Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance: Volume 1, Insects 9780271094595

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction Creatures
1 Silkworm Thomas Moffett, Silkworm Laureate
2 Ants Go to the Pismire
3 Flea Annihilating the Copulative Conceit: John Donne’s Conversion of the “son of dust” into Uncertain Sacrilege
4 Fly Of Flyes: The Insect Mind of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
5 Gnat Th e Clamor of Things: Moffett’s Gnats, Spenser’s Complaints
6 Maggot Mutable Maggots: Corruption, Generation, and Literary Legacy
7 Bee “Some say the bee stings”: Toward an Apian Poetics
8 Wasp What Is It Like to Be Like a Wasp?
9 Butterflies and Moths Volatile Creatures and Elaborate Work
10 Grasshopper and Locust Antimonarchal Locusts: Translating the Grasshopper in the Aftermath of the English Civil Wars
11 Beetle Sycorax’s Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and Blackness
12 Spider Th e Renaissance of Spiders: Ambivalence, Beauty, Terror, Art
13 Water Bugs Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine Science
14 Worms Worms of Conscience
15 Scorpions Flame of Fire Beaten: Scorpions in and out of Mind
Epilogue Creatures
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

L e s ser L i v i ng Cr e at u r e s of t h e R ena is sa nce

BotelhoV1-final.indb i

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Nigel Rothfels, General Editor Advisory Board: Steve Baker (University of Central Lancashire) Garry Marvin (Roehampton University) Susan McHugh (University of New England) Kari Weil (Wesleyan University) Books in the Animalibus series share a fascination with the status and the role of animals in human life. Crossing the humanities and the social sciences to include work in history, anthropology, social and cultural geography, environmental studies, and literary and art criticism, these books ask what thinking about nonhuman animals can teach us about human cultures, about what it means to be human, and about how that meaning might shift across times and places. Other titles in the series: Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing

Heather Swan, Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field

Joan B. Landes, Paula Young Lee, and Paul Youngquist, eds., Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective

Karen Raber and Monica Mattfeld, eds., Performing Animals: History, Agency, Theater

Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Rader, and Adam Dodd, eds., Animals on Display: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History Ann-Janine Morey, Picturing Dogs, Seeing Ourselves: Vintage American Photographs Mary Sanders Pollock, Storytelling Apes: Primatology Narratives Past and Future Ingrid H. Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-Century Britain Dick Blau and Nigel Rothfels, Elephant House Marcus Baynes-Rock, Among the Bone Eaters: Encounters with Hyenas in Harar Monica Mattfeld, Becoming Centaur: Eighteenth-Century Masculinity and English Horsemanship

BotelhoV1-final.indb ii

J. Keri Cronin, Art for Animals: Visual Culture and Animal Advocacy, 1870–1914 Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Life: A Walk Through the Reaches of Time Elizabeth Young, Pet Projects: Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive Marcus Baynes-Rock, Crocodile Undone: The Domestication of Australia’s Fauna Deborah Nadal, Rabies in the Streets: Interspecies Camaraderie in Urban India Mustafa Haikal, translated by Thomas Dunlap, Master Pongo: A Gorilla Conquers Europe Austin McQuinn, Becoming Audible: Sounding Animality in Performance Karalyn Kendall-Morwick, Canis Modernis: Human/Dog Coevolution in Modernist Literature

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Lesser Liv i ng Cr eatu r e s of the R ena issa nce Volume 1: Insects

Edited by Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

BotelhoV1-final.indb iii

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Botelho, Keith M., editor. | Campana, Joseph, editor. Title: Lesser living creatures of the Renaissance / edited by Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana. Other titles: Animalibus. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2023] | Series: Animalibus : of animals and cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: v. 1. Insects—v. 2. Concepts. Summary: “Explores the prominence of insects in the literal and symbolic economies of early modern England. Examines concepts cutting across species (insect and otherwise) and draws attention to the work of early modern natural historians”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022037304 | ISBN 9780271094465 (v. 1 ; hardback) | ISBN 9780271094489 (v. 2 ; hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—Early modern, 1500-1700—History and criticism. | Insects in literature. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PR408.I58 L47 2023 | DDC 820.9/36257—dc23/eng/20221011 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022037304 Copyright © 2023 The Pennsylvania State University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

BotelhoV1-final.indb iv

11/9/22 1:36 PM

For all creatures great and small

BotelhoV1-final.indb v

11/9/22 1:36 PM

BotelhoV1-final.indb vi

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Contents

List of Illustrations (ix) Acknowledgments

(xi)

Introduction Creatures (1) Joseph Campana

1 Silkworm Thomas Moffett, Silkworm Laureate

(20)

Bruce Boehrer

2 Ants Go to the Pismire (35) Shannon Kelley

3 Flea Annihilating the Copulative Conceit: John Donne’s Conversion of the “son of dust” into Uncertain Sacrilege

(47)

Gary M. Bouchard

4 Fly Of Flyes: The Insect Mind of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (60) Perry Guevara

5 Gnat The Clamor of Things: Moffett’s Gnats, Spenser’s Complaints

(77)

Steven Swarbrick

6 Maggot Mutable Maggots: Corruption, Generation, and Literary Legacy (96) Emily L. King

7 Bee “Some say the bee stings”: Toward an Apian Poetics

(111)

Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana

8 Wasp What Is It Like to Be Like a Wasp?

(126)

Donovan Sherman

BotelhoV1-final.indb vii

11/9/22 1:36 PM

viii

|

Contents

9 Butterflies and Moths Volatile Creatures and Elaborate Work

(143)

Chris Barrett

10 Grasshopper and Locust Antimonarchal Locusts: Translating the Grasshopper in the Aftermath of the English Civil Wars

(155)

Kathryn Vomero Santos

11 Beetle Sycorax’s Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and Blackness

(174)

Roya Biggie

12 Spider The Renaissance of Spiders: Ambivalence, Beauty, Terror, Art

(193)

Mary Baine Campbell

13 Water Bugs Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine Science

(216)

Dan Brayton

14 Worms Worms of Conscience

(230)

Karen Raber

15 Scorpions Flame of Fire Beaten: Scorpions in and out of Mind

(248)

Eric C. Brown

Epilogue Creatures (261) Keith Botelho

List of Contributors

(265)

Index (269)

BotelhoV1-final.indb viii

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Illustrations

1.4.1.

Illustrations of flies in Thomas Moffett’s Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum. 61

1.4.2.

“Schem. XXVI” from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia.

1.7.1.

Commemorative window, the Church of Saint Lawrence, Wootten Saint Lawrence. 117

1.10.1.

“Musicam diis curae esse,” in Andrea Alciato, Emblemata Libellus.

1.10.2.

Emblem 96, Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum & Emblematum ex Volatilibus et Insectis Desumtorum Centuria Tertia Collecta. 161

1.10.3.

Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving for “Of the Ant and Grasshopper,” in John Ogilby, Aesopics. 165

1.12.1.

Thomas Moffett, The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures, in Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts. 195

1.12.2.

Cavalry Spider Helmet, France, 1600s.

1.12.3.

Arachne (Aragnes) hangs herself, becoming the spider behind her. From an earlier incunabulum: Giovanni Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris. 200

1.12.4.

Maid crushing spider in Heywood, Spider and the Flie.

1.12.5.

Ramist table from Martin Lister, De Araneis in Genere, part 3 of Lister, Historiae Animalium Angliae. 209

BotelhoV1-final.indb ix

63

160

199

203

11/9/22 1:36 PM

BotelhoV1-final.indb x

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Acknowledgments

A decade ago, we first met in a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America and there discovered a shared scholarly interest in bees. In 2013, we organized a panel, Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance, at the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference, and over the next few years, we developed the outline of a collection on insects in the early modern world. Thank you to Penn State University Press and editor-in-chief Kendra Boileau for offering us an advance contract, and to Nigel Rothfels, general editor of the series Animalibus: Of Animals and Cultures, who was an early advocate for the collection. The comments and feedback on our manuscript from Erica Fudge and an anonymous reader were pivotal in the early stages of revision. Thank you especially to Erica for her enthusiasm and encouragement. Along the way, our editorial assistants—including Evan Choate, Brooke Payne, and Amanda Kruger—worked diligently on the project, and to them we are grateful. We thank the librarians and staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the John and Mary Nichols Rare Books Library at the University of Oklahoma. Thank you to the Norman J. Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the English Department at Kennesaw State University for support and release time to work on this collection and to the School of Humanities, Humanities Research Center, and Department of English at Rice University for their support. To our network of friends and colleagues who supported this massive undertaking in both big and small ways, thank you. Thank you as well to our twenty-four contributors who exhibited remarkable patience during this very long process. Keith Botelho thanks his son, Ethan, and daughter, Julia, for their

BotelhoV1-final.indb xi

11/9/22 1:36 PM

xii

|

Acknowledgments

unfailing love and support and for filling his life with sweetness and light. Joseph Campana thanks both his hive-mate, Theodore Bale, and his teacher, Nolan Marciniec, expert in poems and bees, for the buzz of conversation over the years: all sweet, no sting.

