This dissertation addresses the profound influence that the shared experience of humans and animals had on the poetics of early modern drama. With reference to a selection of early modern comedies and a range of non-literary texts that includes natural history encyclopedias and animal husbandry manuals, I argue that the vernacular knowledge of animals shaped the early modern imagination generally and the early modern playwright's imagination particularly. I propose an original approach to early modern literature, one which urges integrating a consideration of the real-world referent for animal representation, the collective life lived by humans and animals, and the poetics of early modern drama. / In my introduction, I take up the dissertation's general claims about the ethical and historiographical dimension of interpreting early modern animal representation. I continue to work at this theoretical level in Chapter One, where I consider how the animal-focused disciplines of sociobiology and ecology can help and hinder readers interpret early modern drama. In the following chapters, I work closely with a selection of early modern plays, contexts, and literary and theatrical devices. Chapter Two focuses on a web of comic plays that feature instantiations of animals in stage properties and actor's gestures. The web of plays in Chapter Two includes the anonymous Mucedorus; Lording Barry's Ram Alley; John Fletcher's Women Pleased; Thomas Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament ; William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton; Shakespeare's Love's Labor Lost; and Shakespeare and Fletcher's Two Noble Kinsmen. Chapter Three is devoted to the anthropomorphism of the allegorical representations of animals in Ben Jonson's plays Volpone and The Alchemist. In my reading of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream in Chapter Four, I move on to consider animals whose representation is removed from reality not merely by anthropomorphism, but also by magic. All of these instances of representation draw animals into a sphere of existence that is commonly understood as the exclusive domain of humans at the same time that they draw humans in the other direction, which is to say into the muck and mire that is the origin of all life.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.115607 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Margalit, Yael. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 003129774, proquestno: AAINR66547, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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