ABSTRACT
The bee occupies a unique place in early modern conceptions of the animal, experiencing both privilege and oppression in relation to the human. Following the Reformation, the once-unitary and positive model of the apian metaphor grew more nuanced and complicated as Protestants and resistance theorists sought to dismantle the notion of a specifically Catholic and monarchical hive—a top-down hierarchy, where power and influence flowed from one centralized source. Traditionally the sovereign bee had authorized unquestioned authority of the elite over workers who were expected to sacrifice and labor industriously for the good of the kingdom, and yet emerging discourses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries challenged this anthropomorphized insect paradigm to extend new perspectives on human relationships with one another and with God. Moreover, in the colonization of the New World, the shift from a Catholic doctrine of discovery to a Protestant right of conquest produced new significations not only for the native peoples Europeans sought to dominate, but also for the imported beehives that would help to shape their fraught interactions. Shakespeare was instrumental in bringing the multivalent aspects of these debates to the stage.
Here, I will follow the beeline forged through theorizations of the animal from patron saint of beekeepers, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, through Protestant cleric Edward Topsell, to contemporary environmental theorists and ecofeminists in order to examine the competing scales of servitude and authority in Shakespeare’s works. Contrary to a Cartesian model of animal studies that stakes its claim in deconstructing the fount of reason, or one that engages with the question of human exceptionalism (negative or otherwise), I will demonstrate the blurred margins between human and animal conceptions of time, particularly as they relate to the energy expended serving others vs. the time spent pursuing inclinations and preparing the community for the future. What is at stake in Shakespeare’s interventions into popular conceptions of the hive, especially in Henry IV, part 2, Henry V, and The Tempest, is the matter of whether bees’ value is instrumental—contingent upon their usefulness to human agriculture and diet—or intrinsic—based on their own merit within nature as God’s creation. I argue that Shakespeare explores the boundaries between the human and the animal in order to question what is lost and who gains when the collective is compelled to spend its time in the service of the few.