BotelhoV1-final.indb xii

11/9/22 1:36 PM

I n t roduc t ion

CREATURES Joseph Campana

Reality, whatever that may be, has been so much the rage in the rhetoric of entertainment of late that it should be no surprise if, on any given day anywhere in the world, any of us can watch what may seem the most minor dramas streamed to either the largest screens or the most personal of devices. Maybe on your watch, you see squabbling or flirting in the kitchen. Perhaps, off in the living room, you watch sleeping. Perhaps the walls are literally crawling with frenzy. Just at that moment, you might believe you’re watching housewives or debutantes or roommates or spring breakers. If you’re in New Orleans, you might, in fact, not be watching the latest offering by Bravo but, instead, the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium, whose Cockroach House allows viewers in the insectarium to see a host of cockroaches swarming through living, dining, and kitchen spaces. Could it be that on the tiny television, they might be watching themselves on a channel on Animal Planet, which has, at times at least, broadcast the carnival on its live cockroach cam for viewers across the globe?1 Reality television may be a rather singular media development of the late twentieth century, one in this case that offers evidence of a seemingly limitless capacity to create entertainment out of a perverse

BotelhoV1-final.indb 1

11/9/22 1:36 PM

2

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

combination of banality and surveillance. But the cockroach cam is old news with respect to human fascination with insects, from which two desires rise to the fore. The first, not surprisingly, is the desire to observe, which early modern European entomologists avidly displayed, from the fieldwork of natural historians to the proponents of early microscopy to the fantasy, later achieved, of observation hives that allowed the workings of the apian world to be transparent to a viewer. The second desire is more complex, since it reveals a contradictory set of feelings about human entanglements with insect life. Do we call it a kind of anthropomorphism when we see insects placed in a constructed human environment, scaled down for insect proportions? Is it a way of cheekily offering these lesser living creatures the benefits of human technology? Does it also stage—in the safe confines of an environment entirely of human making—an age-old fear of insect invasion, one more typically imagined with respect to attacking swarms? Or does this cockroach house suggest insect resilience in the face of disaster, be it nuclear or ecological? Is it such a stretch to imagine that the cockroaches and their insectoid siblings very well might inherit the earth and populate “the world without us”?2 In some sense, it seems fair to say that Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance was born of both a similar fascination and a resulting conviction that from tiny creatures such massive considerations arise. Insects might be among the very many that did not enjoy a Renaissance amid the purported rebirth of learning, although insects were quite central to the rebirth of natural history, as works by Aristotle and Pliny were translated, debated, corrected, and continued in early modernity. Even as scholars have veered sharply away, understandably, from the portentous civilization-building language of earlier scholarly generations, it is hard to imagine human civilization in any era without also understanding the instrumental role that insects have played in the vast fields of the imagination and in every practical corner of early modern England. What then might we say about the seemingly omnipresent and yet also frequently unremarked creatures: the bees and the silkworms, the ants and the beetles, the worms and the water bugs, the termites and the scorpions, the spiders and the flies, the gnats and the butterflies, the wasps and the locusts and the maggots? And what might we say of stinging and of glowing, of swarming and of creeping, of scale and of polity, of industry and of pestilence, of pollination and of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 2

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

3

infestation? Even as successive waves of attention to ecology and creaturely life emerged in early modern studies, the figures Thomas Moffett called “Lesser Living Creatures” were scarcely troubled. How much more alluring were monsters just a decade or so before. How much more alluring dogs, sheep, and cows seemed to the early proponents of attention to what is of late called nonhuman life. And they are still fascinating, genuinely so—the dogs, sheep, and cows that seemed to enjoy a renaissance precisely because they sit squarely within familiar categories like “companion animal” or “livestock” or even “pastoral creature.” Consequently, what concepts and actions, what forms of life, locomotion, and consumption have we insufficiently considered? Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance represents the first major effort to think comprehensively in early modern England about what we might now call insect life. This is by no means, however, the first effort to understand earlier histories of insect life and the human fascination with life-forms that seemed at times tantalizingly proximate to and at others strikingly distant from the human. The essays in this book represent the latest chapter of this long fascination and are designed to augment existing work while also redressing an imbalance created by the greater charisma of certain (and mostly noninsectoid) creatures. Readers may indeed peruse the critical bibliographies in both volumes for a sense of the history of attention to insects and the most recent approaches. These two volumes of essays that constitute Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance follow two distinct, if overlapping, logics: creatures, on the one hand, and concepts, on the other. In addition, although the chapters in this book range widely throughout the literature and cultures of early modern England, with some tendrils of affiliation with continental Europe, the two volumes also address what is less an oversight than an underemphasis not only on insects but also on influential insect texts like Moffett’s The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures, which was outshone by Edward Topsell’s impressive The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts, which appeared in 1607 and was soon followed by The Historie of Serpents in 1608. The two were published together in 1658 as The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes and Serpents, with a new third volume described as an addition: “whereunto is now added, The theater of insects, or, Lesser living creatures by T. Muffet.”3 The incorporation of Moffett’s 1634 Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum simultaneously enshrined and overshadowed the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 3

11/9/22 1:36 PM

4

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

insect world at the very moment when Topsell became top dog, so to speak, in English natural history.

Thomas Moffett: Life and Works “Ever famous” is how the title page of the 1655 Healths Improvement refers to its author, Thomas Moffett. Yet Christopher Bennett, who “corrected and enlarged” Moffett’s text for that edition, claimed his project was to “raise our Author out of the dust, and long oblivion.”4 Moreover, Victor Houliston concludes his entry on this physician and natural historian in the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers with the rather ignominious dismissal that “apart from Shakespearean source-hunters, literary critics have largely ignored his work.”5 In spite of intimations of Moffett’s oblivion, Bennett finds, as do we, “so much Life and Pulse in his dead Works, that it had not been charity in me to let him dye outright.”6 History has been kinder to Topsell, at least of late. And yet what is missed in the neglect of Moffett and his writing is a series of edifying obsessions and the demonstration of a series of core principles and practices of natural history in an age in which long-standing forms of humanistic inquiry commingle with the impulse of the age of the new science. Moffett’s The Silkewormes and Their Flies appeared in 1599 authored by “T. M. a Countrie Farmar, and an Apprentice in Physicke,” announcing not only his devotion to medicine but also his fascination with the insect world (and inducing Bruce Boehrer to designate Moffett the “silkworm laureate.”7 Silkworms, to which were attached great interest and financial aspiration, form the basis of a work Houliston calls “the first Virgilian georgic poem” and yet might also properly be understood in the context of the late sixteenth-century craze for Ovidian epyllion. Indeed, Katherine Craik has argued that this work represents a complex intervention, as “Moffat responds to both the establishment of an English silk industry, and to Renaissance representations of literary authority.”8 For our purposes here, Moffett was most importantly the author of Theatrum Insectorum, or The Theater of Insects, but his publishing life witnessed a wide range of interests. Based on a lifelong devotion to medical practice was Healths Improvement, or, Rules Comprizing and

BotelhoV1-final.indb 4

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

5

Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing All Sorts of Food Used in This Nation, which, like Theatrum Insectorum, never appeared in print in his lifetime. Healths Improvement appears to be a translation of Moffett’s much earlier De Jure et Praestantia Chemicorum Medicamentorum, which was published in Frankfurt in 1584. The aim of that text was to consider diet, which Moffett defines as “an orderly and due course observed in the use of bodily nourishments, for the preservation, recovery or continuance of the health of mankind.”9 Moffett not only defines and discusses diet but considers the impacts and uses of various foods—meats, eggs, fish, fruit—on health and constitution. The Theater of Insects is as fascinating as it is vexing. Although it is celebrated under the name of the “ever famous” Moffett, it offers a veritable conundrum of authorial identity and legitimacy. Monique Bourque lucidly summarizes the confounding situation: The work began as the notes of Thomas Penny, a botanist and student of famed encyclopedist Conrad Gesner; Penny collected material on insects from classical Greek and Roman writers, from naturalists including Gesner and Wotton, and included his own observations. The manuscript was saved after Penny’s death by Moffett, who compiled and edited Penny’s notes, added to them from his own observations and materials, completed the work in 1589–1590, and died in 1604 before the book could be published. The book was not brought out until some thirty years after Moffett’s death, and then appeared with an introduction by physician Sir Theodore Mayerne, whose effect on the text itself is unclear, but who purchased the manuscript from Moffett’s apothecary.10 Thus, although Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance directs attention to Moffett, when we read his Theater of Insects, we can only conclude that our author, whether he is “ever famous” or easily forgotten, constitutes a many-headed multitude. Dare we even call the Theater of Insects a swarm? Theater of Insects is often viewed as a work of natural history, but as Bruce Boehrer notes, it “nonetheless displays qualities more typically identified nowadays with mythopoeic discourse: a posture of reliance

BotelhoV1-final.indb 5

11/9/22 1:36 PM

6

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

upon literary authority, frequent allusions to versified and fictional sources, a preoccupation with matters we would now consider sociolinguistic rather than scientific in character.”

Of Insects and Critical Turns Scholars may have never been more fond of the notion of the critical turn than they are just now, so much so that one wonders if all this turning might in fact leave us turning in circles. Certainly the great burst of work across disciplines and periods on the relationship between humans and other animals, so-called animal studies, has served as a basis and even an inspiration for a book such as this one. In part, this arises from the sense that taking creaturely life seriously would require a broader sensibility—one that finds interest and importance not only in the complex forms of human life, which can only be understood dialectically in relation to other creatures and ecologies, but also in the specificities of creatures that have a definitive impact on formations and deformations of the so-called human. Some years deep into this animal turn, disaffection with a limited range of creatures—and the limitations of even capacious terms like animal or beast—has resulted in an expansion of what deserves attention as creaturely life. Thus, following hard upon the “animal turn” has been what we might call a vegetative turn or what some call critical plant studies.11 The sentiment “if not animals, why not plants, if plants, why not insects” makes a certain sense; it is also the case that not only does the fascination with insects predate recent critical trends by many centuries (arguably millennia) but that the assimilation of all that is purportedly “not human” to some overarching category, as, for instance, in Richard Grusin’s edited collection The Nonhuman Turn, may unintentionally homogenize.12 In following across genres and disciplines a millennia-spanning fascination with what we now call insects, Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance joins an initial and still few studies of import. More useful, perhaps, than a description of every article published on insects in recent decades is, then, a conversation about broader trends in approaching the cultural life of insects. These two volumes follow a burst of invigorating work in early modern natural history that moves far beyond Keith Thomas’s still influential Man and the Natural World:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 6

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

7

Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (1983), from Paula Findlen’s Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (1996) to Brian Ogilvie’s landmark The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (2008). And while conversations about insect life were part of these larger conversations about the stakes of knowledge, observation, and the natural world, insects offer singular worlds of their own, which scholars have considered in a variety of ways. Some studies approach insects as what early modern writers might have called an anthology of the book of nature, such as, for example, Eric C. Brown’s important edited collection, Insect Poetics (2006), which considers a range of insects from classical epic to contemporary novels. Other studies offer historically embedded accounts of insects in particular eras, such as Janice Neri’s recent art-historical survey, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500– 1700. Neri provides the first account of how insect life became subject to study through the development of a “specimen logic,” which required protocols of visualization that “allowed [early modern natural historians] to construct themselves as the gatekeepers to a strange and fascinating new world.”13 Marisa Anne Bass’s recent Insect Artifice (2019) advances the art-historical examination of the legacies traced in these volumes by considering illustrator and miniaturist Joris Hufnagel’s Four Elements in an era of religious and political upheaval.14 Janelle Schwartz’s Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism (2012), too, follows the fortunes of vermiculture as it comes to redefine Romanticism. By placing literary creation in dialogue with natural history, Schwartz reveals “how these lower organisms became an instrumental paradox for the Romantics’ viable representations of the natural world.”15 Unlike studies structured by historical eras, Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Media and Technology (2010) considers insects not from the vantage point of media theory but from “the powers of insects as media in themselves,” and thus he attempts “not to write a linear history of insects and media but to offer some key case studies, all of which address a transposition between insects (and other simple forms of life) and media technologies.”16 Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance joins this early work in weaving together these various approaches to fascinating, diminutive creatures, considering insects as history, as theory, and as media all at once.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 7

