Laurie Shannon The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean LocalesThe Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+290.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewLaurie Shannon The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+290.Rhodri LewisRhodri LewisUniversity of Oxford Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreI have no doubt that The Accommodated Animal will win an appreciative audience. In it, Laurie Shannon strongly disputes the Cartesian notion of the bête machine; in so doing, she adduces a number of texts produced (for the most part) in the century or so before Descartes wrote and seeks to expose the crudity, injustice, and intellectual poverty that inhere in Descartes’s denigration of animal life. If Descartes is the villain of the piece, then its hero is Montaigne, whose willingness to accept the permeability of the dividing lines between human and animal existence invests nonhuman beings with dignity, agency, and ontological significance. This terrain has been familiar since the publication of George Boas’s classic study of The Happy Beast in French Thought of the Seventeenth Century (1933). But in Shannon’s estimation, Boas “circumscribe[s] the entire logic of the happy beast within an imperturbably human-exceptionalist domain” (136); he is unduly determined to fit zoophilic discourse within the confines of a conventionally defined seventeenth-century literary and intellectual worldview. By contrast, Shannon seeks to unpack the implicit logic of early modern zoophilia and to reconstruct the status of animals as active participants in pre-Cartesian political culture—or what she elaborates as the “constitutionalist sense of legitimated capacities, authorities, and rights that set animals within the scope of justice and the span of political imagination” (3). Shannon conceives of this state as embodying the “cosmopolity” of her subtitle and proposes that “The Accommodated Animal tracks a particular tradition that accommodates the presence of animals and conceives them as actors and stakeholders endowed by their creator with certain subjective interests” (18).Since the advent of the New Historicism nearly forty years ago, students of English literature have grown used to assertions of the special congruity between the critical present and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Accommodated Animal is another case in point. Quite aside from its numerous intersections with the burgeoning subfield of early modern ecocriticism (in particular the work of Bruce Boehrer and Erica Fudge, generously acknowledged throughout), its arguments are directly addressed to contemporary discussions of animal welfare: for instance, Thomas More’s Utopia (1516, cited as 1517 by Shannon) is a “prescient intimation” of the brutalities of industrial farming in present-day North America (23–24). For anyone who follows the leads provided by Shannon in her footnotes (or with the will and inclination to search the internet for themselves), it is hard not to endorse the tenor and assumptions of her argument. Further, her argument is in itself advanced with intelligence, verve, and discursive passion. It is thus unfortunate that as an exercise in literary, cultural, or intellectual history—and as a piece of literary criticism—The Accommodated Animal too often falls short of the mark.Some of the responsibility for this belongs to Descartes. In seeking to repudiate so thoroughly his ill-grounded but influential theorizing, Shannon has projected its mirror image onto the cultural world that preceded it. On the one hand, doing so flattens out and misrepresents the nature of human-animal relations in the century or so before Descartes; on the other, it fails fully to account for the emergence of Descartes’s ideas as a reaction to the received early seventeenth-century wisdom. Contra Descartes, biological and religious comparativism had been a staple of accounts of the natural world and of the place of humankind within it, since ancient Athens at the latest. (Think of the scala naturae, or chain of being.) The rub is that the comparability of human beings and elephants, dogs, cats, parrots, apes, ants, or bees does not connote their identity. Nor does such comparability mean that animals are praised for attributes, whether physical or mental, that are anything other than anthropoid: elephants, like humankind, are social and have excellent memories; parrots, like humankind, have well-developed vocal organs; bees, like humankind, live in complex hierarchical societies. On the standard model of animate life derived from Aristotle, elaborated by Galen, and comprehensively baptized over the course of the Middle Ages, all living beings had vegetative and sensitive souls. Most obviously, the sensitive soul comprised the external senses of vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. But it also comprised the “internal senses”: these varied in number and nature from theorist to theorist but were usually between three and seven and included the faculties of imagination, memory, judgment, and common sense. In all of these areas, animal life