ABSTRACT
According to Audrey Yoder, doing things the hard way before the invention of digital search engines, William Shakespeare makes more than four thousand references to animals. When counting up possible parts in Shakespeare’s plays for living animals, scholars seem to have forgotten about Cleopatra’s asp. To Shakespeare’s audience, so immersed in Christian and biblical iconography, the connection between snake and woman would immediately bring to mind Eve in the Garden of Eden, and so connotations of sexuality and sin. According to Shakespeare’s contemporary Edward Topsell, citing the Roman natural historian Aelian in his 1608 Historie of Serpents, the asp possesses “the greatest venom, and most dangerous of all other” Accordingly, when Shakespeare’s characters are looking, hearing, feeling, and perceiving, it is these material substances that are in operation; when they are affected by the sight or proximity or sound of animals it is because an interchange of spirits—of animating vapors—has taken place between the nonhuman and the human animal.