11/9/22 1:36 PM

8

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Of Charisma and Creatures Max Weber describes “charismatic authority” as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”17 Weber was interested in those figures (shamans, berserkers, and prophets are some of his examples) who seemed marked by the divine and thus offer a model for those who possessed some greater share of political authority by virtue of the force of charisma, or the power to inspire enthusiasm. A leader, then, is one who stirs the crowd and incites devotion. As Weber puts it, “The corporate group which is subject to charismatic authority is based on an emotional form of communal relationship.”18 In Weber’s tripartite scheme, charismatic authority remains the most revolutionary form of authority, always capable of threatening the parameters of traditional or rational authority inasmuch as it engages intense emotional investment. For the most part, the implications of Weber’s account of mystical authority have rarely concerned the world of nonhuman creatures. The charisma of creatures seems very much to have an impact on scientific deliberations. A column in the Economist refers to an increase in “species” or “taxonomic inflation” as what were once subspecies become elevated to species for what we might call popular or political, rather than scientific or taxonomic, reasons: “One reason for this taxonomic inflation is that the idea of a species becoming extinct is easy to grasp, and thus easy to make laws about. Subspecies just do not carry as much political clout. The other is that upgrading subspecies into species simultaneously increases the number of rare species (by fragmenting populations) and augments the biodiversity of a piece of habitat and thus its claim for protection.”19 Even more noticeable would be the palpably economic valences of charismatic megafauna. While scientists may indeed debate how much popular or public appeal contributes to, say, the list of endangered species, organizations (and corporations) literally bank on certain species: dolphins, whales, pandas, and polar bears, at a minimum, and you likely have your own personal list. With respect to the study of creaturely life in Renaissance England and Europe, the charisma of creatures has had a series of impacts—some

BotelhoV1-final.indb 8

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

9

quite beneficial, some quite ambivalent. On the one hand, the animal has had no shortage of admirers in the study of the era, often motivated by an interest in what Topsell referred to as “Four-Footed Beasts.” Leading the way have been a range of familiar, domestic animals from husbandry animals (such as sheep and cattle) to domestic animals or pets (such as dogs and cats), to animals associated with venery or hunting (such as deer, foxes, and boars), to exotic animals (such as tigers, apes, and elephants). One consequence of the charisma of the animal—and of these animals in particular—has been the extraordinary proliferation of attention to many varieties of creaturely life. And yet some animals are clearly more equal than others, a proposition even more true for insect life. Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance attempts to redirect the charisma of creatures and, in so doing, to redress a series of imbalances that privilege familiar animals seemingly more powerfully linked to humans through a combination of scale, utility, and affect even as insect life remains more intimately interspersed and entwined with human life. There is, of course, a risk of merely recapitulating canons of valuation. And to be sure, within the world of lesser living creatures, some insects also seem more equal than others, as some creatures not surprisingly rise to the fore along with unexpected claimants. Bees were sovereign creatures, master metaphors, and powerful exemplars, subject to perhaps more treatises than any other, given the powerful connections between apian and human life. Pity the poor creatures who did not make an appearance, for example, in Samuel Purchas’s Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects (1657), which takes up bees to the exclusion of all others. While ants, gnats, and fleas swarm with predictable regularity in literary, cultural, and natural history texts, the urgencies of transatlantic commerce and trade have elevated the silkworm as an object of attention in a range of treatises. Other unexpected realizations arise in following the logic of the creature as a defining rubric, as do the chapters in our first volume. What, indeed, do we learn from bees? Everything, it seems, and as Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana’s “ ‘Some say the bee stings’: Toward an Apian Poetics” indicates, not only did this diminutive wonder serve as the most charismatic of the creatures of the insect world, but the consistent and often extravagant adulation says something about a process of constant calibration that took place between human and bee. If, on the one hand, natural history treatises and husbandry manuals alike

BotelhoV1-final.indb 9

11/9/22 1:36 PM

10

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

aimed to articulate the best strategy for increasing the productivity and value of the hive, then on the other hand, these works simultaneously encouraged humans to take a page from the great book of nature, reading particularly chapter “B” and aligning moral life with this exemplary creature. Fascinating questions arise about what paradigm of relation best describes what happens when bee and human meet. Pet, livestock, or companion animal? Wild or domesticated? Muse or moralist? The lore on bees was familiar and iterable because it had become iconic, and yet somehow the creature was, remarkably, as multifaceted and even myriad-minded as any human. Much of what we learn from Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance concerns what happens when other creatures seize the center stage, as in the case of Roya Biggie’s attention to “beetles” in “Beetle: Sycorax’s Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and Blackness,” which raises the recurrent question: Whence does information about the world of lesser living creatures arise? In the case of the beetle, which was, like the bee, “deemed an appropriate pedagogical tool,” Biggie considers differing accounts, from the iconic image of Albrecht Dürer to the circulation of Aesopian fables to Erasmus’s Adages to Moffett’s Theater of Insects, and finally, even, to William Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. If the beetle was a pedagogical tool, it was so because of a core ambivalence that required decisions about valuation. Was the beetle a contemptible creature of the muck or an exemplary instance of modesty and tenacity? As Biggie makes clear, the complex and contradictory nature of beetle lore of the era forces a consideration of both just what is “lesser” about lesser living creatures and what different kinds of information—fable, lore, or observation—imply about such creatures. What do we expect from the exquisite and diaphanous butterflies and moths? A sweep of glorious wing, perhaps. Indeed, just as the butterfly enters, stage right, to enhance a distinction between the beautiful and the ugly insects, the gorgeous architecture of bees and the dung-oriented life of the beetle, Chris Barrett complicates this portrait by finding, unexpectedly, in butterflies “a ghastly history of violence” and “narrative innovation.” Perhaps it should be no surprise that creatures associated with transformation would signify more complexly than one might initially imagine, and yet as Barrett ranges from Moffett to Edmund Spenser and beyond, it becomes apparent that the bee was not the only insect associated with literary production, as in the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 10

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

11

oft-cited Senecan adage, Apes debemus imitari. And yet, while writers were to imitate the bee by consulting and digesting the authors of the past just as the bee draws from many flowers, the butterfly intervenes more directly in being associated with “story-retelling” and “rewriting.” Bees collect and digest but butterflies revise, as in the case of Spenser’s “Muipotmos,” which transforms Ovid’s Arachne narrative in a manner not adequately described by the language of imitation or influence. As we watch, the butterfly “folds its codex wings and seeks even the revision of world seething with minute minions of beauty.” As literary, as iconic, and as proverbial as were so many insects, they remain elusive, as much makers of the literary tradition as figures within it. So it was for bees and butterflies and so too it was, as Gary Bouchard argues, for the charismatically uncharismatic flea, a creature, he argues, capable of “a virtuoso display of equivocation.” Long before Moffett or even the equally virtuosic John Donne put pen to page, the flea was present in literary tradition through the strange but notable strand of erotic “flea” poetry, which culminated in La Puce de Madame de Roche (1582), a multilingual collection of dozens of such poems. Thus, what remains remarkable about Donne’s oft-taught poem “The Flea” is not that a flea appeared in a poem or that it appeared in an erotic exchange but, rather, that Donne parlays the allure of the flea, transforming it into a creature not merely of erotic titillation but of “marital unity.” Indeed, as Bouchard considers Donne’s masterful redeployment of what was already a common erotic trope, he plumbs the depths of meaning packed into this tiny creature, the most surprising of which concern not love or sex but devotion. To trace decades of this poem’s reception is to realize that the ambiguity of the poem might equally concern questions of theology and confessional identity. Donne’s singularity comes, then, not from the choice of writing a poem about a flea but in “an astounding leap from its smutty origins in Sergianus’s Carmen de Pulice to the bare flesh of Donne’s lady, where it became a dramatic, violent, and ambiguous sacrifice on her purpled nail.” What a difference truncation makes, which is to say what a difference there is between “butterfly” and “flies.” Insects are, of course, creatures of segmentation, as etymology teaches (entoma, segment) and as our contributor Eric C. Brown reminds us in his introduction to Insect Poetics: “For the idea of the ‘insect,’ we are indebted to Aristotle, who first categorized these creatures as ‘entoma’ (whence ‘entomology’),

BotelhoV1-final.indb 11

11/9/22 1:36 PM

12

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

stressing their existence in sections,” any one of which segments, he believed, would naturally persist on its own if severed from the whole.20 Yet in “Of Flyes: The Insect Mind of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus,” Perry Guevera aligns the segmentation at the heart of the insects with the violent disarticulation at the heart of revenge tragedy. Flies are, he argues, “figures of killability, animal bodies made available for death,” bodies that remind us how available for killing are human bodies on the Renaissance stage. It may have been Gloucester who is forced to concede, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods / They kill us for their sport.”21 But in Titus Andronicus, this drama of killability had already reached an apex, as Marcus’s killing of a fly incites a reflection on justice and revenge. And yet to consider Titus Andronicus from the point of view of cognitive ecology and neurobiology is to wonder if the fly is not only a figure of human vulnerability but something much more intimate. “The very possibility of insect emotion,” Guevera argues, “allows Shakespeare’s fly scene to be something other than exclusively anthropomorphic. Shakespeare portrays a moment of cross-species attunement as a consequence of trauma and the subsequent vertigo of the animal-other’s cognition.” Vertigo is often how insects are apprehended. How odd, for example, that Moffett would lavish attention on “the gnat” given that he described it, in a judgment that seems to contradict the very premise of regarding lesser living creatures, to be “a little Insect not worth speaking of.” And yet, as Steven Swarbrick argues in “The Clamor of Things: Moffett’s Gnats, Spenser’s Complaints,” Moffett was not the only one to note an apparent paradox between the insignificance of the gnat and its irritating capacity for noise. Indeed, it is the very idea of clamor that brings together the science of insects and the art of the complaint, both of which witness the dissolution of the subject into varieties of sensation and life utterly confounding to what might be called, only aspirationally, the human. Swarbrick takes his reader on a dizzying tour of the tiny inhumanities out of which speaking subjects emerge, reminding us that it does not take a natural-historical treatise to, as the complaint teaches, “adopt an inhuman perception” and realize that all art “is an art of dying,” pointing to what is beyond not only the human but life as we tend to understand it. Political was one term used to describe an array of insects. Kathryn Vomero Santos demonstrates in “Antimonarchal Locusts: Translating

