ABSTRACT
Dogs, like bears, appeared in the London playhouses’ main amphitheater rivals, baiting arenas. Onstage dogs and offstage canine sound effects had also been used in the kinds of performances that predated and then ran alongside the London playhouses, from court masques to university, rural, or civic entertainments. William Shakespeare’s attentive, watchful, thoughtful, stubbornly inactive dog plays against previous traditions of on- or offstage dogs whose purpose is to be noisy, boisterous, exciting, and energetic, but Crab may have inaugurated a tradition of his own. Dog is thus a character and a creature perceived at one moment to be of uncertain shape or identity, at another as invisible, and at another as a self-evident dog. In particular the Dogs in Every Man Out and The Witch of Edmonton make issues of human psychology and evil, usually conceived of as internal or supernatural, alarmingly physical and corporal.
