World Of Shakespeare Animals Monsters

CITES THE REFERENCES TO ANIMALS AND MONSTERS FOUND IN SKAKESPEARE'S WORKS.

Animals, as Lévi-Strauss wrote, are good to think with. This collection addresses and reassesses the variety of ways in which animals were used and thought about in Renaissance culture, challenging contemporary as well as historic views of the boundaries and hierarchies humans presume the natural world to contain. Taking as its starting point the popularity of speaking animals in sixteenth-century literature and ending with the decline of the imperial Ménagerie during the French Revolution, Renaissance Beasts uses the lens of human-animal relationships to view issues as diverse as human status and power, diet, civilization and the political life, religion and anthropocentrism, spectacle and entertainment, language, science and skepticism, and domestic and courtly cultures. Within these pages scholars from a variety of disciplines discuss numerous kinds of texts--literary, dramatic, philosophical, religious, political--by writers including Calvin, Montaigne, Sidney, Shakespeare, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke. Through analysis of these and other writers, Renaissance Beasts uncovers new and arresting interpretations of Renaissance culture and the broader social assumptions glimpsed through views on matters such as pet ownership and meat consumption. Renaissance Beasts is certainly about animals, but of the many species discussed, it is ultimately humankind that comes under the greatest scrutiny.

Shakespeare’s plays have a long and varied performance history. The relevance of his plays in literary studies cannot be understated, but only recently have scholars been looking into the presence and significance of animals within the canon. Readers will quickly find—without having to do extensive research—that the plays are teeming with animals! In this Handbook, Karen Raber and Holly Dugan delve deep into Shakespeare’s World to illuminate and understand the use of animals in his span of work. This volume supplies a valuable resource, offering a broad and thorough grounding in the many ways animal references and the appearance of actual animals in the plays can be interpreted. It provides a thorough overview; demonstrates rigorous, original research; and charts new frontiers in the field through a broad variety of contributions from an international group of well-known and respected scholars.

This encyclopaedic account of animals in Shakespeare's plays and poems, provides readers with a much-needed resource by which to navigate the recent outpouring of critical and historical work on the topic. This dictionary extends its coverage to include insects, fish and mythic creatures, as well as the places, practices and lore pertaining to all animal-oriented experiences of early modern life. It emphasizes the role of animality in defining character, and is attentive to the instabilities of the human-animal boundary as they were theatrically represented, exploited and interrogated, but it is also concerned with the material presence of animals on stage and in everyday life in Shakespeare's world. The volume is a new tool for instructors, but is also a resource for critics and scholars in the many disciplines engaged with animal studies, posthumanist theory, ecostudies and cultural studies.

Shakespeare Among the Animals examines the role of animal-metaphor in the Shakespeare stage, particularly as such metaphor serves to underwrite various forms of social difference. Working through texts such as Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream , Jonson's Volpone , and Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside , different chapters of the study focus upon the allegedly natural character of femininity, masculinity, and ethnicity, while a fourth chapter considers the nature of the natural world itself as it appears on the Renaissance stage. Addressing each of these topics in turn, Shakespeare Among the Animals explores the notions of cultural order that underlie early modern conceptions of the natural world, and the ideas of nature implicit in early modern social practice.