ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that The Winter's Tale's creaturely continuum has been largely invisible not only because most academic Shakespeareans live under Latour's "modern constitution", but also because what becomes visible in the scene is deeply unappealing to those who believe in human equality and rights. The sheep-shearing scene in The Winter's Tale shows us that the Clown, a character without a family or personal name, has a beast's "case", a case that marks him as belonging to the creatures he tends rather than to the dominant humans he fears. If Renaissance noblemen were marked as elite by their armor and their velvets and lace, men and women who worked with their hands were marked as common and even as beasts by their attire and their trades and environs. The nonhuman creatures mentioned in the scene have different statuses. Some of them are symbolic, some figurative, and some real within the play's world.
