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The Bard’s beasts

What to do on a summer afternoon in London? Around 1600 you could cross the Thames by bridge or boat and take in a show in Southwark, the Elizabethan entertainment district. Once there, you had a choice. You could either see the latest play by Shakespeare, Dekker or Jonson or watch bears with names like Sackerson, Harry Hunks, Nan Stiles or Bess of Bromley be chained to a stake and set upon by specially trained mastiff dogs. The culture that set the stage for Juliet and her Romeo, for Hamlet, Falstaff and Rosalind also had a taste for animals tearing each other to pieces. Inconceivable as it may seem today, these cruel spectacles were evidently considered good fun not only by the man and woman on the street, but also by Queen Elizabeth herself and her successor, James I. James had the royal menagerie fitted out with a baiting ring for the famous Tower lions’ fights. ‘It was a sport very pleasant’, notes one observer. Other contemporary sources speak of ‘good contentment’, ‘jolly pastimes’, ‘great amusement’. Only Puritan moralists objected, but they were no less hostile to that other form of worldly dissipation, the theatre.

For Puritans, there was not much difference between play-acting and bear-baiting anyway. The two entertainments took place in very similar venues, sometimes even in one and the same venue. The Hope Theatre, for example, served as ‘a play house for stage plays on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and for the baiting of the bears on Tuesdays and Thurs-days, the stage being made to take up and down when they please’. The truly remarkable thing is that this was much more than just coexistence. Play-acting and bear-baiting were joined in active collusion. Appealing to the same audience, they stood not just side by side or competitively against each other but, in the literal sense of the Latin colludere, together.

What I have tried to work out in Stage, Stake and Scaffold is how this collusion affects Shakespeare’s theatre, especially how it affects one of Shakespeare’s central concerns, the question of ‘the human’, his explorations into the nature and workings of humanness as a psychological, ethical and political category. With Shakespeare’s stage so physically close and similar to the stake of the bear-baiting rings and to the scaffolds of public execution, how did the similar form of the three types of spectacle affect their content? If their medium of presentation had such family resemblance, could this fail to colour their message? My answer is no. There is indeed a very strong spill-over that infuses Shakespeare’s characters with a degree of animality, which later interpretations would categorically efface.

There is indeed a very strong spill-over that infuses Shakespeare’s characters with a degree of animality

When René Descartes, in his Discourse on the Method (1637), severed the bond between humans and other creatures by demoting animals to the status of living machines, the highly permeable boundary between ‘man’ and ‘beast’ that we find in Shakespeare becomes insurmountable. As a consequence, Shakespeare’s teeming multitude of animal references came to be regarded as merely metaphorical and a stable marker of moral, social and ontological differentiation: animal is everything man is not or ought not to be. But the notions of humanness embodied by Shakespeare’s tragic heroes and heroines rely just as much on inclusion as on exclusion of the animal. Humans are like (and in important ways unlike) animals; at the same time they are animals.

Hesitating on the brink of murdering King Duncan, Macbeth declares: ‘I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none’. He will, of course, dare to do more. Fully in keeping with how his adversaries see him, as ‘hell-hound’ or ‘rarer monster’, Macbeth’s crime registers as a fall into bestiality. In Act 5, only two steps away from decapitation, Macbeth assumes the role of the baited bear in a gesture of defiance: ‘They have tied me to a stake. I cannot fly, / But bear-like I must fight the course’ (5.7.1-2). As the bear-tyrant is cornered, the stage of the Globe converges with the bear-garden.

Only moments later, Macduff displays, as stage tradition demands, the head of the slain Macbeth on a pole. Here is the executioner’s scaffold as the third perceptual frame of action. This final image of draconian justice could not possibly have been lost on an audience which, returning to the city after the show, would have had to pass a similar display of skewered heads adorning the southern gate of London Bridge. The lopping off of Macbeth’s head is a drastic reaffirmation of the species boundary: the beast is expelled, the reign of humanity re-established. But the final condemnation of the ‘butcher and his fiend-like queen’ (5.11.35) seems glibly reductive because the play has so hauntingly impressed on us the humanness of the bestial couple. The Macbeths are the most fully realized individuals in the play. The ‘more’ that pushes them beyond the human paradoxically also gives them ‘more’ humanness.

Featured image credit: ‘Bear-baiting as practised in the time of Queen Elizabeth’ by John Cassell. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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