The book argues that powerful exchanges between stage, stake and scaffold – the theatre, the beargarden and the spectacle of public execution – crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the construction and workings of ‘the human’ as a psychological, ethical and political category. The theatre's family resemblance to animal baiting and the spectacle of capital punishment, with which it shares the same basic performance space – a theatre-in-the-round – bred potential for a transfer of images and meanings. The staging of any one of these performances was always framed by an awareness of ... More

The book argues that powerful exchanges between stage, stake and scaffold – the theatre, the beargarden and the spectacle of public execution – crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the construction and workings of ‘the human’ as a psychological, ethical and political category. The theatre's family resemblance to animal baiting and the spectacle of capital punishment, with which it shares the same basic performance space – a theatre-in-the-round – bred potential for a transfer of images and meanings. The staging of any one of these performances was always framed by an awareness of the other two, whose presence was never quite erased and indeed was often emphatically foregrounded. Situating Shakespearean drama within its material environment, the book explores how this spill-over affects the way Shakespeare models his human characters and his understanding of ‘human character’ in general. His dramatis personae are infused with a degree of animality that a later Cartesian anthropology would categorically deny. Readings based on this later anthropology tend to reduce Shakespeare’s teeming animal references to markers of moral, social and ontological difference, ‘beast’ being everything ‘man’ is not or ought not to be. This book proposes that Shakespearean notions of humanity rely just as much on inclusion as on exclusion of the animal, more generally of a whole range of nonhuman creatures. Humans and animals face each other across the species divide, but the divide proves highly permeable.