states to the public that the main reason for banishing the Moors is because the Moors are prone to “fall on idleness,” playing off contemporary tropes that black Africans in England were inherently and intrinsically lazy and therefore could affect the economy in negative ways by putting various businesses behind on production. On the surface, this might seem very different from what happens in Lust’s Dominion; however, in the time this play was likely first being performed, right at the turn of the century, Spain had not recently banished its Moors (not since the fifteenth-century Reconquista). It wouldn’t do so again until the latter half of the 1600s decade. The play’s ending responds to the more recent and distinctly English occurrence that would take a few years to happen in Spain. So, reading this ending in light of Elizabeth’s edict forces the question: What if the queen’s job was the one that had been taken by a Moor? The question invokes the image of Henry VII ordering mastiffs executed for daring to stand against the lion again. For all the play’s work with international characters and dynamics, it ultimately is concerned with England’s own security. A few years later, Elizabeth updated the command when it had not been carried through as well as she had hoped: Whereas the Queen’s Majesty, tending the good and welfare of her own natural subjects, greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the 291 Queen Elizabeth I of England, “An Open letter to the Lord Maior of London and th’Aldermen his brethren,” 1596, in Acts of the Privy Council, New Series, 1596-97, London: Mackie and Co., 1902: 16-17. 135 great number of Negroes and blackamoors, which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm since the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain, who are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people that which co[vet?] the relief which these people consume, as also for that the most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel: hath given a special commandment that the said kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged out of Her Majesty’s realms.292 We see in “the troubles between her highness and the King of Spain” that call to the Anglo-Spanish War and the Spanish Reconquista. Due to England’s own economic issues, Elizabeth pits the issues as related to the war, and to further redirect blame, places it on the Moors in England. At this time, Elizabeth would actually trade English Moors for prisoners of war in Spain, contributing to the discourse of turning Moors into property that functioned economically. Elizabeth suggests in these letters that the Moors do not contribute in any healthy way to English economy and should be used for trade in these wartimes, bringing Englishmen back from Spain. In this context, Lust’s Dominion also suggests that one day even Spain will realize the danger of having Moors, these “infidels [who have] no understanding of Christ or his Gospel” and will expel them, too. This letter also reveals a significant religious aspect to the banishment as well. She does not just point out labor concerns with the Moor but also religious ones, that the Moor is an “infidel.” Race and religion (and animals) frequently collided in the conception of the Moor in England. In Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum, Bartholomaeus describes the Antipodean people in Africa: “with no speech other than bestial grunts, [they] share women like beasts without 292 Elizabeth, “Licensing Caspar van Senden to Deport Negroes” [draft], 1601, in Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 3, eds. Paul L Hughes and James F. Larkin, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969: p. 221. 136 religion or law, go naked, and never work.” 293 Likewise, Hieronymous Munzer has a similar account of slaves in Spain: “they are bestial in their manners, for up to now they lived with no religion and were all idolaters.”294 However, Spain, especially central cities like Valencia, at the time was known for “its ethnic, as well as religious, diversity.”295 The perceptions of Moors in Spain would have been tied to this very diverse religious geography, and, especially under Philip II’s reign, a tyrannical association with religion. Race was very multifaceted in Spain at the time. Aurelia Martín Casares identifies seven major groups people that “could be described or referred to as negros in early modern documents” in Spain: 1) Sub-Saharan people from different ethnic groups speaking different native languages, mainly from the area called ‘Guinea’ but also from the Congo and Angola. They could be Muslims (since Islam had entered the area), Christians (since there were also Christian missions there) or animists (keeping their traditional religion). They constituted the largest group of black Africans, most of them slaves; 2) North African Muslims (freed or slaves) of sub-Saharan origin who spoke Arabic; 3) People with sub-Saharan ancestors born in Spain or Portugal, baptised and Castilian- speaking; 4) Moriscos (Spanish Muslims converted by force to Christianity, either free or enslaved) with sub-Saharan blood; 5) People from the Canary Islands who had dark skin and were in most cases slaves; 6) Hindus or Tamils from India brought by Portuguese slave merchants; 293 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum, 1397, XV, p. 52. 294 Ludwig Pfandl, ed., “Itinerarium hispanicum Hieronymi Monetarii 1494-1495,” Revue hispanique 48 (1920): p. 679. 295 Debra Blumenthal, “‘La Casa dels Negres’: black African solidarity in late Medieval Valencia,” in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds. T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe, Cambridge UP, 2010: p. 226. 137 7) African Americans brought to Spain by their Spanish owners living in the Americas.296 We see in the descriptions of these categories that collision between ethnicity and religion that would have coded as diverse (potentially to perceived extremes) for early modern English people. Sending Moors to Spain would have implied this idea of a “return,” bringing the “infidels” back to a space where that diversity is more accepted or seen as more “natural.” In Elizabeth’s rhetoric in both letters, we see a banishment rather similar to what happens in Lust’s Dominion, often pointing to the “idleness” and “infidel” nature of the blackamoors as a reason for their banishment. While Dekker’s work characterizes Eleazar as very active—far from “idle” (Eleazar himself says “I am not”)—he is characterized as a threat to all Spanish people, much as Elizabeth labels blackamoors as “relief”-consuming people and furthermore a “kind of people” rather than just people, working to animalize them much in the way that Dekker does with his use of aping language. From start to finish in Lust’s Dominion, animal appellations communicate a cultural hierarchy that claims people have set stations in life that cannot be changed in either direction. Eleazar and his men are just “apes” and “curs,” while the Philips are called jades and dogs. The animal language stays the same from beginning to end, and when the Moors are banished at the end, the play creates this sense of natural order being restored, evoking Elizabeth’s own orders, too. The curs are no longer running things; the royal horses are. This play is invested in reading Spain’s living with (and banishment of) Moors alongside England’s attempts at the same. All of these contemporary political concerns come to light in this play, and the animal appellations manage to construct an easy yet reductive code for understanding the stakeholders in these controversies. The specific animals that appear in this code—apes, curs, and jades—call to and 296 Ibid., p. 248. 138 respond to contemporary interactions with these animals, and understanding these contexts is essential for a productive analysis of England’s treatment of the figures in this play. 139 CHAPTER 4 – Colonialist Dog-ma: Domestication in Early Modern Travel Narratives and The Tempest On November 26, 1608, the Welsh colonist Peter Winne wrote about his observations in the Jamestown Colony to Sir John Egerton. Winne has left Powaton country and entered Monacon, about “50 or 60 miles” away. He attaches some samples of various Monacon dyes to Egerton. He details the riches of the place to Egerton, but he saves what would seem to be the most important information for the end. The information of the second half of the latter can be deemed important solely because it is the only section that is addressed directly to Egerton’s original requests. While we do not have Egerton’s original correspondence, we get from Winne’s writing that Egerton had requested specific knowledge on the Monacon people, hinting to “your [Egerton’s] request of bloodhounds.”297 Winne then spends most of the letter detailing the dogs in this place: “I cannot learn that there is any such [bloodhounds] in this country; only the dogs which are here are a certain kind of curs like our warrener’s hey-dogs in England, and they keep them to hunt their land fowls, as turkeys and suchlike, for they keep nothing tame about them.”298 What we see in Winne’s letter is this complex blend of exoticization of Native Americans, animal domestication, and questions of colonial potential. Responding to a sponsor’s query of whether valuable bloodhounds could be found in this newly found space, Winne seems 297 Peter Winne, “Letter to Egerton,” 1608, Huntington Library holograph: Jamestown Colony—Ellesmere Papers 1683; Andrews 1934a: 100/4, Wright 1946:9, Jones 1968: 4, Barbour 1969:245, in Jamestown narratives: Eyewitness Accounts of the Virginia Colony, The First Decade: 1607-1617, ed. Edward Wright Haile, Roundhouse, Champlain, VA, 1998: p. 203. 