ABSTRACT
Admiration of dogs as charismatic and signally loyal animals supplanted (not entirely) their earlier derision as sycophantic and abject. Authoritative early modern accounts of canine nature by Caius (1570) and Topsell (1607) find contemptible behavior across varieties. Shakespeare, meanwhile, uses dog invective both to disparage particular groups—non-Christians, flatterers, desperate lovers—and to launch a universal attack on human dignity. While Timon of Athens is more overtly misanthropic, human/dog reversals also expose human nature to ridicule and scorn in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which features a dog onstage. Despite Proteus’s conclusion that human nature lacks only constancy, it is rather doglike fawning on indifferent or worse masters that most compromises human perfection. Showing how Two Gentlemen’s characters become cynomorphic to varying degrees, this reading contributes to a growing consensus that finds Shakespeare profoundly skeptical about human exceptionalism and self-sufficiency. More broadly, this chapter illustrates how an open-ended yet dogged posthumanism, rooted in aspects of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, might provide the best counter to an objectionable humanism descended from the same periods.
