ABSTRACT
This chapter examines early modern diseases widely assumed to be epizootic, if not zoonotic—that is, diseases characterized by high degrees of contagion that may or may not cross-species bounds. Because the etiology of animals diseases was a subject of crucial interest in the sixteenth century, works like John Fitzherbert’s Book of Husbandry (1534), Girolamo Fracastoro’s comparative treatises on human and animal diseases (1546), and Leonard Mascall’s The First Book of Cattle (1587) provide an important context for understanding how Shakespeare and his contemporaries understood health, disease, and what animal studies scholars now call species identity. By the time Shakespeare wrote his first plays, Europe had a recorded history of at least nine major cattle plagues in the sixteenth century—roughly one a decade—and at least 50 years of organized efforts to understand and manage the diseases.
In the first half of this chapter, I argue that murrains (mass infections and die-offs of domesticated animals), like human plagues, raised debates about the nature of animal as well as human contagion: were diseases divine retribution, demonic violence, or the result of natural causes? Like the bubonic plague, murrains affecting cattle and sheep were often attributed to witchcraft or “bad air.” Naturalistic explanations for diseases affecting livestock—putrefaction, carrion eating, and others—led to proposals for remedies that mirror those advocated for human plague victims. Sick animals are to be separated from the healthy, and dead animals must be buried (although sometimes only after being flayed and their skin sold to the tanner). “It hath been a common … custom,” writes Joseph Blagrave in Epitome of the Art of Husbandry (1669), to “take the bare head of the same beast, and put it on a long Pole, and set it on a Hedge fast bound to a stake by the High-way side, that every man that rideth or goeth by that way, may see and know … that there is sickness of Cattel in that Township.” In such passages one sees efforts to manage murrains through quarantines reminiscent of the actions taken to prevent the spread of the bubonic plague.
To the extent that rinderpest, anthrax, and other animal plagues cross-species bounds—to the extent that they jumped from cow to sheep, or sheep to human—these diseases also raise questions about species identity. In the second half of my chapter, I turn to Shakespeare’s works and key passages where animal afflictions serve as models for human cognitive and emotional disorders. The most common and straightforward example of this phenomenon is rabies, to which Shakespeare refers in Antony and Cleopatra (V.2), Merry Wives of Windsor (IV.2), and King Lear: Lear’s diminishing wits are marked by his fear of rabid dogs with “tooth that poisons if it bite” (II.4.24). Significantly, Shakespeare also demonstrates a familiarity with disorders affecting livestock. Biondello’s description of Petruchio’s “hipp’d” horse is a virtual catalog of afflictions to which equine flesh was heir: “possess’d with the glanders and like to mose in the chin, troubled with the lampas, infected with the fashions, full of windgall, sped with spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoil’d with the staggers, begnawn with the bots” (xxxx). Glanders (or farcy) is a bacterial disease, like rinderpest and anthrax, capable of wiping out entire generations of livestock; gid, which leads to brain disease, is caused by a parasite. Both diseases, in different ways, provided a vocabulary for human self-diagnosis. The word “giddy” appears over 30 times in Shakespeare’s plays and is associated with the most characteristic symptom of gid: the animal turns in circles. When the Widow in The Taming of the Shrew says to Katherina “He that is giddy thinks the world turn round,” she invokes centuries of everyday knowledge about animal disease and formalized through early modern animal husbandry texts. Read with and against Shakespeare, these descriptions of zoonotic diseases offer a way of understanding the porous lines between human and beast as they were understood by Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