298 Ibid., pp. 203-204. 140 disappointed to reveal the high stock—and assumed economic value—Egerton was hoping for is not to be found in this nation. However, Winne does speak not only to the “currish” status of the dogs, something discussed previously in the chapter on Lust’s Dominion, but also to the training of these dogs: “they keep nothing tame about them.” Even in the ways pronouns collide here— “they” and “them”—the Monacons and the dogs blur together. While one reading is that it’s the dogs who are not kept tame and another that the Monacans keep nothing tame (no tame animals) around themselves, the uncareful language gestures to early modern European perceptions around domestication, colonialism, and cultural difference. The history of domestication factored in for many Native American peoples, especially in Virginia, as Helen C. Roundtree notes in “Uses of Domesticated Animals by Early Virginia Indians” (2014): The last available North American members of the horse, pig, and camel families became extinct by the end of the last Ice Age, or more than 10,000 years ago. The surviving members of the cow, goat, and sheep families—for instance, bison, mountain goat, and mountain sheep—did not live in the hunting range of Virginia Indians and were not good candidates for domestication in any case. The Virginia Indians did, however, breed dogs.299 With less need for certain kinds of domestication, less than Europe, it is clear how this lack of domestication factored into colonist perceptions around Native American “wildness” and “tameness.” Europe’s own predilection toward strict views of animal husbandry and domestication had equally complex outcomes when it came to implementation in Virginia. This is most easily visible with the introduction of European domesticated pigs: 299 Helen C. Roundtree, “Uses of Domesticated Animals by Early Virginia Indians,” Encyclopedia Virginia: Virginia Humanities, 2014: para. 1-2. 141 Because tobacco farming was so labor-intensive, they skimped on caring for the hogs and instead let them fend for themselves, either hunting them as needed or hiring Indians to do it. Eventually there was trouble. Both Indians and Englishmen were hunting feral pigs that were still claimed by “owners”; English colonists earmarked their pigs, but the Indians didn’t. By the 1690s, the Virginia government assigned earmarks for pigs owned by the residents of various Indian towns.300 This case is interesting because we see the colonists themselves fall back on prioritizing domestication and husbandry of the pigs, and yet, the colonists still returned to earmarking pigs, focusing on the notion of property. Whatever intentions the colonists had in bringing the pigs with them to the colony, they abandoned those intentions—and that husbandry—for a more organized system of hunting. The Indians here did not follow the same rules, and that made a noted distinction between the two groups’ management of animals. As I show in this chapter, English writings—particularly travel writing and drama— represented non-white peoples from foreign countries alongside (and often against) images of animals, practices of animal management, and theories of animal domestication, much in the way that Winne does in his letter to Sir Egerton. These depictions ultimately worked to reinforce English desires to see these foreign others as people needing to be domesticated (much like the animals). They furthered notions of civility and barbarity through this lens of domestication. Throughout the seventeenth century, they provided justification for international economic practices like the slave trade. They built on pre-existing notions of social and environmental hierarches, such as “us vs. them” or “man vs. beast.” And they did all of this with the purpose of wanting to show readers what the world looked like on the outside. 300 Ibid., para. 10. 142 Understandings of the ways that England perceived of the Americas factor into our readings of these texts. Peter Lloyd discusses English sentiments in the colonizing of the Americas in Perspectives & Identities (1989). He labels the colonizing as “opportunist,” focusing on the ways that settlers found a “‘paradise’ in North Carolina.”301 He then speaks to much of the intent with the initial trips to the colony: “The idea was to send out a group of adventurers who would settle in America and work the land for trade.”302 We see in this description some gesture perhaps to the feral but domestic hogs of the Virginia colony, this desire to “work the land for trade” and the idea that these settling “adventurers” were coming with these hogs to colonize and commodify the land. In the reading of this new space as a “paradise,” the animal studies scholar cannot help but read into these colonial intentions an early Christian desire to return “man” (read, white Englishman) into a prelapsarian Eden where man still rules over the animals as a kind of divine right (and perhaps, obligation). When Sir Egerton asked of the bloodhounds, we have to wonder what opportunity Egerton saw in the canines of the Americas and what he had hoped to gain, perhaps even advantages in hunting.303 The “paradise” evoked by Lloyd also emerges in Jonathan Gil Harris’ reading of early modern English literature, “As Europeans encountered the native peoples of America, they asked: are Indians closer than we are to an original Paradise? Michel de Montaigne certainly thought so when he described Brazilian Indians as unadulterated by civilization.”304 Harris brings his analysis of Paradise over to The Tempest as well: “And so does The Tempest’s Gonzalo, who has read Montaigne, and describes the people of Shakespeare’s island as ‘gentle-kind’ spirits living in a 301 Peter Lloyd, Perspectives & Identities: The Elizabethan Writer’s Search to Know his World, The Rubicon Press, 1986: p. 186. 302 Ibidem. 303 These “opportunist” goals mattered a lot for early modern English writers, too. For examples of colony-focused writers in late sixteenth century England, see Lim, p. 15. 304 Jonathan Gil Harris, “Introduction,” Indography: Writing the “Indian” in Early Modern England, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris, Palgrave, 2012, p. 8 143 Hesiodic golden age.”305 The “paradise” reading of Shakespeare’s play reads also into the lush depictions of the New World portrayed in the travel narratives of the time. Kevin Boettcher notes that, “In Hakluyt’s eyes, Virginia is idealized as a place of limitless possibility. The land itself is capable of supporting, first, any number of native European plants…..and, second, any number of excess English workers to harvest those crops.”306 The paradise that Boettcher reads in Hakluyt is a floral one (though I will show later how that same later also portrays a faunal paradise as well), and it again is an opportunist paradise. So, even in the writings of travel writers, the New World was depicted as a place full of opportunity for English growth and domestication.307 What these scholars tend to ignore however is the significance of animal domestication and its relation to English people at the time, revealing unique commentaries on foreign peoples in a growing realm of international trade and mercantilism, one where animals become major figures. While Renaissance travel narratives tended to focus on ways that foreign cultures could be quite generally characterized as “beastly,” these texts, as well as contemporary drama, also focused on the inclination to domesticate—whether domesticating foreign peoples or animals. The current scholarship on early modern treatments of foreign cultures does not take into account the treatment of animals and English perceptions around animal husbandry practices, and thus we lose the depth of that English universalism which also encompasses the natural world, as well as the parallels between treatment of American Indians and treatment of native animals.308 305 .Ibidem. 306 Kevin Boettcher, “Trafficking in Tangomockomindge: Ethnographic Materials in Harriot’s A briefe and True Report,” Indography, p.77. 307 Reading travel narratives as colonialist and/or imperialist structures is far from novel, however. See Heng, p. 266; Binney, 383-403; Alarcón, pp. 25-50; Roddan, 168-88; for example. 308 I vacillated a lot on what to call the indigenous peoples the European colonists found in the Americas. When possible, I try to use the specific nation-tribe. When the scope is broader than that, I will default to American Indian. I default to this mostly to gesture to the multiple Indias early modern England saw in the world, to acknowledge the multiple layers of racism and colonialism they enacted when they used the word “Indian,” and to recognize the work of the scholars in the previously mentioned book Indography, where a lot of these ideas are communicated in depth. 