ABSTRACT
In a field organized both around the great character of Shakespeare as author and dedicated, understandably, to his characters large and small, which is to say a field dedicated to persons, population has a defining role in the literature and theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While much of the historical work on population treats the age of Malthus (and later, a primary and underexplored source of population thinking is to be found in the wide world of early modern creatures). Accounting for creatures allows population to appear in its positivity as a prodigious, and sometimes terrifying, numerousness that can appear in tension with creaturely articulations of civic order, as when birds or bees hold their own parliaments. References to the numerousness of creatures abound across a wide range of early modern disciplines—husbandry manuals and works of natural history, to be sure, but also political treatises and works of literature and theater. As such, it is more useful to designate all such thinking as an early form of population management that cuts, if not indifferently, across species designations and that intersects with a variety of ways of thinking about social groups and political hierarchies. Shakespeare’s works manage creaturely populations with a familiar and proverbial grammar of collectivity embedded in familiar terms like herds, swarms, and flocks, and the many and the multitude. Such terms offer traces of how Shakespeare’s era imagined what we now might term population studies or demographics but they also index the ambivalences of group formations, the tensions between individuation and homogeneity, and a persistent anxiety about being overwhelmed by number.