stood in contiguous relation to its human equivalent. In many cases, animal abilities could even exceed those found in humankind: the vision of a cat or a hawk, like the olfactory sensitivity of a bloodhound, far outstripped those of any human being. What made humankind different was the possession of an immortal, immaterial, and intellective soul; it was in virtue of this that human life could claim deiformity and dominion over the created world. It was also through the intellect that humankind could think and communicate through language. As animals lacked an intellective soul, so even those of them with well-developed vocal organs could only express their passions: fear, pain, hunger, pleasure, affection, desire, satiation, and so on.1 What is more, biological comparativism made possible a species of moral comparativism—of which, as Shannon discusses at length, Montaigne was the principal exponent. Animals accepted their cosmic station with (the anthropomorphic) virtues of humility and patience and stood as a lesson and rebuke to the pride, dissatisfaction, anger, doubt, ambition, and cruelty of so much human life. For Descartes, this comparativism failed to put enough distance between human and animal life, thereby threatening the distinctive status of humankind and philosophical truth alike. The cogito and its concomitant bête machine were his response.By maintaining that “Montaigne and Descartes, pro et contra, stage a historically pivotal debate” on the subject of “animal stakeholdership” (13), Shannon elides the reactive quality of Descartes’s thinking just as fundamentally as she distorts Montaigne. As Shannon notes immediately after situating Montaigne and Descartes alongside one another, Montaigne turns to animals as a way in which to excoriate human pride and in which to probe the limitations of human intellection. For him, a vivid marker of humankind’s fallen insufficiency is the inability to comprehend the makeup of the natural world and its animal inhabitants, while even without the benefits of intellective discourse, animals often possess an innate wisdom to which humankind might well aspire. Shannon’s account of Montaigne is vibrant but loses sight of the fact that he nowhere suggests that animals might be political stakeholders, whether in virtue of their physical, mental, or habitual attributes. An example might better encapsulate the point. Montaigne was unquestionably both squeamish and an animal lover, but he was also a keen huntsman—he took pleasure in pursuing and killing (or, rather, having his hounds kill for him) animals like the hare, boar, and deer. By contrast, and in common with the overwhelming majority of his peers in sixteenth-century Europe, Montaigne seems never to have hunted human beings, just as he seems never to have eaten them, worn their skins, or burned them for fuel. Howsoever praiseworthy Montaigne may have taken animals to be, he viewed them as ontologically lesser forms of life. Hunting also provides some clues as to how early modern animals were valorized more generally. I quote from Oliver St John’s attempt to have Thomas Wentworth (Earl of Strafford) tried by bill of attainder rather than with benefit of law: “we give law to Hares and Deeres, because they be beasts of Chase; It was never accounted either cruelty or foul play to knock Foxes and Wolves on the head, as they can be found, because these be beasts of prey.”2 Remarkable though they were often thought to be, foxes and wolves were acknowledged as dangerous vermin. Unlike peaceable and purportedly noble creatures such as the deer and hare (which were to be given the chance to escape while being hunted), they were to be eradicated with violence and the minimum of fuss. Here as elsewhere, early modern animals were defined within a moral economy—call it a polis, if you will—that they had no role in framing or regulating.Although Shannon’s subtitle draws attention to “Shakespearean locales,” her spaces of exploration are textual and overlook the quotidian reality of human-animal interactions in the early modern world. It is good to see Shannon attending so thoughtfully to humanist natural history and the traditions of hexameral commentary (the twin pillars of her contextualizations), but in advancing an argument about early modern animal cosmopolity, one must surely seek to get in behind the learned world and its various idealizations. I have already mentioned hunting; a more surprising omission is that Shannon offers no sustained account of early modern farming, the site of human interactions with domesticated rather than wild animals. I kept hearing Keith Thomas’s admonition that changing attitudes to animals were the province of “well-to-do townsmen, remote from the agricultural process and inclined to think of animals as pets rather than as working livestock.”3 How did animals fare on the pre-Cartesian farm? About the closest we get to finding out comes in Shannon’s observation that the dimensions of Noah’s Ark proposed in John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668) “uncannily reflect the exact demands made in contemporary calls for minimum standards concerning