144 Early modern travel narrative writers and even some dramatists use specifically exotic animals and specific domestication practices to further reinforce colonial agendas in Renaissance England (specifically in England’s treatment of the “New World”), and this understanding alters our current readings of these texts, showing that the colonial messages therein were not just about taking over these foreign cultures and seizing their wealth but also about “domesticating” them, much like the wild and rare animals found in those new spaces. As I hope to show in my readings of early modern English travel narratives and The Tempest, there is this sharp contradiction between two readings of American Indians in these texts and their relationships to the natural world. The first is in the opportunist “paradise” mentioned previously. In this characterization, the natural world of America is a place full of beauty in its sheer opportunity, and its indigenous inhabitants exist in a prelapsarian state (in this first reading at least). The second is the “savage” and untamed—and therefore, undomesticated—landscape. Here, America is seen more as a postlapsarian nation, needing man to take his “natural” and therefore perceived God-given role to rule over the animals and “beasts.” Throughout the texts here, especially Hakluyt’s writings and Shakespeare’s The Tempest, I examine the juxtaposition of these two English representations of America in relation to the implications for early modern race formation, animal domestication, and the inherent intersections therein. Hakluyt Travel narratives are invaluable for understanding contemporary constructions of cultural geography.309 Rather than depicting cartographically or ethnographically accurate portrayals of the “outside world,” the early modern travel narratives show places full of “barbaric” people that need 309 See Sanders, p. 9, and Crang, pp. 1-3. 145 domestication and riches and treasures that could be used to better the country where the narrative is being distributed. For example, in William Strachey’s History of Travel, American Indians are called “strange” in their lack of animal domestication and shown that they need to be taught better ways of living: They neither do impale for deer nor breed cattle, nor bring up tame poultry, albeit they have great store of turkeys; nor keep birds, squirrels, nor tame partridges, swan, duck, nor geese….It is strange to see how their bodies alter with their diet: Even as the deer and wild beasts they seem fat and lean, strong and weak.310 Strachey explicitly ties the perceived simplicity and lack of education to the people being “very barbarous” and claims that they could be improved through instruction.311 The picture painted here by Strachey exemplifies the English perception that the American Indians needed to be taught better practices of living, especially domestication, even while acknowledging the natural wealth they believed these peoples were sitting on.312 As one of the dominant forces behind communicating the outside world to English people, the travel narratives often are less of a linearly organized narrative and more of descriptive catalogue of what other cultures and lands were like. The way that these places were exoticized relied on juxtaposing foreign (specific) animals against (specific) people with foreign practices. As I will argue here, the rhetoric of domesticating exotic animals starts to mirror the rhetoric of domesticating these other peoples. 310 William Strachey, The History of Travel into Virginia Britannia: The First Book of the First Decade, Bodleian Library: Ashmole 1758, folios 1-102, Major 1849, Wright & Freund 1953, in Jamestown Narratives, p. 637. 311 Strachey, History, p. 634. 312 Quite frequently in this chapter, I lump the animal in with what is called “natural.” Much of early modern class thinking revolves around one’s closeness to “the land.” A king can hunt where he pleases, but he does not have to “tend” to his land like a farmer would. It is a very complex system, but animals very much factor into that system. As I show through my later analyses of animal husbandry manuals, taking nature “out of” animals is a sign of masterful husbandry. So, one can easily read animals as “natured beings” whose statuses are “uplifted” through domestication (according to the early modern husbandry writer). 146 Domestication itself is a complex idea that bears unpacking before delving into these texts. The OED gives four major definitions for the word “domesticate”: 1a. To make, or settle as, a member of a household; to cause to be at home; to naturalize. 1b. To make to be or to feel ‘at home’; to familiarize. 2. To make domestic; to attach to home and its duties. 3. To accustom (an animal) to live under the care and near the habitations of man; to tame or bring under control; transferred to civilize. 4. To live familiarly or at home (with); to take up one’s abode. There are two major elements of interest in these definitions: The first is the focus on the home (from the etymological root in Latin domus). The second is the attention to animals here. The verb implies a transformation, “to make domestic,” “to accustom an animal,” etc. There is a level of implied force at work with the word. The “taming” aspects of the definition echo Derrida’s thoughts on domestication and taming in The Animal: [T]here exists this priority, this being-before (früher) of the animal (another way of saying that man is after the animal), and this superiority of powerfulness also. That priority and superiority are reversed only when a weakening (Schwächung) on the part of the animal makes it submit to man and to the domestication that renders it more useful to humans than the wild beast. The socialization of human culture goes hand in hand with this weakening, with the domestication of the tamed beast: it is nothing other than the becoming-livestock [devenir-bétail] of the beast. The appropriation, breaking-in, and domestication of tamed livestock (das zahme Vieh) are human socialization. As an individual, the human would, like the wild beast, also be ready to go to war against its neighbors in order to affirm its unconditional freedom. There is therefore neither socialization, political constitution, nor 147 politics itself without the principle of domestication of the wild animal. The idea of an animal politics that claimed to break with this power to command beasts, to order the becoming-livestock of the beast, would be absurd and contradictory. Politics supposes livestock.313 An understanding of the use of animal domestication in colonialist literature relies on Derrida’s “Politics supposes livestock.” Early modern English writers applied the notion of “becoming- livestock” to the beast—but whether the beast was animal or the perceived “savage” blurs. Domestication merges the animal with the colonized subject in these texts, displaying relationships based on power dynamics and control over an Other. As Andreas Höfele argues in Stage, Stake, & Scaffold (2011) about Titus Andronicus, “Fittingly, Rome’s champion ‘[h]ath yoked’ (I.i.30) the barbarous Goths. In the literal sense of the word, he has reduced them to the position of tamed beasts harnessed to draw a plough.”314 In his footnote to the sentence, he adds, “The Latin verb subuigare-subjugate (sub iugum agere/to lead under the yoke) conveys the same idea of human control over a tamed beast.” 315 This image of the yoke matters a lot for a reading of English colonization of American Indians: it speaks to the labor, control, and religious conversion enforced on those peoples, particularly in the language used by the colonists, often echoing that of animal husbandry manuals and texts on animal domestication. The idea that the language of colonialism relies on inclusion of animals is far from novel. Virginia DeJohn Anderson focuses on these connections in Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004), examining historical, colonial documents and the 313 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, Trans. David Wills, Fordham UP, 2008: p. 96. 314 Andreas Höfele, Stage, Stake, & Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre, Oxford UP, 2011: p. 140. 315 Ibid., n. 65. 148 frequency of animal encounters in those texts. She argues that “[v]irtually every body of sources pertaining to seventeenth-century English colonization, from local records to descriptive pamphlets to treaties with Indians, mentions these creatures, often with astonishing frequency.”316 But, rather than imagining a “history of livestock,” this kind of project claims that “these people and animals shaped the course of colonial history because of their interactions, not their separation from one another.”317 As this dissertation has aimed to show, much of early modern British history leans on analysis of animal husbandry, much in the way that Anderson does: Assumptions about animal husbandry insinuated themselves into England’s imperial ideology in subtle ways and influenced much more than agricultural practice itself. Expressing an opinion based on their English experience, colonists asserted that farming with animals was one important hallmark of a civilized society….By bringing livestock across the Atlantic, colonists believed that they provided the means to realize America’s potential, pursuing a goal that Indians who lacked domestic animals had failed to accomplish. English settlers employed assumptions about the cultural advantages associated with animal husbandry to construct a standard against which to measure the deficiencies they detected in native societies and to prescribe a remedy for their amelioration.318 And, while Anderson is looking at a slightly later time period, the concepts extend well into early modern England as well. When English colonists came to America, they brought with them specific knowledge about animal husbandry and practices of domestication, and those 316 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America, Oxford UP, 2004: p. 3. 317 Ibid., p. 4. 318 Ibid., p. 8. 149 knowledges influenced and shaped their perceptions of racial others, particularly American Indians. The rhetorical purpose of the travel narrative genre allows for close readings focused on erection of social and natural hierarches that are ultimately complicated but, at the same time, is easily misinterpreted as contemporarily agreed-upon “fact” and often read as a text with a one-to- one relationship with cultural belief at the time. Julia Schleck and Anthony Payne have noted many scholars “quarrying” Hakluyt’s work for short quotes that display a belief in this one-to-one relationship, including Jack D’Amico in his introduction to a newer version of Hakluyt’s text (1991). 