BotelhoV1-final.indb 12

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

13

the Grasshopper in the Aftermath of the English Civil Wars,” it was not only the majestic bee but also the fascinating insectoid shifter— grasshopper into locust—that could bear the impress of the political. In the wake of the civil wars, a time of extraordinary national stress, the figure of the solitary, sovereign grasshopper comes to be replaced by the terrifying specter of “swarms of ‘antimonarchal locusts.’ ” Santos traces the long impact of John Ogilby’s retelling of the Aesopian fable of the ant and the grasshopper and the various translations of the Greek term tettix. “By choosing to transform the Greek cicada into the English grasshopper,” Santos argues, “the royalist poets may have been acknowledging the ways in which the word `grasshopper’ could also be read as ‘locust,’ bringing together two culturally opposite meanings in the same word.” Thus, the grasshopper-locust astonishes in its vertiginous transformations. It is the nexus of various kinds of knowledge— natural-historical, biblical, Aesopian, political-theoretical—that Biggie similarly traces around the beetle. If the butterfly was a catalyst of revision, the locust, like the flea, founds a literary trend—in this case, the many “royalist grasshopper imitations circulating in print in the 1640s and 1650s.” Admiration is one consequence of charisma. Of course, most often charisma results from what is compellingly attractive. Beauty, symmetry, and similitude all constitute charismatic lures, as butterflies and bees indicate. And yet, as Emily King demonstrates in “Mutable Maggots: Corruption, Generation, and Literary Legacy,” maggots had a lure, if not precisely an appeal, even though “their ubiquity alone rarely qualifies them as suitable companions” and “they do not readily avail themselves to anthropomorphism.” Although they existed outside the charmed circle of aesthetically appealing insects, beneath their repugnance lurks a fascinating if “grotesque mobility.” They not only confound dividing lines between species, but their proximity to corruption seems to denature all boundaries, as death, the great maker of indistinction, draws all into its shadowy world. As signifiers of oblivion, maggots seem to motivate a reparative, literary response to “death’s inevitable annihilation.” Crossing from the theater of insects to the theater of tragedy, King finds “worms and maggots in libraries instead of graves,” threatening the very possibility of cultural memory and meaning. And yet perhaps corruption may lead to generation. “Maggots effect radical transformations,” King insists, perhaps nowhere more

BotelhoV1-final.indb 13

11/9/22 1:36 PM

14

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

exquisitely rendered than in The Tempest’s famous sea change, in which eyes become pearls and thus, perhaps, see the world differently. Many of the lesser living creatures come into focus in distinction not just to the human but also to other insects. Most particularly, the charismatic bee is that creature with and against which so many others are juxtaposed. Like the bee, if unlike the maggot, the ant, or pismire, was seen to be a creature of virtuous work. And although the ant may not yet have evoked the kind of fascination typical of later eras, what Edward Bury considered “the diligence of ants” was already legendary. And yet ants were also warriors, tending at times to havoc. Shannon Kelley considers this “equivocal insect,” illuminating the evolution of ants from earlier bestiary traditions to natural history tracts such as The Theater of Insects. If, as Donovan Sherman will argue, the wasp is a kind of ant-bee, in Kelley’s chapter the ant serves as a kind of alterbee: virtuous but violent, political but lacking in a central ruler. “Two points surface repeatedly about pismire government,” Kelley argues. “The citizen-ant’s identity is indistinguishable from that of the entire commonwealth, and the citizen-ant lacks any oversight” whatsoever. Despite these divergences from the bee, the dominant strands of figuration depict the pismire as a creature of contented labor. As Eric C. Brown argues in “Flame of Fire Beaten: Scorpions in and out of Mind,” the scorpion comes into clarity as a terrifying alternative to the bee. The very title page of The Theater of Insects juxtaposes these creatures, “the admirable giving away to an image most readers would have associated with things dangerous, even diabolical.” And yet Brown points out a larger truth in his fascinating essay that “Moffett’s larger project in Theater of Insects is always a redemptive one.” Even scorpions, then, are part of the glorious book of nature. Moffett’s age read that book for what we now call fact and science, but the fascinating appeal of the scorpion, relative to some of the other insects represented here, is that it is “an especially imagined creature for English readers—one largely exotic and steeped in legend and fable,” and thus “the scorpion comes to be associated with infinitude, inscrutability, and insubstantiality.” That this creature took on a phantasmatic, even psychic life in a climate not prone to scorpions might figure “the limitless quality of a tortured mind” as in Macbeth or the terrors of mortality in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Although perhaps no insect could displace the bee as the sovereign insect, the silkworm, although also associated with luxury, excited

BotelhoV1-final.indb 14

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

15

early modern thinkers as it offered the promise of parlaying the virtuous industry of insects into a new English industry woven of strands of silk stretching to Virginia and back. Or so Bruce Boehrer argues in “Thomas Moffett, Silkworm Laureate,” which considers Moffett’s writings about silkworms in both The Theater of Insects and his poem The Silkwormes and Their Flies, the tantalizing possibilities of an ultimately canceled royal visit to Wiltshire in 1599 during which Moffett hoped to advocate for “the establishment of an English silk industry.” Boehrer reads Moffett’s natural history with Moffett’s poetry to realize that not only do these writings “contravene modern disciplinary and generic boundaries,” but in doing so, they “participate in a holistic mode of relation to society and to the earth itself, a mode of relation at once cultural, economic, and political in character.” Although time and literary opinion have not been kind to Moffett’s Silkwormes, Boehrer clarifies the ambition of the poem, which was not merely to replicate or innovate with respect to literary predecessors but “to promote an agricultural innovation.” Moffett may be no Shakespeare, but “within a decade of Moffett’s death, domestic sericulture had become a crown project and the focus of considerable resources.” Moffett and his silkworms were, then, authors of a literary tradition of broad ambition and scope, one capable of addressing land, resources, and trade, and that we have been perhaps hitherto all too unequipped to understand and acknowledge. Like silkworms, spiders weave captivating patterns. Unlike the luxurious products of the silkworms, on which Moffett and so many others hoped to capitalize, the awe inspired by the spider generated a spiral of fear and fascination. “What other tiny, cold-blooded creature,” Mary Baine Campbell asks in her far-reaching survey, “has generated its very own phobia?” And yet for all the strong omnipresence of this creature and a wide range of emotional responses, Campbell also notes “the relative paucity of treatments” across early modern disciplines of knowledge—hence, the need for what Campbell calls “The Renaissance of Spiders: Ambivalence, Beauty, Terror, Art.” In one respect at least, the spider offers another potent counterpoint to the silkworm and the bee. “The lack of a commercial use for spiders or spider silk,” she argues, “was another reason why an insect whose representation boasts such antiquity and poetic power could not always make it as a subject of natural history.” In an era of fluid interchange between what we might now refer to as relatively separate literary and scientific systems, it becomes easier to describe what Campbell sees as “the spider’s early

BotelhoV1-final.indb 15

11/9/22 1:36 PM

16

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

modern affective terrain: its elegance, beauty, frightfulness, and useful beneficence, especially its power to protect.” In poetry from John Heywood’s Spider and Flie to Spenser’s Muipotmos, the spider witnesses a strange “latency” as Campbell argues, always available as a repository of “symbolic convenience as a sometimes venomous, generally secretive, gender-ambiguous, too-many-legged creature” that “dampened interest in it . . . and helped make it relatively unpopular as a topic.” The spider is thus the paradigm of a certain human relationship to insects, which finds them everywhere and nowhere at the same time, always scuttling in and out of sight and attention. In engaging with insects, a series of sometimes conscious and sometimes inadvertent acts of comparison and association occur. As Donovan Sherman asks, with a nod to Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Wasp?,” he narrows in on a core question about how we construct relationships of difference and similitude both between humans and the insect world and within the insect world. He does so by considering the vexed relationship between wasp and bee. Noting that wasps are uncannily like both bees and anti-bees, Sherman notes that “the difference between wasp and bee is distant enough to make them oppositional but proximal enough to cause aesthetic confusion.” Despite the tiny nature of those creatures—and even those differences—the consequences may be massive when considering the odd triangle created by bee, wasp, and human. “The bees,” he argues, “are like humans but do not resemble them; the wasps resemble bees but are nothing like them. At stake in evoking the wasp is the nature of what it means to be ‘like’ something at all.” Sherman confirms a perception in most of the chapters in this collection: every human effort to make meaning with and about insect life provokes a powerful countercurrent, as insects seem to remake the humans who observe them. To consider closely these relations is to apprehend paradox. “The Renaissance wasp,” Sherman argues, “invites analogy as a negation of meaning making: being like wasps is being not like bees; it is to be outside the limits of relationality at all.” Such an “outside” is perhaps where, despite their proximity and enmeshment with humans, insects live. Limit cases abound in the insect world and, for Dan Brayton’s “Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine Science,” to apprehend the odd category of the water bug is, in several respects, to consider “creatures dwelling near the limits of perception.” Such creatures offer

BotelhoV1-final.indb 16

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction

|

17

a challenge not only of classification but of basic perception. “How to study,” Brayton asks, “a creature too remote to see in its native habitat, too small to see except in unusual circumstances, and about which little or nothing was written?” Brayton considers, then, Moffett’s engaging response to such dilemmas, which witnesses “the triumph of observation over tradition” that Brian Ogilvie’s influential The Science of Describing establishes as a core premise of the early modern renaissance of natural history. So too for The Theater of Insects. “Nowhere in Moffett’s work,” Brayton argues, “is his commitment to the science of describing more in evidence than in his accounts of water bugs.” Perhaps, indeed, the lack of earlier natural history on aquatic insects made Moffett especially free to privilege observation. Despite occasional anthropomorphism, the precision of Moffett’s writing about this subject, Brayton argues, suggests that his “knowledge derives from direct observation, which we can only speculate involved considerable time spent in the field, in this case investigating English ponds, puddles, and waterways, as his repeated insistence on a dearth of literature on the subject suggests.” Moffett becomes, then, not merely a compiler of other people’s knowledge or a transmitter of canonical natural history but an observer and pioneer oddly ahead of his time in acknowledging and studying a wholly nonterrestrial world of “tiny lives aquatic.” Silkworms and spiders weave, bees mellify, maggots corrupt, and scorpions terrify. But it was the property of the worm, Karen Raber argues, to burrow, and its burrowing takes it deep into the conscience. Perhaps it should be no surprise that a creature so suited to infiltrating the flesh would also permeate the mind. Raber’s “Worms of Conscience” considers how the worm constitutes “a competing agent dwelling not just alongside, but within humans themselves.” This might seem an observation driven by much more recent acknowledgment of the extent to which human bodies are made of and dependent on other life-forms, from bacteria to worms and beyond. But as Raber convincingly shows, the natural history of Moffett’s era acknowledged this premise and in doing so built on older classical and biblical traditions of the worm of conscience, which offered whispers from within: “the internal, secret promptings of morality seem to the sufferer the intercession of another entity altogether.” Raber traces this cultural commonplace from proverb and lore to theology and theater, confirming “that early moderns considered parasitical worm infestations as an internal conflict over

