Royal Fish: Shakespeare’s Princely Whales

Abstract

In the first nine editions of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus categorized humans with the Quadrupedia, the four-limbed animals. In the tenth edition he created the category of Mammalia: thenceforth we were kin to whales (cetacea) as well as to seals and sea lions (phocae) and manatees and dugongs (sirenia). In systematizing the human kinship with marine mammals, Linnaeus apparently contributed to the displacement of an anthropocentric—and terrestrial—cosmology: sharing four limbs was a weaker basis for species similarity than lactation, viviparous birth, and warm blood. As naturalist Wayne Hanley once quipped, “to accommodate the whale, Linnaeus changed man and his hairy cousins into mammals.”1 But did this formalization of our species’ similarity with sea creatures challenge centuries of thinking about humanity’s unique place in the cosmos, or was it another chapter in a longstanding narrative of species kinship between humans and cetaceans? In this chapter, I trace the idea of interspecies kinship between humans and whales from classical and biblical culture to Shakespeare.