Animalistic Shakespeares Explored

Campus Report ^ | February 3, 2009 | Bethany Stotts

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Animalistic Shakespeares Explored

by: Bethany Stotts, February 03, 2009

Not only did the Bard speak to human nature and love, but he also spoke to philosophy, epistemology, and sociology, according to four Modern Language Association (MLA) scholars speaking at a panel arranged by the Division on Shakespeare. They argued at this year’s MLA Convention that Shakespeare used complicated ecosystemic imagery to evoke concepts of Atomism, to delineate a continuum of animals, to explore nature’s indecipherability, and to comment on power struggles between social groups.

Hamlet. The reflections of the melancholy protagonist Hamlet reflect the tenets of atomism, argued North Carolina State University Professor Christopher Crosbie. “If Hamlet seeks to reconstruct the material history of skulls, he does so in part in order to imagine future transformations in the corporeal that despite the degradation of decomposition nonetheless promise the retention of a type of identity, an imperviousness to suffering. He imagined, in short, what I would like to call a teleologically-inflective atomist materialism,” said the assistant professor of English. Such a philosophy shares the three atomist mores: “traceable, identifiable, and free of suffering.”

The Winter’s Tale. Referring to Act 4 Scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale, Professor Rebecca Ann Bach demonstrated how modern translations obscure or modify animal references in Shakespeare. “For my purposes today, the most interesting nonhuman animal reference made invisible by modernized spelling is actually related to sheep-shearing,” said the University of Alabama at Birmingham scholar. She explains...

[baltodog]

I respectfully disagree.
And so does my beagle.