livestock confinement” (280). This is ingenious and charmingly arcane but shirks the question. Notwithstanding her attention to Montaigne’s bookish thought experiments, Shannon by no means establishes that her pre-Cartesian stakeholder zootopia existed.There is comparatively little Shakespeare in The Accommodated Animal, and when Shannon does discuss his texts, it is generally as a peg on which to hang her broader arguments or as a pendant with which to adorn them. Chapter 1, for instance, begins with a discussion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (29–31) and concludes some fifty pages later with As You Like It (80–81). Initially, these readings are unsatisfactory. It does not inspire confidence in Shannon’s critical ear to find her discussing “Jacques” throughout her account of As You Like It (80–81, also 69), but more concerning is her determination to set the play’s action within a prefabricated interpretative mold. After granting that Duke Senior is allowing his fancies to get the better of him by imagining the Forest of Arden as another Eden, Shannon asks us to read his assertion that deer are the “native burghers of this desert city” as evidence of animal political stakeholdership (80). Such a reading leaves no space for the critic to acknowledge Shakespeare’s riff on pastoral convention: the Duke’s metaphor belongs to the overwrought speech of one used to dwelling in an urban court and who is not yet habituated to the realities of country life. He and his cohort will hunt, kill, and eat the deer anyway. Here as elsewhere, it is disappointing that Shannon does not scrutinize the politics and dynamics of the pastoral mode.Things pick up in the book’s final two chapters, particularly in discussions of King Lear (127–37, 165–76) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (180–84, 212–17). Here, instead of constraining her critical faculties to the demands of her thesis, Shannon works with patience and care, deftly teasing out the ways in which early modern writing on animals can help us to comprehend Shakespeare’s dramatic writing. This is historicism at its best. She reads Lear as “part of a larger zoographic critique of man” (133), in which humankind is contrasted unfavorably to the animals who know and contentedly inhabit their place in the order of things; Lear and his extended family are by contrast unaccommodated, disconnected from themselves and their place in the cosmos. As for the Dream, Shannon traces in it anxiety about the nocturnal weakness of humankind; in the darkness of the night, nonhuman animals establish temporary dominion of the worlds they inhabit. Through its “comparatist sensibility, the play engages in the zoographic mode of critique…[and] actually goes further and enforces human identity as a constraint” (180). Aside from their impressively analytical edginess, what these readings have in common is that they are epiphenomenal to Shannon’s stated thesis about pre-Cartesian cosmopolity and animal stakeholding. Animal discourse emerges as something though which Shakespeare was able to develop the thick weave and texture of his dramatic vision and against which he was able to measure certain aspects of the human condition. Near the start of The Accommodated Animal, Shannon announces her intention to move on from the critical habit of thinking “with” animals and to think “about” them instead (5). The problem is that Shakespeare, like Montaigne, resists this categorization: for the non-Cartesian early moderns, animals and the attempt to understand animal life were valuable to the extent that they helped to illuminate the human condition. Descartes’s revolution was to claim that such illuminations were illusory, harmful, and therefore to be discarded. Regrettably, he prevailed. Shannon, like many other broadly ecocritical writers, is to be praised for seeking to push back against him.University of Chicago Press has produced an attractive and affordable volume; it is especially welcome that Shannon’s references are printed in footnote rather than endnote form. Two cavils: copyediting is undistinguished (proper names, e.g., are a lottery); given the breadth and interest of the sources Shannon discusses, I cannot understand why her readers have been deprived of a bibliography.Notes1 The bibliography on such questions is massive. Three good starting points are Katharine Park, “The Organic Soul,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, and Eckhard Kessler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 464–84; Peter Harrison, “Descartes on Animals,” Philosophical Quarterly 42 (1992): 219–27; and Richard W. Serjeantson, “The Passions and Animal Language, 1540–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 425–44.2 Oliver St John, An Argument of Law Concerning the Bill of Attainder of High-Treason of Thomas, Earle of Strafford (London, 1641), 72.3 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Lane, 1983), 182. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 112, Number 4May 2015 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/679328 Views: 281Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.