The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales

Abstract

Shakespeare wrote of lions, shrews, horned toads, curs, mastiffs, and hell-hounds. But he used word only eight times in his work - which was typical for sixteenth century, when word was rarely used. As Laurie Shannon reveals in The Accommodated Animal, animal-human divide first came strongly into play in seventeenth century, with Descartes' famous formulation that reason sets humans above other species: think, therefore I am. Before that moment, animals could claim a firmer place alongside humans in a larger vision of belonging, or what Shannon terms cosmopolity. With Shakespeare as her touch-stone, Shannon explores creaturely dispensation that existed until Descartes. She finds that early modern writers used classical natural history and readings of Genesis to credit animals with various kinds of stakeholdership, prerogative, and entitlement, employing language of politics in a constitutional vision of cosmic membership. Using this political idiom to frame cross-species relations, Shannon argues, carried with it notion that animals possess their own investments in world, a point distinct from question of whether animals have reason. It also enabled a sharp critique of tyranny of humankind. By answering the question of animal historically, The Accommodated Animal makes a brilliant contribution to cross-disciplinary debates engaging political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies.