ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues some of the various aspects of early modern thought concerning the interrelations of life, excrement, food, and earth as they contribute to both a social leveling among humans, and a species leveling between humans and animals. With its presentation of excremental life, Antony and Cleopatra elicits a green reading that questions humans' ability to rise out of the dung heap and attain a nobleness of life that sets them above the animals. The chapter looks at the various historical contexts of excremental life and nourishment in Shakespeare's England and Egypt. Antony and Cleopatra alerts people to the excremental life that also nourished and was nourished by the earth. As Susan Signe Morrison has recently written, "Excrement carries hierarchies with it, but it reminds us that these are delusions, impositions imposed on matter we all produce". Characters draw on excremental life as they imagine forms of leveling and the effacement of distinctions.
