Abstract
Karsten Stueber has argued that inferences can frame acts of imagination, the two methods working in concert to enable mindreading. For Shakespeare’s plays focused on decay—Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet—the early modern theory of spontaneous generation is an important frame for imaginative mindreading. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, each make pivotal decisions based upon their understanding of how decay functions, as a process immanent and imminent at the point of death. Helms brings together recent work in animal studies and in cognitive ecology to consider the affects that animal (and insect) life have upon human cognition. Understanding the choices Shakespeare’s characters make can require setting aside one’s own contemporary theories of decay and inferentially adopting theirs, thinking through the lives of carrion flies alongside the lives of these young lovers.
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Notes
- 1.
See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, as well as Schoenfeldt, Bodies And Selves In Early Modern England.
- 2.
Stueber, Rediscovering Empathy, 148.
- 3.
See “cerecloth, n.” OED.
- 4.
In The Whole Course of Chirurgerie (1597), Peter Lowe describes common early modern embalming practices, which included opening the body’s central cavity, “taking out all which is contayned therein as also the braynes,” exposing and cleansing the major veins and arteries “with stronge vineger, wherein hath been sodden Worme-wood, Allom and Salt,” and drying the interior of the body “with Lynnen clothes or sponges” and “sow[ing] them vp againe.” This removal of blood and internal organs did away with the parts of the body that decompose the fastest; these parts were often buried separately from the body. The embalmer would “thereafter enroll the Corps in a cered cloth, and tie him in all parts, with small cords, and put it in a coffer of lead well closed” (4.1–2).
- 5.
As the gravedigger in Hamlet notes, a tanner will decay more slowly than others, for “his hide is so tanned with his trade that he will keep out water a great while; and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body” (5.1.175–78).
- 6.
qtd. in Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth I, 90.
- 7.
Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth, 99.
- 8.
For a review of the development of mortuary practice in the burial of British monarchs from the eleventh century on, see Hope, “On the Funeral Effigies of the Kings and Queens of England.”
- 9.
Zimmerman, The Early Modern Corpse and Shakespeare’s Theatre, 33.
- 10.
See “Fly-blow, n.” and “fly-blow, v.” OED.
- 11.
See Bardell, “Francesco Redi’s Description of the Spontaneous Generation of Gall Flies.”
- 12.
Pasteur, “On Spontaneous Generation”; See also Steel’s discussion of the history of spontaneous generation in “Creeping Things: Spontaneous Generation and Material Creativity.”
- 13.
Steel, “Creeping Things,” 212.
- 14.
Elsewhere, Steel points to the belief found in medieval natural science that grave worms “hatched from the spines of human corpses”; Steel, “Abyss: Everything Is Food,” 101; Cited from D. Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England, 26 n48.
- 15.
MacInnes, “The Politic Worm,” 255.
- 16.
For more on excrement and spontaneous generation, see Geisweidt’s “‘The Nobleness of Life.’”
- 17.
Raber argues that “ Hamlet is fundamentally about parasitism, the kind practiced by animals, and the kind experienced and practiced by humans.” She continues, “part of the fear of Hamlet , the character and the play, is that our physical, anatomical selves might literally, physically ‘house’ creation in the form of worms or maggots—or dogs, rats, mice, and other verminous parasitic entities” (Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture, 111).
- 18.
One of the primary sources for the concept of bugonia in classic literature is Vergil’s Georgics. See Habinek, “Sacrifice, Society, and Vergil’s Ox-Born Bees,” as well as Samson’s riddle about the honeycomb in the corpse of the lion: “Out of the eater came meat, and out of the strong came sweetness” (Judges 14.14 GNV).
- 19.
MacInnes, “The Politic Worm,” 263.
- 20.
See Shannon’s critique of Descartes in The Accommodated Animal, 174–217.
- 21.
Ogilvie, “Order of Insects,” 224.
- 22.
Ibid., 226–27.
- 23.
Charles Butler writes: “[The larva] lieth at the bottom of the cell [of the comb] round like a ring … till it be growen to the full bignesse of a Bee: and then doth the worme die and becommeth void of all motion and sense, and so is shut up in the cell, the Bees covering the top close with wax. The worm thus lying dead doth by little and little grow to the shape of a Bee, but of colour white as before: and having obtained the full proportion, then doth it first begin to move againe, and to live hir second life: and thence forth by little & little turneth browne” (C.4.13–14). Curiously enough, Butler’s description of bee metamorphosis (or perhaps rebirth) mirrors early modern funerary practice. The larva is sealed with wax (like the cerecloth) that encases a cell (like the lead coffer). Butler, The Feminine Monarchie, 725:16.
- 24.
Hunter tracks the links in Romeo and Juliet between cancer, canker, and medical practice in “Cankers in Romeo and Juliet.”
- 25.
“canker, n.” OED.
- 26.
Iyengar, Shakespeare’s Medical Language, 53.
- 27.
Weis’s note on this line in the Arden edition indicates that such a worm was “pricked” from inside the maid’s finger (1.4.69.n).
- 28.
Cole, Imperfect Creatures, 17.
- 29.
Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” 129.
- 30.
Ibid., 128.
- 31.
Qtd. in Stallybrass and Jones, “Fetishizing the Glove in Renaissance Europe,” 128–29.
- 32.
Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” 42.
- 33.
Ibid., 50.
- 34.
As well as the lives of the humans that worked with and on such animals. On butchery in Shakespeare, see Duncan-Jones’ Upstart Crow to Sweet Swan 1592–1623, 1–26.
- 35.
The term “affordance” originates with Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
- 36.
Sofer, The Stage Life of Props, 90.
- 37.
Ibid., 96.
- 38.
Ibid., 98.
- 39.
