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• W151492340 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeAndreas Höfele Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre Stage, Stake, and Scaffold: Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Andreas Höfele. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xii+315.Bruce BoehrerBruce BoehrerFlorida State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAndreas Höfele’s Stage, Stake, and Scaffold provides the most complete exploration yet of the relation between Shakespeare’s theater and the spectacles of blood sport and criminal punishment concurrently available to the poet’s original audiences. For Höfele, these sites of entertainment and edification participated in an ongoing mutual transfer of symbolic energies, “a powerful semantic exchange” that “crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the nature and workings of humanness as a psychological, ethical, and political category” (2). This exchange, in turn, “constitutes the human-animal relationship” through an “intertwining of sameness and otherness” (24), a kind of “human-animal border traffic” (39) that calls into question the existence of both humanity and bestiality as distinct entities. Over the course of six chapters, Höfele considers examples of this border traffic as they make their appearance in a broad selection of Shakespeare’s works.Chapter 1 addresses the especially prominent use of bear-baiting metaphor to be found in Macbeth, a play that “probe[s] one of the foundational distinctions of Western culture, that between man and beast, human and non-human” (53). Here Shakespeare pursues various acts of definition and differentiation, seeking to distinguish people from beasts and vice versa. There is for instance the First Murderer’s insistence that “We are men, my liege” (3.1.92), which ironically echoes Macbeth’s own earlier declaration to his wife, “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none” (1.7.46–47).1 But such reassurances signally fail to reassure. On the contrary, in fact, the play’s insistence on the human integrity of its various characters only reveals species difference to be a rhetorical sleight of hand, with the category of humanity itself disrupted by a bestial nature that “is no intruder from outside, but always already lurking within” (54). As “an exemplary site of such internal rifting,” Macbeth himself “fails to achieve what might be called a working wholeness” (56), his final punishment turning “the stage of the public playhouse into the centrepiece of [a] triptych whose wings are formed by the baiting arena and the gallows” (64).Höfele’s second chapter proceeds to another paradigmatic Shakespearean villain, in this case Richard III, who exemplifies a similar kind of instability with respect to the nature of human personhood. A figure of “monstrous, multiform animality” (89), Richard’s “moment of becoming human is also crucially one of becoming animal”—a “transgressive ‘more’ that propels [him] beyond the boundaries of the human” but “is paradoxically the condition for unfolding a ‘more’ of humanness” (90). If Richard’s body thus doubles the animal, so does his kingship double as an act of criminality, with the result that man, animal, and criminal once more engage in a complex pattern of cross-reference through which “Shakespearean subjectivity…presents itself as an experience not of self-possession, but of the rift through which such possession is forever withheld” (75).In chapter 3 Höfele proceeds to a reading of Coriolanus, whose famously misanthropic hero functions “not as a political animal, but rather as an animal caught up in politics” (104). As such, Coriolanus embodies the “raw energy” upon which Roman civilization is grounded—an energy that manifests itself as “uncontrolled rage” both within Coriolanus himself and within the “bestialized mob” of plebeians whom he despises (105). Indeed, Coriolanus’s heroism derives from this same rage as it receives expression on the field of battle, with the result that “the godlike and the bestial are inextricably entwined in him” (106). Thus Coriolanus’s mother, the wolflike Volumnia, comes to represent the city of Rome itself as a “two-faced” being who “both nurtures and devours her own offspring” (113), while her son figures as an “anti-social god-beast” (110) both essential and inimical to the city’s survival.From here Höfele proceeds, in chapter 4, to detail the figures of animality and cannibalism that characterize Shakespeare’s use of revenge tragedy. In the meat pies of Titus Andronicus, as in Hamlet’s declared propensity to “drink hot blood” (3.2.379), Höfele discerns “the limits of the human” as these “provide evidence of the human possibility of inhumanity” (167)—a possibility equally suggested by Titus’s “slaughtered lamb” Bassianus (2.3.223) and Hamlet’s “Hyrcanian beast” Pyrrhus (2.2.453). In both these plays, Shakespearean revenge tragedy “shows the foundational distinction of political anthropology in dissolution,” such that “what is civil can no longer be cordoned off from what is savage, and this state of undecidability persists even when a restitution of order is proclaimed” (167). Thus, “shining through the increasingly frayed pretence of normal court life, the stage behind the stage of Hamlet is the scaffold” (168), while “few plays…have the collusion of stage and scaffold written all over them as boldly as Titus Andronicus” (137).Chapter 5 then concentrates on King Lear, and Höfele places this tragedy against the background of Europe’s celebrated medieval and early modern animal trials, which subjected beasts to criminal punishment for various violations of the human legal code. The connection here may be drawn through the play’s storm scenes in act 3, where Lear’s fantasized arraignment of his pelican daughters parodies actual judicial procedure. Thus, while “King Lear has no hanged pig in human clothes…it does have the so-called ‘mock trial’” (195), a trial which works in collusion with the play’s opening love test to “measure out and delimit the space of the political” (203). Here and elsewhere, Lear not only embodies the “standard judicial practice” of “bestializ[ing] the criminal,” it also enacts a “bestialization of the representative of the law, a reversal of conventional roles which implies that Lear, too, as a king whose word was law, may have been no more than ‘a dog obeyed in office’” (219).Finally, chapter 6 turns to The Tempest, that perennial touchstone of humanist and antihumanist criticism. Here Caliban figures as an “‘anthropophorous,’ or carrier animal, in whom ánthropos remains for ever unrealized” (250), such that “although [he] is denied humanity, humanity somehow always seems to be at stake in him” (249). Energized as it is by the crosscurrents of Prospero’s relationship with Caliban, The Tempest stages a world in which “the ascendancy of the spiritual, the rational, the good, the human or ‘humane’ over the base, the dark, the evil, the bestial is never securely established” (251). And within this realm, Caliban himself figures as “Shakespeare’s final intimation of the link between the human stage and the animal-baiting arena” (253).Höfele is right to see Shakespeare’s plays as organized around patterns of semiotic exchange between the categories of humanity, criminality, and animality. These terms provide perhaps the central coordinates for the circulation of social energy through the poet’s dramatic work, and Höfele has investigated this circulation in unprecedented detail. By way of friendly amendment to his study, one might note that Höfele’s readings of Shakespeare are drawn overwhelmingly from the tragic end of the canon. Even the exceptional cases of Richard III and The Tempest hardly seem exceptional in this regard. Not only is Richard III advertised as a tragedy on its quarto title pages; Höfele describes its eponymous hero as “Shakespeare’s first tragic, or near-tragic, protagonist” (69). Likewise, Höfele’s understanding of The Tempest seems largely divested of comic potential; it becomes a play about Caliban and Prospero, not about Caliban and Stephano or Caliban and Trinculo. But the same raw energy courses through other parts of the Shakespeare canon, too, as in the human-animal confusions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, or The Two Gentlemen of Verona. There remains a need for some study of these plays comparable to the work on the tragedies that Höfele has here conducted with such impressive depth and precision. Notes 1All Shakespeare quotations are from The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, 2nd. ed., ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery (Oxford University Press, 2005). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 111, Number 2November 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671951 Views: 273Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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