BotelhoV1-final.indb 17

11/9/22 1:36 PM

18

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

identity and agency.” Perhaps it should be no surprise that creatures so numerous as those of the insect world, be they flies or gnats or worms (of conscience), confirm that the human is definitively not one. Notes 1. At the time this introduction was composed, the Animal Planet channel was, alas, offl ine. 2. For this influential formulation of what it is to imagine the aftermath of human extinction, see Weisman, World Without Us. 3. Topsell, Historie of Four-Footed Beasts. 4. Moffett, Healths Improvement, A3r. 5. Houliston, “Thomas Moffett,” 136:234. 6. Moffett, Healths Improvement, B1v. 7. Moffett, Silkewormes. 8. Craik, “These Almost Th ingles Things,” 53. 9. Moffett, Healths Improvement, 1. 10. Bourque, “ ‘There is nothing more divine,’ ” 141. 11. Marder has led the way on a substantial reconsideration of the philosophical tradition in a series of books, including Plant Thinking (2013), The Philosopher’s Plant (2014), and Grafts (2016), and Irigaray and Marder, Through Vegetal Being (2016). Hall argues for the personhood of vegetation in Plants as Persons (2011). Kohn’s

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

How Forests Think (2013) departs markedly from anthropology’s focus on the human to ask what ethnographic attention to vegetation might yield. Nealon surveys this burgeoning field in Plant Theory (2016), while The Language of Plants, ed. Gagliano, Ryan, and Vieira (2017), offers an ample overview. In early modern studies, ecocriticism has lavished some attention on vegetation, most especially in figurations of the forest, as in Theis, Writing the Forest (2005) and Nardizzi, Wooden Os (2013). See Grusin, Nonhuman Turn. Neri, Insect and the Image, xi. Bass, Insect Artifice. Schwartz, Worm Work, xv. Parikka, Insect Media, xiii. Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization, 358–59. Ibid., 360. “Species Inflation: Hail Linnaeus.” Brown, introduction to Insect Poetics, x. Shakespeare, King Lear, 4.1.35–36.

Bibliography Bass, Marisa Anne. Insect Artifice: Nature and Art in the Dutch Revolt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. Bourque, Monique. “ ‘There is nothing more divine than these, except Man’: Thomas Moffett and Insect Sociality.” Quidditas 29 (1999): 137–54. Brown, Eric C. Introduction to Insect Poetics. Edited by Eric Brown. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Craik, Katharine. “ ‘These Almost Thingles Things’: Thomas Moffat’s The Silkewormes and English Renaissance

BotelhoV1-final.indb 18

Georgic.” Cahiers Elisabethans 60, no. 1 (2001): 53–66. The Economist. “Species Inflation: Hail Linnaeus.” Economist, May 17, 2007. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Gagliano, Monica, John C. Ryan, and Patricia Vieira, eds. The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Introduction Grusin, Richard, ed. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Hall, Matthew. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011. Houliston, Victor. “Thomas Moffett.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography: Sixteenth- Century British Nondramatic Writers. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994. Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Marder, Michael. Grafts: Writings on Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Univocal Publishing, 2016. ———. The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. ———. Plant Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Moffett, Thomas. Healths Improvement, or, Rules Comprizing and Discovering the Nature, Method, and Manner of Preparing All Sorts of Food Used in This Nation. London, 1655. ———. Silkewormes, and Their Flies: Liuely Described in Verse. London, 1599. ———. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 19

|

19

Nardizzi, Vin. Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Nealon, Jeff rey T. Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetal Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. Neri, Janice. The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Ogilvie, Brian. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Parikka, Jussi. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Media and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Schwartz, Janelle. Worm Work: Recasting Romanticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. London: Thompson, 1997. Theis, Jeff rey. Writing the Forest in Early Modern England: A Sylvan Pastoral Nation. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Topsell, Edward. The Historie of FourFooted Beasts and Serpents. London, 1658. Weber, Max. Theory of Social and Economic Organization. London: Free Press, 1947. Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne, 2007.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 1

SILKWORM Thomas Moffett, Silkworm Laureate

Bruce Boehrer

Thomas Moffett’s (1553–1604) reputation rests on his work as a physician and protoentomologist, one of early modern England’s foremost naturalists specializing in insects and related species. But a case can also be made for his importance as a poet. As it happens, this case must be built mainly on Moffett’s writings on the silkworm. The broad intellectual context of Moffett’s poetizing tendencies is on display in his zoological magnum opus, the Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum, compiled partly from the writings of Conrad Gesner (1516– 1565), Edward Wotton (1492–1555), and Thomas Penny (d. 1589), which first saw print in Latin in 1634, thirty years after Moffett’s death, before being translated into English (by a certain J. R., M.D.) in 1658, as The Theater of Insects, for inclusion in that year’s combined posthumous edition of Edward Topsell’s (1572–1625) Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents. But the principal witness to Moffett’s poetic abilities is his two-book didactic poem, The Silkewormes, and their Flies, first printed in London in 1599 by V. S. (Valentine Simmes) for Nicholas Ling, “to be sold in his shop at the West end of Paules.”1 Moffett took interest in sericulture as early as 1579, when, at twentysix years old, he visited Italy and Spain on an early version of the Grand Tour.2 The subject of silk production would have naturally intrigued a

BotelhoV1-final.indb 20

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Silkworm

|

21

young man given to the study of insects. With the honeybee, the silkworm was one of the two principal insect species domesticated for commercial purposes, and unlike the honeybee, which had long been raised in England, the mulberry silkworm (Bombyx mori) was an exotic species. Moreover, silk production remained an emerging industry in early modern Europe. While the cultivation of mulberry silk first reached Andalusia with the Moors in the 700s and Sicily with the Saracens in the 800s,3 “it was only in the 1440s that the spread of silk manufacturing in Italy began to quicken at a remarkable pace.”4 From there, sericulture expanded into France in the late 1400s and Germany and the Low Countries by the mid-1500s.5 Typically for the sixteenth century, England lagged behind in this regard. Sericulture interested the kingdoms of early modern Europe because of silk’s iconic status as a luxury commodity. This status also provides a firm connection between the practical field of silkworm husbandry and the poetic register within which Moffett extols it. One need not seek far for examples of the literary association between silk and qualities like luxury, conspicuous consumption, and excess, whether admirable or sinful. “How go things at court?,” asks Vindice at the outset of Thomas Middleton’s (1580–1627) savage satire of courtly manners, The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), a question to which his brother Hippolito replies, “In silk and silver, brother, never braver.”6 These opening words anticipate the play’s most celebrated lines, delivered later by Vindice as he prepares to entrap the play’s nameless and lecherous Duke in an assignation with a poisoned skull disguised beneath layers of rich fabric. Moralistically addressing the skull in question, Vindice wonders, “Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours / For thee? For thee does she undo herself?”7 While the question itself is rhetorical, its ironies run deep, as the silkworm undoes itself only to adorn a human body that succumbs in turn to vermiculation: “See, ladies, with false forms / You deceive men, but cannot deceive worms.”8 As memento mori, Middleton’s lines offer a sartorial version of Shakespeare’s gastronomic truism, “We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots”; like sentiments also recur, now in the sexual register, when Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) worries about worms trying his mistress’s “long-preserved virginity.”9 As moral condemnation, however, Middleton’s lines connect straight back to The Theater of Insects: “So often as I consider, that some ten thousands of Silk-worms, labouring continually night and

BotelhoV1-final.indb 21

11/9/22 1:36 PM

22

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

day, can hardly make some three ounces of Silk, so often do I condemn the excessive profusion and luxuriousness of men in such costly things . . . as if they . . . were wholly bent upon waste.”10 Moffett’s treatise on insects thus extends into a skein of poetic association encompassing Middleton, Shakespeare, Marvell, and more. And rightly so, given that Moffett’s treatise is itself essentially poetic in much of its character, expressing what Michel Foucault called “the semantic web of resemblance in the sixteenth century,” an order of knowledge grounded in “the primacy of the written word.”11 This intellectual dispensation—which, lacking modern disciplinary divisions of knowledge, presents natural history as “an inextricable mixture of exact descriptions, reported quotations, fables without commentary, remarks dealing indifferently with an animal’s anatomy, its use in heraldry, its habitat, its mythological values, [and] the uses to which it could be put in medicine or in magic”—also parallels Bruno Latour’s account of premodernity, a condition in which “the myths, ethnosciences, genealogies, political forms, techniques, religions, epics, and rites” of a culture occupy the same mental space, without differentiation.12 Within this space, the divisions between scientific and poetic discourse tend to dissolve, as witnessed if we ask a question about poetic diction: Why does Middleton specifically imagine the silkworm’s labors as “yellow”? A possible answer comes from Moffett, not from the Theater of Insects, as we might expect, but instead from a technical description in The Silkwormes of the grades of thread produced by the silkworms’ cocoons: Three sorts there are, distinct by colours three, The purest like to their resplendant haire, Who weeping brothers fal from coursers free, Their teares were turned to yellow amber faire. (63) Moffett glosses this passage with a marginal reference to book 2 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which recounts the tale of Phaëthon’s sisters, the Heliades, transformed into trees by grief at their brother’s demise, their tears hardened into amber.13 To a modern ear, this note seems maddeningly irrelevant, offering neither empirical confirmation of the color of high-grade silk nor even a mythic account of that color’s origins, but instead a mythic account of the origins of another substance

