Not only did the Bard speak to human nature and love, but he also spoke to philosophy, epistemology, and sociology, according to four Modern Language Association (MLA) scholars speaking at a panel arranged by the Division on Shakespeare. They argued at this year’s MLA Convention that Shakespeare used complicated ecosystemic imagery to evoke concepts of Atomism, to delineate a continuum of animals, to explore nature’s indecipherability, and to comment on power struggles between social groups.
Hamlet. The reflections of the melancholy protagonist Hamlet reflect the tenets of atomism, argued North Carolina State University Professor Christopher Crosbie. “If Hamlet seeks to reconstruct the material history of skulls, he does so in part in order to imagine future transformations in the corporeal that despite the degradation of decomposition nonetheless promise the retention of a type of identity, an imperviousness to suffering. He imagined, in short, what I would like to call a teleologically-inflective atomist materialism,” said the assistant professor of English. Such a philosophy shares the three atomist mores: “traceable, identifiable, and free of suffering.”
The Winter’s Tale. Referring to Act 4 Scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale, Professor Rebecca Ann Bach demonstrated how modern translations obscure or modify animal references in Shakespeare. “For my purposes today, the most interesting nonhuman animal reference made invisible by modernized spelling is actually related to sheep-shearing,” said the University of Alabama at Birmingham scholar. She explains,
“The preface to Autolycus’ specific threats of torture for the shepherdess’ son is his fictional account of the general attitude of a people toward their crime. He says, ‘Some say he shall be stoned but that death is too soft for him, say I. Draw our throne into a sheepcote! All deaths are too few, the sharpest too easy.’
“Modernized spelling additions render the word sheepcote as a compound word whose second syllable is “C-O-T-E” and some then gloss the word as a pen for sheep, but in the folio we find two words: the word sheep a hyphen and then a second word, coat, “C-O-A-T.” This hyphenated word appears to be a classic example of…‘semantic slippage.’ It means both a pen for a sheep and the coat of a sheep—either the fleece that the shepherds are sheering off the sheep, or the skin of the sheep.”
Thus, “Autolycus then may be saying that the shepherd should be punished for pulling the prince into the skin of a sheep, for turning his outside into that of a non-human pedestrian animal. This possibility for the word and the speech is reinforced by the pattern of reference to skins in his conversation with the shepherdess’ son and in the scene generally,” she said.
(In the play, Autolycus devises a harsh punishment for the shepherdess’ son, declaring that he is to be “flayed alive; then ‘nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp’s nest; then stand till he be three quarters and a dram dead; then recovered again with aqua-vitæ or some other hot infusion; then, raw as he is, and in hottest day prognostication proclaims, shall he be set against a brick-wall, the sun looking with a southward eye upon him, where he is to behold him with flies blown to death.”).
Timon of Athens. “When Timon renames himself Misanthropos and departs Athens for the woods, he displaces himself from the urban interpersonal systems of Athens—citizenship, status, credit—to seek as unmediated a non-human environment as he can find,” said Villanova University Professor Lauren Shohet.
“Refusing all human interchange vitiates our constant systems from making meaning. Timon’s forest is not pastoral nor is it romance nor is it really a forest,” she argued, continuing, “The play’s bareness conveys the difficulty of representing Timon as ontologically subject to the forest rather than intersubjectively linked to other people.”
The Tempest. At last year’s MLA Convention, Professor Scott Maisano of the University of Massachusetts at Boston explained how Aldous Huxley based his Brave New World off of Shakespeare’s Tempest. This year, Laurie Shannon of Northwestern University read a paper by Professor Crystal Lynn Bartolovich, unable to make it due to “budget cuts,” which explains the multiple meanings for “roarer” within the play.
At the beginning of the play, the mariners fighting the “roaring” sea have courtiers underfoot who undermine their efforts to save the ship, Shannon notes, quoting Bartolovich’s paper. Thus, the boatswain first tells them “Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin: silence! trouble us not,” a command socially unacceptable given the stature of those the boatswain is addressing.
“Context puts us in mind of the wind and the sea here of course, but we should recall that the term “roarers” was frequently deployed in the period to describe not only natural but also social disturbance,” Shannon quotes Bartolovich. The term at the time, she said, “often found its way into official chronicles of challenges to authority perceived to be serious.”
“Roar, in other words, manifested itself in moments of threat to order—natural or historical—times of potential sea change in the language of The Tempest, where the mariners by their labors against and with nature apparently undermined social order as much as the waves do,” said Professor Shannon.
Shakespeare then makes the phrase doubly ironic when those watching the play learn that the natural (sea) “roarers” are conjured up by Prospero, a “displaced Duke” who, as Shannon quotes Bartolovich, “cares very much indeed about the name of King.”
Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
