ABSTRACT

Early modern drama often relies on animal metaphors to describe human behavior and motivation. But there is no one form of dehumanization. Being a “beast,” as Timon of Athens demonstrates, means being an enemy of everything, particularly cities and women; being an animal, as illustrated by any number of standard metaphoric catalogs, could mean being reduced to one emblematic characteristic: proud as a lion, cruel as a wolf, meek as a sheep, and so on; and, especially in the stranger reaches of prescientific encyclopedias—the work of Thomas of Cantimpré, Bartholomew the Englishman, Olaus Magnus, Edward Topsell, among others—to be an animal could mean to escape the familiar altogether: in these works, geese hatched from barnacles, bears licked their cubs into shape, panthers lured their prey to death with their fragrant breath, eagles repeatedly restore their youth by flying at the sun. To be a beast is to be outside of all categories of custom or society, to be, in a sense, led to being nothing at all through an obsessive, hyper-rational cynicism; to be an animal, to be just a fixed, predicable thing; or, especially in the stranger reaches of natural history, such an important resource for early modern animal metaphor, to be an animal can mean is to “naturally” behave in such a way that the predictable rules of nature break altogether.