BotelhoV1-final.indb 22

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Silkworm

|

23

entirely, one whose only connection to silk lies in a coincidence of pigmentation. The associative process here becomes neither causal nor logical but more properly analogical, driven by random resemblance, and Moffett’s own syntax perversely indulges this fact, comparing the yellow of silk not even to “yellow amber faire” but in fact to the “resplendant” hair color (presumably also yellow) of the nymphs whose tears are thus hardened and preserved in resinous form. One consequence of such associations is to render genre distinctions particularly elusive. The Theater of Insects, generally accepted as a work of natural history, nonetheless displays qualities more typically identified now with mythopoeic discourse: a posture of reliance on literary authority, frequent allusions to versified and fictional sources, a preoccupation with matters we would now consider sociolinguistic rather than scientific in character. The Silkwormes also participates in a poetic genre—georgic—whose relationship to practical matters of estate management grows ever more tenuous with time until the genre itself falls defunct by the early 1900s.14 In both works, we confront forms of writing that have been subjected to processes of modern disciplinary “purification” (to use Latour’s term) until they have been purified into nonexistence, replaced by genres (the biological treatise, the agronomic manual) that address similar subject matter but may hardly be considered interchangeable.15 This necessary preamble leads to my argument here: that just as Moffett’s writings contravene modern disciplinary and generic boundaries, so those writings also participate in a holistic mode of relation to society and to the earth itself, a mode of relation at once cultural, agricultural, economic, and political in character. My latest book, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, has advanced a similar argument about Shakespeare, contending that his plays, with their emphasis on famine and food supplies, need to be read alongside the surviving records of his business investments in the Warwickshire grain market, investments that are, on the one hand, enabled by proceeds from the plays while seeking, on the other hand, to realize the plays’ utopian vision of a society in which “distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough.”16 As it happens, Moffett pursues a similar project, one that elicits various kinds of literary output as just one aspect of a broader set of undertakings encompassing innovations

BotelhoV1-final.indb 23

11/9/22 1:36 PM

24

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

in economic production and land use, together with the cultivation of patronage relations. These broader, nominally nonliterary undertakings unfold, in turn, around Moffett’s interest in introducing sericulture into England. This was a lifelong preoccupation, extending from his early encounter with silkworms in Italy to the publication of The Silkwormes four years before his death. Appearing as it does at the very end of the sixteenth century, The Silkwormes serves as an early outrider of the “georgic revolution” that, according to Anthony Low, “took place in England between about 1590 and 1700.”17 For Low, the rise in popularity of georgic verse in seventeenth-century England corresponds to “a radical revision of the period’s typical attitude toward manual labor” that raises farming from its former status as “a base activity,” unworthy of the privileged elite, to a new position as “useful . . . honorable . . . and even capable of glorious fruits.”18 Low’s thesis has been criticized for anachronism in attributing to the sixteenth-century gentry a disdain for manual labor more typical of their eighteenth-century descendants, as well as for its failure to recognize the influence of georgic in English verse that precedes the heyday of formal Virgilian imitation.19 But Moffett’s poem remains noteworthy in any case, either as one of the very earliest efforts to import the georgic into English or as a linchpin in the developmental sequence leading from informal to formal imitations of the Virgilian georgic mode. Either way, Moffett’s poem was not meant simply as an effort to reproduce a classical literary form. It was also clearly designed to promote an agricultural innovation, and here, in the promotion of English sericulture, The Silkwormes forged its immediate legacy. Efforts to create an English silk industry began with Moffett in the late days of Elizabethan rule but continued for over 250 years, ultimately generating a short-lived boom in demand for English silks in the late 1700s and early 1800s before the industry collapsed after 1860, a victim of trade competition from France.20 In the shorter run, over the course of the 1600s, the nascent English sericulture trade spawned a series of promotional publications, of which Moffett’s Silkwormes is the earliest. Eight years later, in 1607, Nicholas Geffe published The Perfect Use of Silke-Wormes and Their Benefit (a translation of Olivier de Serres’s Theatre d’Agriculture et Mesnage de Champs [1598]) under the patronage of James I. To this work Geffe also appended a tract of his own on [T]he Meanes and Sufficiencie of England, for to Have Abundance of Fine Silke. In 1609,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 24

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Silkworm

|

25

William Stallenge published a translation of Jean-Baptiste Letellier’s Memoirs et Instructions pour l’Etablissement des Meuriers, et Art de Faire la Soye (1603) under the title Instructions for the Increasing of Mulberie Trees. By 1620, interest had begun to focus on the production of raw silk in England’s New World colonies, as witnessed by the appearance that year of John Bonoeil’s Obseruations to Be Followed, for the Making of Fit Rooms, to Keepe Silk-Wormes . . . for the Benefit of the Noble Plantation in Virginia. Bonoeil reprinted this work in enlarged form two years later, with epistles dedicatory from James and Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. This in turn led to a series of midcentury tractates promoting Virginian silk, particularly Virginia’s Discovery of Silk-Worms, by Edward Williams (1650), and two works published by Milton’s associate Samuel Hartlib, A Rare and New Discovery of a Speedy Way . . . for the Feeding of Silk-Worms . . . on the Mulberry Tree Leaves in Virginia (1652) and The Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees . . . with the Reformed Virginian Silk-Worm (1655). These are the principal publications to emerge from the first century of English silk production, and they have undergone excellent recent appraisal by Linda Levy Peck.21 More such works appear around the turn of the eighteenth century, when Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) led to an influx of Huguenot silk workers into England, thereby sparking the brief heyday of the English silk industry in the 1700s and early 1800s. But that is a later story. The pre-Restoration tracts divide naturally into two groups: the translations of the early 1600s (Geffe and Stallenge), which aim to reproduce French-style sericulture on English soil, and the tracts from 1620 onward that instead focus on New World silk cultivation (Bonoeil, Williams, and Hartlib). This shift seems to compensate for a major perceived obstacle to the development of English silk making: the silkworm’s preferred feedstock, the white mulberry tree (Morus alba), did not adapt to the British climate sufficiently well to enable large-scale domestic silkworm cultivation.22 The earliest efforts to import silkworms and mulberry seed into England thus fell flat, even though they enjoyed royal patronage. Not only did James encourage the publications by Geffe, Stallenge, and Bonoeil, but he also supported cultivation of the worms themselves. Stallenge, Bonoeil, and later the elder John Tradescant all received royal appointments as keeper of the king’s silkworms and royal gardener, responsible

BotelhoV1-final.indb 25

11/9/22 1:36 PM

26

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

for the maintenance of the royal silkworms and their food, for which King James reserved significant parcels of royal property. According to one recent assessment, “James fanatically pursued the establishment of a domestic silkworm industry, with trial silkworm rooms and mulberry tree plantations at Whitehall, Oatlands, and Greenwich, and a special keeper; allegedly staff had to carry the insects wherever the king went.”23 When wild mulberry trees were discovered in Virginia, James thus backed efforts to raise silkworms there as well, supplying his colony at Jamestown with eggs from his own stock not once but twice, in 1608 and again (after rats ate the first worms) in 1619.24 Within a decade of Moffett’s death, domestic sericulture had become a Crown project and the focus of considerable resources. However, Moffett himself is seldom connected to these developments, arguably because his efforts at silkworm promotion took place under an earlier monarch less given to the project and because the textual record of those efforts occurs in a genre now understood as belletristic rather than practical in nature. In her survey of the Jacobean sericulture tracts, for instance, Peck mentions Moffett only once, describing The Silkwormes as a “tongue in cheek” production.25 Nor were Moffett’s contemporaries always quick to recognize his efforts. Writing just eight years after Moffett’s death, Henry Peacham credited William Stallenge, not Moffett, with being the “first Author of making Silke in our Land.”26 This accolade makes sense insofar as Stallenge indeed produced the first raw silk raised in England under direct royal patronage. But Moffett had been urging the very same undertaking a good decade earlier, as the title page of The Silkwormes declares: “For the great benefit and enriching of England.” Part of Moffett’s problem lay in the fact that in the short run, sericulture promised to cut into Crown revenues derived from customs duties on imported silk, while also threatening to undercut the native wool knitting industry. The unhappy story of William Lee (d. ca. 1610) helps illustrate the difficulty. Lee, a fellow Cantabrigian of Moffett’s generation, had by 1589 devised the stocking frame, the first mechanized instrument to revolutionize the production of textiles, and with the support of Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, he brought it to the attention of Queen Elizabeth. After her first meeting with Lee, the queen declined patronage on the ground that mechanized knitting would deprive her subjects of livelihood, but she added that if the stocking

BotelhoV1-final.indb 26

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Silkworm

|

27

frame could be adapted specifically to silk (thereby posing no competition to native wool knitters), she might reconsider. Foolish enough to take her encouragement seriously, by 1598 Lee had redesigned his mechanism to knit silken hose. Frustrated of reward even so, he eventually took his device to France, where he died around 1610, his hopes for advancement still unrequited.27 While it remains uncertain how much Moffett knew of this story, in any case he well understood the threat protectionism posed to the growth of a native silk industry. Thus, he ends The Silkwormes with elaborate assurances that silk would only enrich the English economy: But list, me thinks I hear Amyntas fayne, That shepheards skill wil soone be quite vndone, Behold faire Phillis scuddeth from the plaine, Leauing her flocks at random for to runne, Lo Lidian clothier breaks his loomes in twaine, And thousand spinsters burne their woolen spunne: Ah! Cease your rage, these spinsters [i.e., the silkworms] hurt you nought But wil encrease you more then ere you thought. (75) The argument continues by encouraging native clothworkers to knit silk-wool blends, and Moffett then concludes his poem with a hopeful vision of Elizabeth herself—“the Queen of Queenes, for vetrue [sic], witte, and might”—hatching silkworm eggs “twixt those hillocks rare, / Where al the Graces feede and Sisters nine” (75). To modern ears, it is a jarring final image, combining sublimated Mariolatry and bizarre eroticism in a manner typical of the cult of Elizabeth. However literary Moffett’s poem may be, it was also sufficiently practical in purpose to anticipate a major obstacle confronting innovators in the textile trade who sought royal support during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. And while Moffett may have dreamed of royal patronage, like Lee he also sought help from other members of the elite. Where Lee enjoyed the backing of Hunsdon, Moffett focused—quite successfully, in the event—on enlisting the support of Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. In doing so, he chose a patron who not only offered direct access to the queen but also combined a storied literary reputation with interest in more practical matters. As a literary figure,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 27

