Animal Characters. Bruce Thomas Boehrer
and the study of animals emerge as parallel expressions of the same taxonomic impulse.
It may be objected that this is merely a matter of form, that in substance the two undertakings differ considerably. Perhaps, but the most recent translators of Theophrastus's Characters have traced its antecedents back to the lengthiest surviving verse fragment by Semonides of Amorgos (seventh century B. C. E.), consisting of character sketches of women whose “various vices (e.g. filthiness, cunning, extravagance) are explained by their creation from animals (e.g. the pig, fox, horse)” (Rusten and Cunningham 17). If, as these same editors aver, “the notion that individual good or bad traits of character may be isolated and studied separately” is “basic” to the philosopher's “whole enterprise” (13), then the Characters participates in an ethical project that encompasses the world of nonhuman animals as well. That, at least, is a major assumption of the bestiarists, those other heirs to Aristotle, when they identify the behavior of the halcyon hen as “an unexpected celebration of kindness” (White 124) or attribute to horses the capacity “to weep for man and feel the emotion of sorrow” (86) or expound upon “[t]he merciful nature of lions” (Barber 25). As quaintly familiar as such language may be, it points to the historical investment of character study in observation of the nonhuman world.
Thus, from the standpoint of animal studies, it becomes appropriate to view the bestiary entry as a particular variety of character study and to view the Theophrastan character as a particular variant of the bestiary entry. In terms of early modern English literary history, this linkage becomes especially visible in the “birds of prey”—Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino—who populate Ben Jonson's Volpone (1605; 1.2.89), as well as in Nano's claim, in the same play, to have passed former lives as an “ox and asse, cammell, mule, goat, and brock” (1.2.22). Volpone's characterological bestiary draws simultaneously on the traditional figures of beast fable and epic, deriving from post-Aristotelian animal lore, and on the stock figures of New Comedy, based on post-Aristotelian psychology. In the latter respect, the linkage to Theophrastus again seems clear enough; Menander is said to have been one of the philosopher's students (Diogenes Laertius 485; 5.36–37). Later English usage retains the affinity between human and animal traits in the sense of “character” as denoting “the distinguishing features of a species or genus” (OED, s.v. “character,” sb. 8b).
Jonson's carrion birds by no means exhaust the characterological possibilities of the animal in early modern literature. If we accept Fowler's working definition of literary characters as “social persons” compounded from over lapping “legal,” “civic,” “corporate,” “economic,” “kinship,” and “literary” identities (16–17), the heavy integration of animals into all these aspects of early modern society makes it hard to see how one could reasonably deny them status as literary characters in their own right. Consider Montaigne's Apology for Raymond Sebonde (1576), which, apart from its inscrutable cat, abounds with sentient beasts: a magpie who, after “a profound study and withdrawal within herself,” learns to mimic the sound of trumpets (341); elephants who help each other escape from traps (342); cranes and swallows with “the faculty of divination” (345); and so on. Or consider Baiardo in Lodovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1516), a steed so cunning and faithful to Rinaldo that he refuses to let the latter mount him lest his master might call off the horse's steadfast pursuit of Rinaldo's beloved Angelica (Caretti, ed., 2.20–23). Or consider the beginning of Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesy (1580–85), where John Pietro Pugliano praises the horse as “a peerless beast…, the only serviceable courtier without flattery, the beast of most beauty, faithfulness, courage, and such more…that I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse” (3).
One might protest that for Sidney, Pugliano serves as an object of derision, an exponent of “unbeliever” opinions, who defends these with “strong affection and weak arguments” (3). However, this fact speaks precisely to my broader point: that in early modern culture, the literal and figurative proximity of nonhuman to human animals elicited anxiety, generating what René Girard has called a “crisis of distinctions” (49). Pugliano's character as a horseman (or horse-man) inspires Sidney's disapproval, and yet Pugliano also provides Sidney with the model and motive—“self-love” (3)—for the latter's defense of verse. In fact, Sidney's relation to Pugliano is far too close for comfort. It is the archetypal relation of “scholar” to “master” (4), fraught with tension and ambivalence, which qualities receive figuration across the species barrier. Thus it stands as a further irony that in Sidney's case, “self-love” is the love of Philip, phil-hippos, bearing within itself the trace of the anathematized other.
This “crisis of distinctions” can be presented more broadly in Kuhnian terms, as an emerging dilemma in the early modern discourse of species—in effect, as a philosophical problem for which Descartes and his followers presented a paradigm-shifting solution.5 Erica Fudge has traced this dilemma to inconsistencies within the early modern understanding of how and when a human being may be regarded as truly rational and therefore truly human: on one hand, “infants are not fully human, insofar as human status can only be designated truly by the actions that evidence the possession of a rational soul” (Brutal Reasoning 48); on the other hand, “a human can literally become an animal when acting without reason” (66); and various subaltern categories of humanity (for example, women, slaves, ethnic others) present further challenges to a conventional understanding of humanity as grounded in reason. In sum, “There are natural born humans who can only be human because they possess the rational soul. Then there are humans in possession of the rational soul who require education to become truly human. Finally, there are humans who possess rational souls, can be educated, but are still less human than the human. Thus the category begins to collapse into absurdity” (58). Descartes solved this problem with mathematical elegance by elevating human reason to the status of a first principle, requiring no proof outside the philosopher's own inference. The way was thus clear to discount the apparent sentience of other animals by dismissing it as an anthropomorphic projection, so that how beasts behaved no longer told us anything about what they thought or felt.
To this extent, the Cartesian cogito is itself a product of the inward turn, an application of skepticism to the philosopher's own beliefs and instincts until what remains—skepticism itself—becomes the ground of his identity as a rational being. Appropriately enough, this inward turn takes the confessional mode as its proper form of literary expression: “I judged that I was as prone to error as anyone else, and I rejected as false all the reasoning I had hitherto accepted as valid proof. Finally,…I resolved to pretend that everything that had ever entered my head was no more true than the illusions of my dreams. But immediately afterwards I noted that, while I was trying to think of all things being false in this way, it was necessarily the case that I, who was thinking them, had to be something” (Descartes 28; 4.32). In effect, the Cartesian self arises from and entails the exploration of a new notion of character: not an Aristotelian taxonomy of shared attributes, but rather a sense of personal identity as singular and doubtful, consisting in particularity and observation, privileging mind over body and interior over exterior. This, of course, is the mode of character celebrated in the grand literary achievements of the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries: the novel, the illusionistic theater, the cult of sentiment, and the critical veneration of Shakespeare.
Hence we may recognize this notion of character, in its originary Cartesian moment, as an instrument for defining and maintaining the species barrier. It is no accident that the Discourse on Method (1637) remains almost equally famous for two distinct philosophical postulates: the cogito and the bête-machine. These principles emerge hand in hoof from Descartes's meditations, in symbiotic and mutually reinforcing relation: the former crafts a notion of humanity composed of inwardness and speculation, while the latter denies such qualities to the nonhuman. Taken together, these philosophical constructs offer a response to earlier notions of human character that had come by the early modern period to appear increasingly untenable. In the process Descartes's principles also paved the way for new literary techniques of representing the human, techniques that in turn proved essential in consolidating the species distinction on which they were based.
But to return to more conventionally literary writing, what then of Shakespeare? How is this very pre-Cartesian