319 Hakluyt’s two-volume work was purportedly designed to be a compendium of the contemporarily up-to-date information on English expeditions, recounting countless travelers and what they experienced to the north and northeast of England as well as the Americas. However, Hakluyt’s work arguably has more face-value popularity in current scholarly analyses of early modern travel narratives than it did in Hakluyt’s own time. Julia Schleck (2006) tracks many of the ways that Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations have been frequently lauded not as empirically sound depictions of foreign places—as many scholars would argue—in the early modern period but as “openly colonial.”320 Starting with Emily Bartels’ claim that “Hakluyt’s mission was to push the English court towards an imperialist future by crafting England’s spotty record overseas into an extensive history of continued progress,” Schleck advances a criticism of other scholars’ lack of serious treatment of Hakluyt’s motivations.321 Schleck argues that scholars 319 Julia Schleck, “‘Plain broad narratives of substantial facts’: credibility, narrative, and Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations,” Renaissance Quarterly 59.3 (2006): p. 769. Anthony Payne, “‘Strange, Remote, and Farre Distant Countreys’: The Travel Books of Richard Hakluyt,” in Journeys through the Market: Travel, Travellers and the Book Trade, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris, 1-37, New Castle, DE: 1999, p.20-25. Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama, Tampa, 1991, pp. 50-53, 58-59, 63-66. 320 Schleck, para. 5. 321 Emily Bartels, “Othello and Africa: Post-colonialism Reconsidered,” William and Mary Quarterly 54.1 (1997): p. 54. 150 of Hakluyt treat his work with a specific literary practice when analyzing his work: “to be mined for short quotations which serve as textual sound-bites for generalized discussions of English attitudes towards the foreign in all its guises.”322 She argues scholars frequently tend to ignore the colonial and nationalist elements of the text. The way she examines this is by stepping back from close reading and examining the larger tropes of Hakluyt’s work, examining how the authors Hakluyt prioritizes have colonial intentions. She sees that Hakluyt among other travel writers paint the Other as commercial opportunities by focusing on mercantilist language: In both the travel log and the trade report, foreign peoples are described only tangentially, and purely in reference to trade. In these accounts, native inhabitants tend to fall into four categories: thieves, merchants, sailors and caravan leaders, and nobility and rulers. Nearly all of these groups are described purely in terms of whether they are hindrances or helps to travel and trade, and are then described only with taciturn succinctness.323 And the mercantilism collides with the colonial mission of the sources Hakluyt uses. By giving foreign “characters” these succinct characterizations based mostly on economic status, a narrative is constructed around economic opportunity. Richard Helgerson sees Hakluyt as focused on economy in his travel narratives (even as a compiler). In Forms of Nationhood (1992), Helgerson argues that Hakluyt understands England as “an essentially economic entity, a producer and consumer of goods….Exploration, military action, colonization: all must be made to serve the overriding objective of economic well- being.”324 In examining Hakluyt’s treatment of world economics, Helgerson notes Hakluyt’s focus on “mercantile voyages” and says that including them alter our reading of the text: “Seen 322 Schleck., para. 2. 323 Ibid., para. 18. 324 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, U Chicago Press, 1992: p. 165- 66. 151 through the eyes of merchants, the world emerged as a vast network of markets offering unlimited commodities and vent, and England itself emerged as the aggressive commercial entity required from the first by Hakluyt’s strategic thinking.”325 It is in this thinking that we see Hakluyt’s focus on economic opportunity in the New World. David Armitage in The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2004) also names Hakluyt and Purchas in a “host of English Protestant clerics who chronicled and promoted trade, colonisation and conquest in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”326 In the elder Hakluyt’s “Pamphlet for the Virginia Enterprise” (1585), Hakluyt moves from talking about England’s responsibility to “increase the force of the Christians” overseas and then moves on to talk about the natural bounty that can be found in Virginia.327 Part of the descriptions here focus on the rivers and especially fish, easily the dominant animal of the document: “The knowen abundance of Fresh fish in the rivers, and the knowen plentie of Fish on the sea coast there, may assure us of sufficient victuall in spight of the people, if we will use salt328 and industrie.”329 Here, Hakluyt pits faunal abundance and diversity against “the people,” focusing on “industrie.” He suggests there is promise in this land if work is put into the place and Christianity is enforced on the indigenous peoples there. This stands as a complementing contrast to Boettcher’s work in Indography previously mentioned. As Boettcher reads Hakluyt’s pamphlet in terms of the floral paradise presented, painting Virginia as “place of limitless possibility,” his focus on fish also gestures to the faunal paradise and the desire for “industrie” to shape both the people and the natural world. 325 Ibid., p. 171. 326 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge UP, 2004: p. 64. 327 Richard Hakluyt, “Pamphlet for the Virginia Enterprise,” 1585, Document 47, in The Original Writings & Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, vol. 2, Hakluyt Society, 2010: p. 327. 328 More to follow on “salt and industrie” in my analysis on The Tempest. 329 Ibid., p. 330. 152 The way these narratives portrayed otherness offered frequent comparisons of indigenous peoples to exotic animals, and often these comparisons provided a narrative of needed domestication. But, while these “nonfiction” texts aided in a construction of English civil identity and their place in the natural and social world, perhaps more telling of early modern English views of domestication toward the Other, especially in the “New World,” is the treatment of those peoples in drama. It is here that I segue into The Tempest, to see the ways that the travel narratives’ inclination to show indigenous peoples as yet-to-be-domesticated cultures manifests in the creative imagination of Shakespeare, furthering colonial agendas, particularly through language of domestication and, more specifically, fishing. The Tempest Largely, the world of The Tempest is made up of disparate ideologies that also work together. Reflecting early modern English views of America, the island is both a paradise and a savage, yet-to-be-tamed wild, or as Tom MacFaul says in Shakespeare and the Natural World (2015), “it is both a purgatory and a paradise, a place of the highest redemptive art and a home of the most fallen nature.”330 MacFaul borrows a word from Alison Shell to describe this space, a “heterocosm,” referring to the collision of the cosmology against narrative and structure in an imagined space.331 MacFaul argues that the island of the play, as a heterocosm, “is necessarily precarious and provisional, like Miranda’s virginity. It is not worth less for that, but its value and its precariousness are tightly tied together.”332 And he goes on to connect the setting even with Prospero’s mastery (an idea I discuss shortly). Here, MacFaul is speaking to the ways that the 330 Tom MacFaul, Shakespeare and the Natural World, Cambridge UP, 2015: p. 179. 331 Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion, London, Methuen, 2010: p. 13. 332 MacFaul, p. 183. 153 natural world reflects on the narrative of the play, reflecting character morals in productive— productive for us scholars—ways. While MacFaul does not connect the idea of the island heterocosm to real representations of nature in early modern England, he shows how the portrayed environment of The Tempest serves a deeper narrative than just a dramatic backdrop: it reflects the characters’ own inner natures. The inclination to read nature and animals in The Tempest through a humanist lens is logical (pun intended). As Anthony Raspa says in Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist, the Renaissance understanding of the category of the “human” relied on an understanding of the relationship between body and soul, where soul could be further broken down into logic and spirit. Raspa is easily able to read the animal language surrounding the figure of Caliban as a representation of Renaissance humanism: “What is animal in him, and there is much, is there in virtue of his refusal to use the part of him called reason in its full spirit sense. He resorts to reason only enough to discern the nature of the sensual experience and power that appeals to him.”333 Here, Raspa reads Caliban’s animal nature as a reflection of the character’s “refusal to use….reason.” While Raspa later speaks to the early modern ontological connection between humans and their animal counterparts, he does not examine much of the specific animal imagery of the play and thinks of the animal as an overall category without much species distinction. After all, as I have argued throughout the dissertation, it matters that the Philips of Lust’s Dominion are called horses rather than apes, that Othello is called a ram and not a bull, and that Tamburlaine uses the imprisoned kings like horses as opposed to like dogs. But Raspa speaks to the formation of the category of the human in this tripartite sense, and understanding the functions of logic, soul, and body helps to see how the categories of human and animal can be 333 Anthony Raspa, Shakespeare the Renaissance Humanist: Moral Philosophy and His Plays, Palgrave, 2016: p. 133. 