11/9/22 1:36 PM

28

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Herbert had no peer in late Elizabethan England. Sir Philip Sidney’s learned sister and cotranslator of the Psalms, redactor of (and inspiration for) The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Herbert had also translated Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte, among other French and Italian works by the 1590s. And Moffett mentions every one of these productions in the verse dedication to Herbert that precedes The Silkwormes in its one Elizabethan edition: Great enuies Object, Worth & Wisedoms pride, Natures delight, Arcadia’s heir most fitte, Vouchsafe a while to lay thy taske aside, Let Petrarke sleep, giue rest to Sacred Writte. (n.p.) It is a self-consciously literary epistle, appealing to Herbert as both patron and author, the beating heart of the Sidney circle. The opening stanza of The Silkwormes then continues this appeal, seeking inspiration from the Sydneian Muse and complimenting Herbert again, this time as the “Lady of [Salisbury] plaine” (1). In one dimension, thus, Moffett’s poem insists on standing as a belletristic exercise, a product of the poetic community Herbert assembled at her estate of Wilton. In this capacity, The Silkwormes particularly seems to recall that most famous of Sidney protégés, Edmund Spenser, especially the Spenser of The Shepheardes Calender (1579) and Muiopotmos (1591). Where The Shepheardes Calender offers eclogues, Moffett proceeds to georgic; where Muiopotmos offers ottava rima mock epic with insect protagonists, Moffett provides a heroic praise of insects in the same stanza. In this way The Silkwormes signals not only literary filiation but also literary ambition, one bound up in group identification with the Sidney circle. It is fitting that Moffett elsewhere composed a Latin elegy for Sidney, the Lessus Lugubris, that, bound together with a reverent Latin prose biography of the poet, he presented in manuscript to Sidney’s nephew William Herbert on New Year’s Day 1594.28 And while modern readers have treated Moffett’s verse with marked contempt— dismissing it as “undistinguished Spenserian imitation” and decrying its “quite astonishing incompetence”—contemporaries, by contrast, appear to have received it with respect.29 On March 1, 1599, John Chamberlain forwarded a copy of The Silkwormes to Dudley Carlton, declaring that “in mine opinion [it] is no bad peece of Poetrie,” while in 1606,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 28

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Silkworm

|

29

Nathaniel Baxter described the poem as “eloquently pen’d.”30 So Moffett’s verse arguably deserves more attention as a stand-alone literary performance than it has heretofore received, yet at the same time it remains unimaginable apart from his work as a natural historian. More intriguing still, both the natural history and the poetry connect—through patronage politics—to another dimension of Moffett’s career, one simultaneously agricultural and economic in nature. Moffett likely also sought to influence English husbandry and the English textile trade by actively practicing native sericulture himself and by publishing The Silkwormes to draw attention to his practice in a formal patronage setting. Thus, the text of The Silkwormes, with its opening dedication to Herbert and its final vision of Elizabeth incubating silkworm eggs between her breasts, seems designed for presentation to both women, and perhaps for an occasion involving their appearance together. Such an occasion seemed to present itself late in 1599, the year of the poem’s publication, when Elizabeth prepared to visit the Pembroke estate at Wilton. It was a visit tailor-made for literary tributes, with the Countess of Pembroke herself preparing “a presentation manuscript of the ‘Sidney Psalms’ . . . as the central gift to be offered to Queen Elizabeth” upon her arrival.31 But “in the event,” as Katherine Duncan-Jones observes, “the Queen did not come, and so neither (presumably) received the versified Psalms nor viewed the household’s silkworms.”32 When mentioning Wilton’s silkworms, Duncan-Jones offers no evidence of their actual existence, and the limited surviving records of the estate supply no confirmation of silkworms or mulberry plantings there in the 1590s. But it is still likely that some limited experiments in sericulture occurred at Wilton during the decade in question. For one thing, Moffett was there. By 1593 he was living at Wilton, where John Aubrey says he received a pension from the countess; sometime thereafter he removed to the neighboring manor house of Bulbridge.33 For another thing, Moffett himself ends book 1 of The Silkwormes with a melodramatic scene set specifically—as glosses indicate—at Wilton, a scene in which Moffett consoles the household over the postcoital demise of their silk moths: Weepe not faire Mira for this funeral. Weepe not Panclea, Miraes chiefe delight,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 29

11/9/22 1:36 PM

30

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Weepe not Phileta, nor Erato tall: Weepe not Euphemia, not Felicia white: Weepe not sweete Fausta: I assure you all, Your cattels parents are not dead outright: Keepe warme their egges and you shall see anone, From eithers loynes a hundred rise for one. (40) As the marginalia explain, Mira is “The Lady of the plaine” (i.e., the countess herself), while Panclea is her “daughter” Anne, and the other ladies “Gentlewomen attending upon Mira and her daughter” (40). The scene may, of course, be purely imagined, but it may just as easily have factual grounding. Moffett’s title page self-identification as “T. M. a Countrie Farmar” may similarly be purely rhetorical—a conventional humility topos consistent with imitation of Virgilian georgic. (The title page of the 1658 Theater of Insects, by contrast, describes Moffett as a “Doctor in Physick.”) But by 1599, as master of Bulbridge, Moffett could quite plausibly call himself a farmer, and in the context of a georgic on sericulture, this title carries strong presumptions of practical knowledge, functioning not only as a humility trope but also, contradictorily, as a marker of expertise. To return to my preamble, the tendency to “purify” Moffett’s life and work (I use scare quotes here to invoke the parallel processes of disciplinary purification associated with Latour’s modern constitution) leads to the reification of misleading categories—Moffett as good naturalist but bad poet, The Silkwormes as imitative literary exercise rather than practical instruction. These categories in turn correspond with—are enabled by—the modern division of knowledge into separate regimes of scientific and social inquiry. But there is no reason to believe Moffett or his patrons would have considered this division essential to the order of things. Quite the opposite, in fact: Henry Turner has argued that “poesy achieves a proto-‘scientific’ quality” for the Sidney circle, with Sidney’s literary theory “claiming for ‘poesy’ the same instrumental potential and metaphysical authority that his contemporaries had claimed for geometry, alchemy, or astrology.”34 Aubrey, describing Moffett’s relationship with the Countess of Pembroke, makes the same point in language that thoroughly confuses modern professional categories. “Her Honour’s genius,” Aubrey declares, “lay as much toward chymistrie as poetrie. The learned Doctor Mouffett, that wrote of Insects and of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 30

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Silkworm

|

31

Meates, had a pension hence.” The distinction between “chymistrie”— whatever that is supposed to mean here—and poetry appears just long enough to be dismissed as inadequate to “her Honour’s genius,” and then, after mention of “Insects and Meates,” in the very next sentence, Aubrey goes on to the countess’s literary achievements as if no transition were necessary: “In a catalogue of English plays set forth by Gerard Langbain, is thus, viz.: ‘Lady Pembrock, Antonius, 4to.’ ”35 Central to the exchange of favors and obligations planned for the 1599 royal visit to Wilton, Michael Brennan has proposed that the Countess of Pembroke had hoped to seek a patent from Elizabeth for the publication of the Sidney Psalms,36 explanatory of the care with which a manuscript of this work was prepared for presentation to the queen. And if any poetic undertaking could be said to transcend the limits of the merely literary, the psalms would be it. In the context of such a visit, Moffett’s Silkwormes makes another sensible addition to the entertainment and gifts on offer. As the Chamberlain letter confirms, The Silkwormes was in print by late February 1599, months ahead of the projected royal appearance at Wilton. The work itself—“a very fine example of late Elizabethan literary book production”—was issued by the celebrated printer/publisher duo of Simmes and Nicholas Ling, specialists in belletristic printing now best known for bringing forth the first quarto of Hamlet in 1603.37 So as a physical artifact, The Silkwormes would have made an appropriate gift, particularly if it accompanied a tour of a working silkworm house such as may have been present in 1599 at Wilton or Bulbridge. As Chamberlain’s letter again confirms, the appearance of Moffett’s bare initials on the title page of The Silkwormes prompted quick and accurate speculation as to the poem’s authorship. Perhaps Moffett expected as much and planned to use the queen’s visit to Wiltshire as an opportunity to acknowledge his composition openly. While it cannot be proved that Moffett published The Silkwormes in anticipation of the queen’s planned 1599 visit to Wilton, this theory conforms to the known circumstances of the poem’s appearance, while supplying something scholars have heretofore lacked: a clear “purpose of publication” for the work.38 As a further virtue, this theory understands Moffett’s efforts as naturalist, poet, courtier, and “Countrie Farmar” to be integrated aspects of an organic whole, not separable into anachronistic categories of professional expertise. Ultimately the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 31

11/9/22 1:36 PM

32

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

organic whole formed by Moffett’s efforts as a sericulturist must also be understood in modern terms as an ecology: an attempt to force the natural world of England into a new state of dynamic equilibrium, one encompassing new species, new agricultural practices, new economic opportunities, and new poetry as well. Firm confirmation of this theory in turn would require more detailed records of agricultural activities at Wilton—particularly tree planting, the acquisition of silkworm eggs, and the development of facilities for their incubation—than currently exist. Still, it is tantalizing to note that in 1609, five years after Moffett’s death, François de Verton, one of the French sericulturists associated with James’s early efforts to promote the English silk industry, undertook to plant mulberry trees throughout the realm, and to that end, he met with various English peers, including Herbert’s elder son, William, third Earl of Pembroke.39 However, no detailed account of their conversation seems to have survived. Notes 1. Moffett, Silkewormes, t.p. Subsequent references to The Silkewormes are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 2. Lee, “Moffett, Moufet, or Muffett, Thomas,” 13:548. 3. See Schoeser, Silk, 35; Anquetil, Silk, 22. 4. Mola, Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice, 4. 5. Schoeser, Silk, 46. 6. Middleton, Revenger’s Tragedy, 1.1.51–52. 7. Ibid., 3.5.72–73, 80–82. 8. Ibid., 3.5.97–98. 9. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.3.21–23; Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress,” lines 27–28. 10. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1030. 11. Foucault, Order of Things, 17, 39. 12. Ibid., 39; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 7. 13. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 2.364–66. 14. Thus, Alastair Fowler: “To suppose that early Augustan georgic represented a great revaluation of labor is naive progressivism. On the contrary:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 32

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

lexical imitation of Virgil very easily went with a distanced euphemizing and blurring of the details of work” (“Beginnings of English Georgic,” 122). See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 10–11 and elsewhere . Shakespeare, King Lear, 4.1.70–71. See Boehrer, Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama, 71–95. Low, The Georgic Revolution, 6. Ibid., 37–38. Fowler, “Beginnings of English Georgic,” passim. Warner, Silk Industry, 79–90. Peck, Consuming Splendor, 85–111. Leland, Aliens in the Backyard, 29. For a rebuttal of this argument, see Feltwell, Story of Silk, 22. Ravelhofer, Early Stuart Masque, 128. Hatch, “Mulberry Trees and Silkworms,” 5, 10–11. Peck, Consuming Splendor, 90. Peacham, Minerua Britanna, 89. Warner, Silk Industry, 536–37. This manuscript (Huntington Library MS HM 1337) was finally printed as Nobilis or A View of the Life and

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Silkworm

29.

