ABSTRACT
Insects have traditionally been marked, according to Eric Brown, as “humanity’s Other,” “imaginatively as well as apparently (spatially, temporally) different,” often viewed as adversaries to man as they elicit unease (xi–xv). Early modern literary accounts of insects demand a consideration of mankind’s relationship to miniature life forms. After all, size matters in the Renaissance. Natural historians, poets, and theologians alike during the period wondered and marveled at the tiniest of earth’s creatures in relation to both four-footed beasts and man. In his Preface to The Theater of Insects (1634, 1658), Thomas Moffett asks, “Where is nature more to be seen than in the smallest matters, where she is entirely all?” (Ffff5r), while Johannes Jonstonus’s An History of the Wonderful Things of Nature Set Forth (1657, tr. John Rowland) notes that there is “no where a more remarkable piece of Nature’s Workmanship; and Nature is no where total, more than in the least Creatures … in these that are so small, and almost as nothing, what reason, what force, what unspeakable perfection is there?” (Hhr1). Perfection can be seen, in other words, by looking at the complexity of miniature life.
However, in recent critical conversations the insect rarely makes an appearance, despite evidence of this fascination with insects in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Early moderns lived with insects on a daily basis, as they were the domestic creature (despite being undomesticated and uncontrollable), and are certainly at odds with charismatic megafauna and other larger life forms. Insects are often implied creatures on the early modern stage, not visible but certainly omnipresent, and Shakespeare’s plays often magnify the diminutive. The chapter considers the Shakespearean insect theater, or what Moffett called a “School of Insects” (Ggggv), paying particular attention to the issues of scale and magnitude. I seek to answer how we should read “real” insects in the plays—the fly (Titus Andronicus), the flea (1 Henry IV), and the butterfly (Coriolanus)—in relation to imagined insects or those used as rhetorical devices or character names—the bee (Henry V), the ant (King Lear), the beetle (The Tempest), and Moth, a diminutive page in Love’s Labour’s Lost and a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This chapter thus examines the actual and imagined space the smallest of earth’s creatures occupy on Shakespeare’s stage and considers how audiences, no strangers to insect life themselves, might have related to the plethora of insect references in his plays.