154 complicated. Likewise, Amanda Bailey in “Race, Personhood, and the Human” examines the natural imagery surrounding Caliban as a reflection of how we are to read the character, calling specifically the “‘fish’iness” of Caliban affirming “his status at the interstice of the human and nonhuman.”334 Bailey acknowledges the racialization of the character through these animal features, noting that the image of the fish in particular becomes a “synecdoche for the quasi- human, at once a racialized natural body and a personified form of fungible property.”335 In Bailey’s work, we see how the focus on the specific animal contributes to this examination of species in racial contexts. (One major analysis Bailey makes of the fish image is that the word “fish” is homonymic of “flesh,” an idea that Topsell would contest in his differentiation between otter and beaver tails: “[T]he taile of a BEAVER is fish, but the taile of an OTTER is flesh,” indicating that the two are at odds, making the homonymic attributes actually read as diametric opposites rather than like characteristics.)336 However, what I want to add to the analysis is the addition of contemporary animal manuals, such as those by Edward Topsell and Leonard Mascall. After all, what separates a fish from other beasts for early modern English viewers of the play? As I showed in the introduction to this chapter, it is far from new to examine the colonial aspects of The Tempest. In the recent Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (2019), Jyotsna Singh centers Caliban in this discourse of parsing through Shakespeare’s colonialist thought. She examines the ways more modern playwrights have worked to enable us to “consider an anti- colonial future….[and] re-think the relationship between the past and present.”337 Much of her 334 Amanda Bailey, “Race, Personhood, and the Human in The Tempest,” in Renaissance Personhood: Materiality, Taxonomy, Process, ed. Kevin Curran, Edinburgh UP, 2020: p. 152. 335 Ibidem. 336 Topsell, p. 572. 337 Jyotsna Singh, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, Arden Shakespeare, 2019: ch. 3. 155 analysis of the play’s adaptations is focused on the multiple treatments of Caliban. Likewise, Paulus Sarwoto centers his work on Caliban in The Figuration of Caliban (2004). For Sarwoto, the animal nature of Caliban speaks to elements of English “tutelage” of American Indians: The stage interpretation of Caliban as half human and half animal may have something to do with the travel books of the period that described the New World inhabitants and their strange customs and dress. Such stagings of Caliban already evidenced seeds of colonialism, because the description of the Other as sub-human assumed that the native inhabitants needed England tutelage for their betterment as human beings. The half- animal Caliban shows that Shakespeare and subsequent performers viewed the inhabitants of the New World through a European, ethnocentric lens.338 His figuring of Caliban, while not going into detail as to the animal aspects—much less the specific species—shows an awareness that Caliban’s education is often read as a call to colonist relationships with America. In Caliban and Other Essays (1989), Roberto Fernández Retamar reads the figure of Caliban against an early modern binary characterization of the “American man”: “The Taino will be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of a utopic world….The Carib, on the other hand, will become a cannibal—an anthropophagus, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, who must be opposed to the very death.”339 For Retamar, the American is divided into these two categories, and Caliban represents the latter, the Carib, both at odds with and an opponent to the paradise he sits within. Caliban as a character seems to be an invisible but ever-present force in Frantz Fanon’s 338 Paulus Sarwoto, The Figuration of Caliban in the Constellation of Postcolonial Theory, Louisiana State University, Master’s thesis, 2004: p. 11. 339 Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker, U Minnesota P, 1989: pp. 6-7. 156 Wretched of the Earth (1965). Fanon speaks to the characterization of the “native” here: At times this Manicheism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. In fact, the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms. He speaks of the yellow man’s reptilian motions, of the stink of the native quarter, of breeding swarms, of foulness, of spawn, of gesticulations. When the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary.340 It is this kind of description that is called to task in this chapter. The ways that Caliban is characterized are highly animalistic, and these descriptions serve that kind of colonial agenda, forming part of what Fanon calls the “colonial vocabulary.”341 Throughout the course of The Tempest, we see this ongoing battle happening, one between nature and nurture. Frank Kermode discussed this battle as being specifically between “art and nature,” labeling Caliban and Prospero respectively “a ‘natural’ man, and an ‘artist’ who controls by super-natural means.”342 For Kermode, “art” implies a control over nature. This general binary codes for a number of other binaries itself: home versus the foreign, civilization versus the wild, man versus animal, student versus educator, and domesticated versus domesticator. While none of these binaries are equivalent to one another, they do connect under this umbrella of nature versus nurture that the play presents to us, most visibly in the lines Prospero uses to describe Caliban, “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick.”343 Here, Prospero explicitly characterizes Caliban in terms of nature and nurture, claiming 340 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1965: p. 42. 341 : Ibid., p. 43. 342 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare: The Final Plays, Longmans Green & Co., 1963: p. 44. 343 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library, 2015: IV.i.211-212. 157 that Caliban’s nature, “a born devil,” is one that nurture cannot change or alter, “can never stick.” Given Prospero’s self-given role to teach Caliban, we cannot eliminate the roles of teacher and student here. Caliban acknowledges Prospero’s childhood lessons early in the play: “[you wouldst] teach me how / To name the bigger light and how the less, / That burn by day and night.”344 Miranda responds by showing how she helped teach Caliban as well: “I pitied thee, / Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour / One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known.”345 Caliban’s final response on the subject of language is this: “You taught me language, and my profit on ‘t / Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you / For learning me your language!”346 The idea of teaching the act of naming happens later in the play as well when Stephano, having just met Caliban, questions Caliban’s education: “Where the / devil should he learn our language?”347 Language is integral here not just in the Ian Smith notion of “barbarian errors” but also in the sense of pedagogy and domestication, through this explicit context of “nurture.” Lynn Enterline addresses the domestication inherent in early modern pedagogy, with these lines from The Tempest in mind: “Sixteenth-century humanist schoolmasters claimed that their methods of teaching Latin grammar and rhetoric would turn boys into gentlemen, that the eloquence and wisdom garnered at school would directly benefit the English commonwealth.”348 We see in Prospero the Shakespearean figure of the schoolmaster attempting to “turn” Caliban into a “gentleman” with his attention to language and rhetoric. With the animal nature ascribed to 344 Ibid., I.ii.400-02. 345 Ibid., I.ii.424-29. 346 Ibid., I.ii.437-39. 347 Ibid., II.ii.67-68. 348 Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, U Pennsylvania Press, 2011: p. 9. 158 Caliban throughout the play, this very easily reads as an act of domestication, not removing “boyhood” as Enterline suggests, but “wildness.” But, for all the aspects of domestication based around Caliban’s education, the same lines emphasize a failure or futility around this education. Yes, Caliban learns language, but he does so in order “to curse,” at least before his master. Before others, like Stephano and Trinculo, he is able to be much more eloquent with his speech, particularly in the “Be not afeard” speech. And still, when others see him, like Stephano, they cannot see this person as being a man. And even Prospero sees him as a person on whom “nurture can never stick.” Enterline reads this moment as “a bitter assessment of language training’s effect on its students.”349 However, in the added context of Caliban’s racialization-animalization, it also calls attention to the linguistic and religious teaching that happened in colonization and missionary work in America at the time. Shakespeare critiques the strength of pedagogy as well as the perceived weakness of Native Americans here—or, if not “weakness,” rather a refusal to become Anglicized or “domesticated.” In this way, Prospero is more than just a teacher or educator for Caliban. He takes on the role of master animal handler. Just as Enterline reads Prospero as displaying mastery over man, I want to examine the ways that Prospero displays mastery over nature. Near the end of the play, we see Prospero evoking magic. The stage directions cue the animals: “Enter divers spirits in shape of dogs and hounds, hunting them about, Prospero and Ariel setting them on.”350 Prospero and Ariel encourage the hounds, driving the hunt on expertly. In the following lines, we see them urge the hounds on by name: PROSPERO Hey, Mountain, hey! 349 Ibid., p. 24. 