For an intellectual history of cognitive ecology, see Hutchins, “Cognitive Ecology.” Cognitive ecology encompasses Hutchins’ work on distributed or group cognition but also includes a wide range of theories regarding embodied, embedded, and extended cognition. See also McConachie’s review of “enaction,” a related term, in Evolution, Cognition, and Performance.
- 40.
Tribble and Sutton, “Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies,” 94.
- 41.
Ibid., 96.
- 42.
On embodied cognition, particularly its relationship to metaphor, see the work of Lakoff and Johnson on embodied metaphor (Metaphors We Live By; Philosophy in the Flesh) and the work of Fauconnier and Turner on conceptual blending theory (The Way We Think). Amy Cook’s Shakespearean Neuroplay reads Shakespeare’s Hamlet through these lenses.
- 43.
On embedded cognition, see Hutchins’s work on naval navigation in Cognition in the Wild, as well as Tribble’s use of Hutchins’s research in Cognition in the Globe.
- 44.
Note that while such mental work extends into the environment and incorporates objects, it is not therefore decentered or decoupled from the human brain. As Clark writes, “Cognition is organism-centered even when it is not organism-bound” (“Curing Cognitive Hiccups,” 192). For a critique of the potential nihilism of other critical theories related to cognitive ecology—flat ontology, object-oriented ontology, and speculative realism—see Dionne’s Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene.
- 45.
Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 2.
- 46.
Tribble and Sutton, “Cognitive Ecology as a Framework for Shakespearean Studies,” 97.
- 47.
Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” 42.
- 48.
On the overlap between the terms “animal” and “insect,” see Neri, The Insect and the Image, ix–xiii, as well as Brown’s introduction to Insect Poetics, ix–xx.
- 49.
For an extended discussion of how insects exist outside human laws and how that interacts with human phobias, see Lockwood’s The Infested Mind, 52–64.
- 50.
Donne’s “The Flea” is emblematic of this poetic tradition. See also Raber, Animal Bodies, 25.
- 51.
Such criticism includes the work of: Carroll, “‘We were born to die’: Romeo and Juliet”; Derrida, “Aphorism, Countertime”; Dollimore, Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture; and Kristeva, Tales of Love.
- 52.
Targoff, “Mortal Love,” 33.
- 53.
Kottman, “Defying the Stars,” 34–35.
- 54.
As John Donne describes in “The Relic.”
- 55.
Targoff, “Mortal Love,” 31.
- 56.
The “shambles” is a meat-market or slaughterhouse. “shambles, n.1” OED.
- 57.
Also, though less in the vein of conjuring, see Benvolio’s news that Mercutio is dead—“O Romeo, Romeo, brave Mercutio is dead” (3.1.121)—and the Nurse’s (ambiguously expressed) news that Romeo has slain Tybalt—“Romeo can, / Though heaven cannot. O Romeo, Romeo, / Whoever would have thought it? Romeo!” (3.2.46–48).
- 58.
“Rust” comes from Q2, in opposition to Q1’s “Rest.” See Weis’ note on this line in the Arden edition (Rom. 5.3.170.n).
- 59.
Aristotle, Aristotles Politiques, or Discourses of Gouernment, 239.
- 60.
Abbot, An Exposition Vpon the Prophet Ionah; 594. Abbot is explicating the worm that eats away Jonah’s shade tree (Jon. 4.7). Abbot’s words recall the notion of decay from James 5.1–3 (GNV): “Go to now, ye rich men: wepe and howl for your miseries that shal come upon you. Your riches are corrupt: and your garments are moth eaten. Your golde and silver is cankred, and the rust of them shall be a witnes against you, and shall eat your flesh, as it were fire.”
- 61.
Falstaff even desires that lack of use, directly linking rust to the appetites of death: “I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion” (2H4 1.2.219–21 ). In Shakespeare, scouring away rust seems aphoristic. See 2H6 3.2.205–8 and Per. 2.2.53–54.
- 62.
On early modern stage blood, see Munro’s “‘They Eat Each Other’s Arms.’”
- 63.
Feerick, “Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare’s Historical Tragedies,” 233.
- 64.
One might object that the wax of Tybalt’s cerecloth could in fact be composed of rendered animal fat rather than beeswax. However, both beeswax and animal fat are animal-made-objects, so the opposition between cultivation and decay remains.
- 65.
Butler, The Feminine Monarchie, C.10.P.3.8–11, 30–38.
- 66.
See Raber, Animal Bodies, 131. Bees also straddle the conceptual line between elements of nature that can be exploited and those that are inimical to humanity. Woolfson writes: “Though not tame or domestic animals, honeybees were kept very much in the territory of cultivated nature, for example in the grounds of the villa, country house, abbey or monastery. They formed a part both of untamed nature and of a human agricultural and economic order. They ruled over themselves and were self-sufficient and yet could be exploited by humans for honey, with its alimentary and medicinal properties, and wax, which combined practical and liturgical uses.” Woolfson, “The Renaissance of Bees,” 286.
- 67.
Incidentally, both sweetness and gall can be insect-made-objects: the sweetness of the bees’ honey oozing from the hive or tree, the gall “a sore or wound produced by rubbing or chafing” (perhaps a canker?) or even “an excrescence produced on trees, especially the oak, by the action of insects, chiefly of the genus Cynips [a type of wasp].” “gall, n2, n3,” OED.
- 68.
Fudge, “Renaissance Animal Things,” 44–45.
- 69.
Stage directions from the Folger edition of the play.
- 70.
Romeo’s fear that Death seeks to violate Juliet may be a variation on the trope of droit du seigneur in Shakespeare’s works. See also Doniger’s The Bedtrick, 171–75.
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Helms, N.R. (2019). Finding the Frame: Inference in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet. In: Cognition, Mindreading, and Shakespeare's Characters. Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03565-5_6
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