350 Shakespeare, IV.i. 159 ARIEL Silver! There it goes, Silver! PROSPERO Fury, Fury! There, Tyrant, there! Hark, hark! Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo are driven off. Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews With agèd cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them Than pard or cat o’ mountain.351 One of the major aspects of animal-handling seen in this passage is the act of naming animals. The hounds are named “Mountain,” “Silver,” “Fury,” and “Tyrant.” The naming of hounds has a long historical tradition and speaks to the interactions and relationships Prospero has with the natural world. While the reader of today might hear this soliloquy and be immediately reminded of Santa Claus’ “On Dasher, On Dancer,” animal studies scholar Vicki Hearne connects the practice of animal naming to an older figure: “[O]ur impulse [to name animals] is also conservative, an impulse to return to Adam’s divine condition.”352 Hearne associates this act with prelapsarian philosophy, that we as humans should be good “stewards” of the land and that includes dominion (note the shared root with “domestication,” domus). Here in The Tempest, Prospero wields animal names to display his mastery over them, to show his connection with those animals, and perhaps to place himself in that “divine role.” The ability to manipulate his hounds is what separates Prospero from being mere animal dilettante and animal master. While the hounds themselves are imaginary hounds produced by Ariel’s magic, Prospero uses Ariel as an instrument in managing the hounds, much like a rider uses a crop to manage one’s horse. It is clear from Prospero’s guiding words over the hounds that 351 Shakespeare, IV.i.282-289. 352 Vicki Hearne, Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name, Alfred A. Knopf, 1968: p. 170. 160 Prospero is the one really in charge, as an animal master. Höfele in Stage, Stake & Scaffold once analyzes a painting by Frans Snyders, entitled The Bear Hunt. The painting depicts a pack of collared dogs tearing two bears down. But, as Höfele says: What we don’t see [in the painting] is the hunter who has set the dogs on, the master acting by proxy, unleashing a wildness he has learned to control. Man, though absent, invisibly presides over the scene. He is ‘behind it’, in the sense of having caused it, just as he is ‘before it’, the observer for whose benefit the spectacle has been arranged. The painting’s evocation of wild nature is thus inscribed in a framework of hierarchical order, endorsing both the ascendancy of man over beast and a stratified society in which hunting was a prerogative of the nobility.353 While the above-mentioned scene in The Tempest has the visible “master” of the dogs rather than the “invisible” one mentioned in the analysis of The Bear Hunt—after all, Prospero is on stage for this scene—this framework of hierarchy remains. We see in Prospero’s managing the pack that “ascendancy of man over beast” as well as Prospero’s own call to nobility through his rightful management of the hunt. And the island seems to be ripe with potential subjects for Prospero. Early on, the flora and fauna are described in detail, with implications of husbandry mixed in to showcase the potential for management of the land. Caliban protests against Prospero in this natural description of the island: And then I loved thee, And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle, The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile. 353 Höfele, p. 94. 161 Cursed be I that did so! All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you, For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me The rest o’ th’ island.354 There is a sharp juxtaposition of natural language here, as seen previously, between the description of paradise and the description of the savage wild. The qualities of the island, Caliban says, reflecting on his love for Prospero, include “The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.” Yet at the same time, Caliban’s anger evokes for him the natural language and images his mother wielded: “All the charms / Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you.” And in the center of this space, Caliban acknowledges his own role in it. While he starts with the language of dominion—”I am all the subjects that you have” and “mine own king”—he quickly shifts to that of domestication—”you sty me” and “you do keep from me / The rest o’ th’ island.” The language Caliban uses in this speech constructs this environment that is naturally at odds with itself while also figuring himself as a subjugated subject. The concept of domestication in The Tempest’s natural imagery has been discussed previously in L. T. Fitz’ “The Vocabulary of the Environment in The Tempest” (1975). Here, Fitz argues that the masque within the play contrasts the image of the island itself: The following items mentioned in the masque all have to do with cultivation, by which I mean Nature organized and controlled by human effort: “wheat,” “rye,” “barley,” “vetches,” “oats,” “pease,” “nibbling sheep,” “broom-groves,” “poll-clipt vineyard,” 354 Shakespeare, I.ii.402-411. 162 “barns and garners never empty,” “vines with clustring bunches growing,” “sunburnt sicklemen,” “furrow,” and, above all, “harvest.” On the other hand, there is no evidence whatsoever to show that there is any kind of cultivation or domestication of animals on the island.355 Fitz acknowledges that much of the focus on the harvest connects to marriage and fertility, especially through the mythology of Ceres and Juno. However, there is the sharp distinction from the characteristics of the island itself. Fitz lists many of the natural features shown in the play: grassy, windy, and large with caves, streams, and ponds. And Fitz creates lists of the flora and fauna respectively, just to catalog those at least. Fitz’s ultimate reading of the natural language is that Prospero, through his use of magic, makes the island flourish, revealing that the previously mentioned paradox—both paradise and waste—makes sense as colonized space and pre- colonized space respectively. One of the major aspects of the environment in this play is the use of sound. Throughout the play, animals making sound works to serve as both a dramatic ambience for the theatergoers, transporting them to this exotic place where animals occupy and threaten the civil space. However, the sounds also further construct this exotic world as a natural space occupied by specific animals. In terms of land mammals, there are two major categories presented in the play. The first is composed of British animals: wolves and bears, namely. The second category includes the island fauna, such as bulls and lions.356 Through sound, we see two different types of environment, one that the audience would be intimately familiar with and one the audience would not. 355 L. T. Fitz, “The Vocabulary of the Environment in The Tempest,” Shakespeare Quarterly 26.1 (1975): p. 43. 356 Furthermore, it could be productive to think through the possibilities of hearing the bear gardens in the Globe while the play was being performed, where they might have heard some very real animal sounds throughout the play’s performance. Shakespeare easily alludes toward bull- and bear-baiting in these 163 The first category of animal sounds, coding for England, is best exemplified by Prospero’s speech to Ariel early in the play: “Thy groans / Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts / Of ever-angry bears.”357 Here, Prospero shows how Ariel’s “groans” caused wild animals to cry out in turn, but it’s the specific species that matter here. Wolves and bears were far from rare in early modern England and would have indeed been common threats out in the woods and wilderness between major cities. While these animals are from then on absent in the presented island of the play, they offer an echo from the time when Prospero first found the island, before he domesticated it. This original fauna indicates the island might not have been so magical and paradisiac as it is now, instead being much more mundane for English viewers at the time. The island, post-Prospero, however, represents an outer, more exotic natural world, much more of a vacation destination than the world of “wolves” and “ever-angry bears.” At one point, Sebastian hears the magic constructed by Prospero and points it out to his group: “Whiles we stood here securing your repose, / Even now, we heard a hollow burst of bellowing / Like bulls, or rather lions.”358 The image of the lion, though a decidedly Christian one even at the time, marks this natural space as inherently exotic, a place of wealth—and perhaps opportunity. While the English monarchy is also associated with the lion, that association comes specifically with the idea that English royalty had sway over the natural world even far away, indicated further by the Royal Menagerie.359 As the sounds of animal species shift, we see a transformation of the space itself. Like Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Prospero has taken a perceived dull world and brought it to life, animating spirits when there were none before. Through magic, colonialism, 357 Shakespeare, I.ii.341-343. 358 Shakespeare, II.i.356-58. 359 For more info on this idea, check out Pastoreau’s The Bear: History of a Fallen King, where he talks about the cultural history of the lion as the “king of beasts” in the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods. 164 and mastery over animals, Prospero shows the promise of a man-made paradise in this play. The figure of the animal in The Tempest begs for a relation to England as the homeland (domus). When Trinculo notices Caliban, likening him to a fish, he remarks on domestic curiosity about the Other / the Exotic. He claims that people back in England would love gawking at—and paying to see—a marvel like Caliban: Were I in England now, as once I was, and had but this fish painted, not a holiday fool there but would give a piece of silver. There would this monster make a man. Any strange beast there makes a man. When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.360 A lot is happening in this quote! For starters, Caliban’s identity is conflated to this hybrid of man and animal (“fish”), much like the Medieval Cynocephali were. Next, he is relegated to mere spectacle. Trinculo focuses on the image of the “piece of silver,” calling perhaps on the silver scales of a fish alongside the circular object of Renaissance capitalism. And a clear hierarchy of spectacle is constructed here: Trinculo argues that a disabled and impoverished beggar is less of a spectacle worthy of attention than “a dead Indian.” This attends to the draw of the macabre, true, but it also addresses the exoticism of racial alterity for the early modern English imagination. In many ways, this echoes Caius’ claims about exotic hounds: “A beggerly beast brought out of barbarous borders, fro[m] the vttermost countryes Northward, &c. we stare at, we gase at, we muse, we maruaile at, like an asse of Cumanum, like Thales with the brasen shancks, 360 Shakespeare, II.ii.28-34. 165 like the man in the Moone.”361 Just as Caius connects the foreign animal with the racial spectacle, so too does Trinculo ponder the capital worth of Caliban through this opportunistic lens. But one aspect that has been hinted at throughout this chapter, especially through Trinculo’s speech here, is the specific species Caliban is most likened to, the fish. Even aside from Caliban’s own characterization as part-fish in the narrative, fish matter in The Tempest in terms of animal-human interactions. One example is in the threat of the sea which sets the scene for the play. When Alonso early on expresses fear his son drowned in the sea, he describes this fear in animal terms: “O, thou mine heir / Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish / Hath made his meal on thee?”362 In this quote, he names the fish “strange,” as a kind of opposite to “Of Naples and of Milan,” hinting at the xenophobic sentiments later expressed toward Caliban (and hinting at the animal imagery they will evoke, for, after all, they call him a strange fish, too). But we also see that animal-human interactions shape the significance of the fish in the play, namely through fishing. At one point, Caliban speaks to his own relationship to fish in the island: “I’ll fish for thee [Trinculo and Stephano] and get thee wood enough.”363 And he later sings, “No more dams I’ll make for fish.”364 As Fitz says, “Prospero and company seem to have been living on fresh-brook mussels and whatever fish Caliban could trap in his dams.”365 So, we see how fish make up the foundational diet for Prospero, Miranda, and Caliban on the island before the next ship even crashes there. However, when we see how Caliban is specifically coded as a fish and what the cultural implications of that association are, the figure of Caliban 361 Caius p. 37. 362 The Tempest, II.i.117-19. 363 Tempest, II.ii.167. 364 Ii.ii.186. 365 Fitz, p. 43. 166 shifts from mere domestic spectacle to an opportunist reference to the English domestication of American Indian peoples and lands. However, the most significant use of fish in the play is of course the characterization of Caliban as fish or part-fish. Trinculo gives a long speech upon seeing Caliban: What have we here, a man or a fish? Dead or alive? A fish, he smells like a fish—a very ancient and fishlike smell, a kind of not-of-the-newest poor-John. A strange fish…. Legged like a man, and his fins like arms! Warm, o’ my troth! I do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.366 In this quote, we have that echoed phrase of “a strange fish,” repeating what Alonso had said to describe the threats to his potentially drowning son. Trinculo relies on sensory details to depict the fish-ness of Caliban, focusing on smell—”smells like a fish” and “a very ancient / and fishlike smell”—to construct this hybridization between fish and animal. And those sensory details produce this narrative of taxonomical observation. He begins with a process of questioning: “What have we here, a man or a fish? Dear or / alive?” Immediately after questioning, he names what he sees as a “fish,” based solely on that sensory observation of smell. It’s only after Caliban is “identified” that Trinculo actually describes Caliban’s appearance more. After this more nuanced—though no less problematic—description, Trinculo revises his initial naming: “I do now let loose my / opinion, hold it no longer: this is no fish, but 366 Shakespeare, II.ii.25-37. 167 an / islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt.” And Caliban stands there, passive, while someone names and then re-names him. Just as Prospero names his hounds, Trinculo names Caliban. However, the difference between these two scenes is that Prospero gives identity to the hounds, giving them a proper name, one that makes them distinct from one another. Trinculo, however, gives Caliban a common name, a “strange fish,” noting the opportunity for capitalist investment and nothing more. What happens here is an echo of Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis. Trinculo takes this very prelapsarian role as a steward of animals, taking a position of power—advancing a power to name—to subjugate Caliban. And even later, Trinculo continues the fish rhetoric: “Why, thou debauched / fish, thou! Was there ever man a coward that hath / drunk so much sack as I today? Wilt thou tell a / monstrous lie, being but half a fish and half a / monster?”367 However, what’s particularly interesting to note is the fact that Caliban is named a fish as opposed to any other animal. What signifies a fish in early modern England? While fish took up a whole volume of Conrad Gesner’s History of Animals (which Topsell translates and summarizes in A History of Four-Footed Beasts), Topsell does not lend fish a similar focus in his manual. Rather, fish are interspersed regularly through other sections, particularly in sections where a predator eats a specific kind of fish. However, the first real mention of fish as unique in any way happens in the epistle of the text, focusing on the Biblical uniqueness of fish: Another thing that perswadeth me in the necessarie vse of this history, that it was deuine vvas the preseruation of al creatures liuing, which are ingendred by copulation (except Fishes) in the arke of Noah: vnto whom it pleased the creator at that time to infuse an instinct, and bring them home to man as to a fold.368 367 Tempest, III.ii.28-32. 368 Topsell, p. vi. 168 Here, we see an early modern understanding that fish are exempt from many of the markedly distinct qualities of other animals. Because fish were not included in Noah’s ark, Topsell reads fish as not worthy of “preseruation.” Of course, their lack of need for “preseruation” could be easily explained by fish being fine in the water; after all, it’s only the land-dwelling animals that would need to be preserved. However, the focus on non-fish goes beyond just preservation. They are given “an instinct.” They are not brought “home to man as to a fold.” By extension, as seen in the lack of a separate section for fish as Gesner had made, Topsell shows that fish are not necessary for an understanding of animal history and therefore not needed to enter “the fold.” They somehow fall outside the typical realm of animal husbandry that other animals fall into. And the word “fish” itself seems to be a broad category in the period. As Topsell notes, “you [his readership] hold opinion that the Beauer or Otter is a fish (as many haue beleeued).”369 But generally, we get the sense that fish exist solely as a food source. While Topsell notes a few poisonous species, he spends little time talking about the act of fishing and associates them with a foul “smell,” scaled skin, and cold. He characterizes them as intrinsically different from beings of “flesh,” noting that flesh and fish are almost diametric opposites. And, perhaps following the metaphysical and cosmological logic of the Great Chain of Being, they are the furthest from God, signifying their lack of importance and their distance from man. Many of these ideas connect directly to the characterization of Caliban in The Tempest. Thinking on the divine, Stephano once thinks he hears Caliban calling his name and says, “Doth thy other mouth call me? Mercy, mercy, / this is a devil, and no monster!”370 In these lines, Stephano suggests Caliban could be worse than mere monster, and that worse-ness implies a closer proximity to the Devil, a geospatial proximity to the earth and farther distance from the 369 Ibid., p. 171. 370 Tempest, II.ii.100-01. 169 heavens. In this logic, it would make sense that fish—and therefore, Caliban—would be closer to Hell than Heaven, closer than mammals or birds. The physical attributes linked to fish in Topsell appear throughout The Tempest as well. Trinculo, after all, focuses on the smell of the fish, much as Topsell does: “[A] very ancient and fishlike smell,” Trinculo says. But understanding the natural descriptions of fish at the time only help us in an analysis of Caliban so much. Topsell helps us to understand Caliban’s place in a natural-cosmological order reinforced through the play’s focus on Caliban being a fish, making him monster and one close in the hierarchy to being a devil. What will prove more productive is an examination of fish in more colonial texts, particularly a return to the Jamestown documents. In George Percy’s “Observations gathered out of a discourse of the plantation of the….Virginia” (1606), a river is characterized as a faunal paradise: “There are many branches of this river which run flowing through the woods with great plenty of fish of all kinds; as for sturgeon, all the world cannot be compared to it.”371 This setting is full of opportunity for commerce for the English colonist. This melding of commerce and nature is furthered in the Council in Virginia’s letter to London: “We are set down 80 miles within a river for breadth, sweetness of water, length navigable up into the country, deep and bold channel so stored with sturgeon and other sweet fish as no man’s fortune hath ever possessed the like and, as we think, if more may be wished in a river it will be found.”372 Further, in the writings of John Smith, too, fish takes a special place as consumed and traded animal. In “A Map of Virginia,” Smith begins the document with a list of words from “their language.” 371 George Percy, “Observations gathered out of a discourse of the plantation of the southern colony in Virginia by the English,” 1606, Purchas 1625d:1685, Arber 1884a:lvii, Brown 1890:152, Quinn 1967, Barbour 1969:129, in Jamestown Narratives, p. 96. 372 The Council in Virginia, “Letter to the Council of Virginia,” 1607, Northumberland Papers: Alnwick MSS, volume 7, Brown 1890: 106, Barbour 1969:78, in Jamestown Narratives, p. 125. 170 While he gives words for various numbers, measurement of time, and social words like “friend” and “enemy,” most of the words in this list are focused on trade and weaponry: “arrows,” “swords,” “land,” “copper,” “iron,” and “skins.” What makes this interesting for our work on animals is that the only animals that appear in the list are “fish” and “sturgeon,” indicating a prioritization of using that word among American Indians.373 Likewise in The General History, Smith says, “Sir George Somers….discovered those broken isles [the Bermudas] where how plentifully they lived with fish and flesh. What a paradise this is to inhabit, what industry they used to build their 2 ships, how happily they did transport them to James Town in Virginia.”374 We see in these various sections a focus on fish being tied to the reading of the New World as a paradise. And, especially in Smith’s latter quote, we see England’s perceived relationship to and responsibility to a foreign paradise: “What a paradise this is to inhabit, what industry they used.” Fish factor into this paradise as provision and therefore a symbol of natural wealth in this space. Edward Test connects Caliban to natural wealth, too, in “The Tempest and the Newfoundland Cod Fishery” (2008). When Trinculo characterizes Caliban’s smell, he compares the scent to that of the newest “Poor John,” what Test shows was a common name for cod at the time.375 He argues that “the lowly codfish contributed to the highest concerns of the nation state: domestic stability, national security, and foreign trade.”376 In this reading, Test labels Caliban both “laborer and product” and claims that the island from the play “represents the new economics of global exchange, stressing the importance of (and dependence upon) uncolonized 373 John Smith, “A Map of Virginia with a Description of the Country, the Commodities, People, Government, and Religion,” 1612, Smith 1612, in Jamestown Narratives, pp. 208-09. 374 Smith, The General History: The Third Book—The Proceedings and accidents of the English colony in Virginia, extracted from the authors following by William Simons, Doctor of Divinity, London, 1624, Smith 1612, Smith 1624, in Jamestown Narratives, p. 341. 375 Edward M. Test, “The Tempest and the Newfoundland Cod Fishery,” in Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, eds. Barbara Sebek and Stephen Deng, Palgrave: 2008, p. 201. 376 Ibid., 202. 171 foreign spaces for the growth of the early modern nation state.”377 For Test then, the economic possibilities of the New World relied on the dependence on the cod industry, marking Caliban— and the island as a whole—as a site for potential for natural wealth, helping to evolve and grow the British nation state. Perhaps, most telling for our reading of Caliban though is the natural descriptions provided by William Strachey in A True Reportory. Here, he catalogs the types of fish found around the shore: [D]aily [we] hooked great store of many kinds, as excellent angelfish, salmon, peal, bonitos, stingray, cavally, snappers, hogfish, sharks, dogfish, pilchards, mullets, and rockfish, of which be divers kinds. And of these our governor dried and salted and, barreling them up, brought to sea five hundred….I may boldly say, we have taken five thousand of small and great fish at one hale, as pilchards, breams, mullets, rockfish, etc., and other kinds for which we have no names.378 In these words, Strachey focuses on species diversity to paint this picture of natural variety. He focuses on the numbers of five hundred and five thousand, showing abundance in this New World. However, Strachey follows up with the kind of sensory detail we have seen in The Tempest and Topsell: For they [the “better fish” of the New World], sucking of the very water which descendeth from the high hills mingled with juice and verdor of the palms, cedars, and other sweet woods—which likewise make the herbs, roots, and weeds sweet which grow about the banks—become thereby both fat and wholesome, as must those fish needs be 377 Ibidem. 378 William Strachey, A True Reportory of the wrack and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, knight, upon and from the Islands of the Bermudas; his coming to Virginia, and the estate of that colony then, and after under the government of the Lord La Warre, 1610, Purchas 1625d:1734, in Jamestown Narratives, p. 397. 172 gross, slimy, and corrupt the blood which feed in fens, marishes, ditches, muddy pools, and near unto places where much filth is daily cast forth.379 Strachey’s words reveal the early modern awareness that a fish’s habitat could affect both its smell and its taste. In the paradise of the New World, of course, the fish would taste better compared to the mires and marshes of East Anglia and the mountains of the Welsh Marches, Midlands, and North England. So, fish could be read as two-sided, foul or fair depending on its environment. In the case of reading a cohesive meaning out of the fish in these colonial documents, there is the same dichotomy between prelapsarian and postlapsarian imagery, and domestication shapes that dichotomy. Fish became an animal symbol for the opportunity and wealth in this new paradise for colonists. And, as Strachey suggests, it is one that reveals the differences in environment between England and Virginia. But at the same time, the paradise is read in terms of man’s perceived divine responsibility of stewards of the land. Domestication shapes the way colonists viewed their relationship to paradise. Reading this knowledge into Caliban, we see that the people arriving on Prospero’s island were coming to a place with a history of domestication. Gone were the “barren places” of the island and Sycorax’s “toads, beetles, [and] bats” from before Prospero’s arrival, and now the isle is managed by Prospero where the ground can look “lush and lusty.” Caliban fits in as a representation of the undomesticated island as well as a figure who needs to be domesticated. In Prospero’s attempts to teach him, we see the futility of the action, a pessimistic—or at least critical—representation of forced education of American Indians by the English colonists. We see in the animalization of Caliban as a fish that same awareness of fish representing their 379 Ibid., 397-98. 173 environment. In this case, Caliban, with his pungent smell, indicates the reality of the island without Prospero’s magic. And, the spectacle of Caliban as part-fish gestures to both the exoticism seen in American Indian peoples and the perceived lowness of Caliban’s status as subaltern. In this way, The Tempest speaks to issues of colonialism through its use of piscine imagery and concerns of domestication. The play’s characterization of both Caliban and the island engages with these contemporary discourses of domestication and colonialism, ultimately linking the two. Understanding the ways that the play (and early modern documents of the New World) collides animal domestication and human colonialism is crucial for analyzing the ways that the New World was ontologically constructed in the early modern English mind. Furthermore, it reveals that contemporary interactions with animals in England formed a part of the construction of the New World Other in the early modern period. Especially in The Tempest, where Caliban is both labeled a fish and judged by his management of fish, we see the construction of a paradisiac, faunal space marked by, populated by, and managed by the New World Other, still labeled as needing “nurture” or “art.” While scholarship of The Tempest has often glossed over the significance of animal domestication in the framing of colonialism in the play and early modern texts of the New World, texts of animal domestication informed the ways that England viewed the New World, shaping the perceptions around economic opportunity, natural wealth, and cultural alterity. If the play is really about “art and nature,” as Kermode argues, then domestication is the framing principle behind that binary in the play. 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