30. 31. 32.

Death of a Sidney and Lessus Lugubris in 1940. Duncan-Jones has speculated that the elegy Lessus Lugubris may appear in the Stationers’ Register for January 15, 1589, as “An Epitaphe or epigram or elegies Done by Master Morfet,” but if any work was printed as a result of this entry, the edition has vanished (“Pyramus and Thisbe,” 297). Houliston, “General Introduction,” xviii; Foakes, introduction to Midsummer Night’s Dream, 11. Chamberlain, Letters, 1:70; Baxter, Sir Philip Sidneys Ourania, sig. G3v. Brennan, “Queen’s Proposed Visit,” 49. Duncan-Jones, “Pyramus and Thisbe,” 298.

|

33

33. Aubrey, Natural History of Wiltshire, 89; Lee, “Moffett, Moufet, or Muffett, Thomas,” 13:549. 34. Turner, English Renaissance Stage, 83–84, 110. 35. Aubrey, Natural History of Wiltshire, 89. The reference is to Herbert’s translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc-Antoine. 36. Brennan, “Queen’s Proposed Visit,” 42–45. 37. Houliston, “General Introduction,” xix. 38. Ibid., xix. 39. Cited in Peck, Consuming Splendor, 98.

Bibliography Anquetil, Jacques. Silk. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. Aubrey, John. The Natural History of Wiltshire. Edited by John Britton. London, 1847. Baxter, Nathaniel. Sir Philip Sidneys Ourania. London, 1606. Boehrer, Bruce. Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Brennan, Michael G. “The Queen’s Proposed Visit to Wilton House in 1599 and the ‘Sidney Psalms.’ ” Sidney Journal 20, no. 1 (January 2002): 27–53. Chamberlain, John. Letters of John Chamberlain. Edited by Norman E. McLure. 2 vols. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939. Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Pyramus and Thisbe: Shakespeare’s Debt to Moffett Cancelled.” Review of English Studies 32, no. 127 (August 1981): 296–301. Feltwell, John. The Story of Silk. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Foakes, R. A. Introduction to A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 33

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. Fowler, Alastair. “The Beginnings of English Georgic.” In Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, edited by Barbara Lewalski. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Hatch, Charles E., Jr. “Mulberry Trees and Silkworms: Sericulture in Early Virginia.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65, no. 1 (January 1957): 3–61. Houliston, Victor. General introduction to The Silkwormes and Their Flies by Thomas Moffet. London, 1599. Facsimile edited by Victor Houliston. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Lee, Sidney. “Moffett, Moufet, or Muffett, Thomas.” In Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen and Lee, 13:548. 23 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1885–1900.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

34

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Leland, John. Aliens in the Backyard: Plant and Animal Imports into America. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. Low, Anthony. The Georgic Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress.” In The Complete Poems, edited by Elizabeth Story Donno. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972. Middleton, Thomas. The Revenger’s Tragedy. In The Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Moffett, Thomas. Nobilis or A View of the Life and Death of a Sidney and Lessus Lugubris. Edited by Virgil B. Heltzel and Hoyt A. Hudson. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1940. ———. The Silkewormes, and Their Flies. London, 1599. Facsimile edited by Victor Houliston. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989. ———. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Mola, Luca. The Silk Industry of Renaissance Venice. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 34

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Frank Justus Miller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Peacham, Henry. Minerua Britanna: or, A Garden of Heroical Deuises. London, 1612. Peck, Linda Levy. Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in SeventeenthCentury England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ravelhofer, Barbara. The Early Stuart Masque: Dance, Costume, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Schoeser, Mary. Silk. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1997. ———. King Lear. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Turner, Henry. The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Warner, Frank. The Silk Industry in the United Kingdom: Its Origin and Development. London: Drane’s, 1921.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 2

ANTS Go to the Pismire

Shannon Kelley

Goe to the pismire, o sluggard, consider her waies and be wise. —Proverbs 6:6 (Geneva Bible)

Myrmidon, pismire, soldier, worker: in early modern England ants are equivocal insects. Proverbial for their strong work ethic and military prowess, they are seen also as easy to kill, individually insignificant, and swarming without reason in the dirt. In The Husbandmans Companion (1677), Shropshire minister Edward Bury criticizes the “tumultuous confusion,” “hurlyburly,” and “confused stir” he notices about an anthill, comparing it to a “crowd in a market or fair.”1 And in 1665 Robert Hooke disregards the ant as “little Vermine,” guilty of making “most grievous havock of the Flowers and Fruits, in the ambient Garden.”2 Most of the ant’s early modern cultural associations are more positive, though. In the beast fable, pismires model foresight, labor, and resourcefulness: the tale of the ant and the grasshopper warns away idleness; the fable of the ant and the chrysalis implies that appearances can be deceiving; and the tale of the ant and the dove proves that small things can be mighty.3 Even Bury follows his meditation “Upon an Heap of Ants or Pismires” with a glowing commendation,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 35

11/9/22 1:36 PM

36

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

“The Diligence of Ants.” Ubiquitous, earnest, and socially conscious ants inspire Thomas Moffett’s praise in his 1658 field guide, The Theater of Insects, for although they cannot match the economic value of bees, they do not harm men.4 Moffett minimizes their damage to trees, herbs, and orchards by shaming readers for idleness: To “drive all Pismires away” pour hot water infused with lime on the soil, or try any of the wasp repellents he lists in another chapter, as though their presence would contaminate his hyperbole. Moffett devotes six folio pages to breathless commendation of ants and implores us to “judge uprightly” as we read of their beauty, intelligence, strength, civility, selflessness, and frugality.5 What follows shapes an argument about the exponential greatness of this tiny species on their scale or our scale, driven by unflattering comparisons with humans, biblical and classical authority, and appeals to proverbial wisdom.

False Praise and True From Moffett’s first words in praise of the graceful and well-proportioned shape and attractiveness of the pismire’s body, readers might wonder if they are in the realm of mock encomium. Even his surprising chapter title, “The Commendation of Pismires,” conjoins disparate topics—praise and piss “mires,” or earthen heaps—since Moffett selects the English name for ant with at least one derogatory connotation. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the “pismire” derives its name “on account of the urinous smell of an anthill” and could refer to either an “ant” or “an insignificant person.”6 At the very least, pismire (unlike emmet, the term preferred by poets) suggests that the early modern had his or her nose to the ground and that life among ants had an olfactory significance largely absent today. The colloquial name pismire also reveals the importance of the social body, since the individual insect is given the same name as its earthen dwelling, which Moffett describes as both a mysterious labyrinth and the home of a healthy, robust commonwealth. Moffett’s late sixteenth-century praise of pismires anticipates the sentiment of the next century. As Keith Thomas writes, England experienced an “obsession with bees and ants” that emerged in the seventeenth century alongside the rise of “bourgeois virtues of hard work,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 36

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Ants

|

37

diligence and frugality.”7 Despite variation across their particular jobs (for some have specialized training), all ants labor willingly to profit the collective. As Moffett notes, “each Ant,” whether it holds the office of carpenter, householder, or mason, “knowes what is needful to be done, and willingly doth its best to help the Common-wealth.”8 Stronger ants perform needed tasks in earthen trenches, while the “wiser sort” of engineering experts build and “frame vaulted chambers” fit to exceed the Golden Age in splendor.9 They so excel at their work—digging earth, collecting grain, scavenging meat—that pismires know when to work (in daylight or by full moon) and how to do so without additional tools: their nails are spades, and their feet are shovels. Each ant selfmedicates, digests venom without harm, gathers food, stores sufficient food safely in any weather, cares responsibly for its young, and abstains from superfluous consumption. As if these traits are not praiseworthy enough, the pismire possesses extraordinary physical strength proportionate to its body size. It can carry more than a packhorse and outrun the swiftest chariot. In his description of pismire behavior and appearance, Moffett presents both serious zoological observations, largely absent in medieval bestiaries or the beast fable tradition, combined with moral evaluation and the near-constant refrain that his readers ought to imitate the pismire. Moffett’s presentation of insect behavior contrasts in some ways with that of the beast fable. As Jill Mann explains, animals are usually resistant to moral judgment, since their behaviors “are naturally determined, and therefore, according to the laws of the fable world, unalterable.”10 In Moffett’s field guide, certain ants do resist the collective and innate urge to work, share, and save meat for winter, and therefore they must be disciplined or taught to do so. To avoid letting idle ants infect society, the kingdom practices several tactics. Parents raise “young Pismires” to work from the minute they spring from their eggs, “immediately shew[ing] them the way to labour and take pains, and if they refuse to work they will give them no meat.”11 On rare occasions when nature’s course and parental nurture fail to motivate youth to work, the ants set the offenders (who are already hungry, “pinched with famine as a base breed”) before a council of the entire commonwealth and “put them to death, that their young ones may take example, that they may not hereafter addict their minds to sloth and idlenesse.”12 Idleness endangers the group, and its infrequent existence among one or two

BotelhoV1-final.indb 37

11/9/22 1:36 PM

38

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

ants (albeit described in a way that seems impossible to prove even for Moffett) is quickly eradicated. In The Belgicke Pismire (1622), Thomas Scott makes a similar claim about the role of labor among men, suggesting that Adam is born with an innate work ethic in prelapsarian Eden. Scott’s hundred-page sermon expands on King Solomon’s advice in Proverbs 6:6, “Go to the Pismire, O Sluggard, Behold her ways and be wise,” as part of its political aim to support the Dutch Republic in its ongoing war with Spain and to reform the English class system. The text charges Englishmen to recall and imitate Adam’s role in the Garden of Eden, thus requiring special effort among his readers to “stirre up the faculties of the soule and body” to “attaine by industrie, that which this silly worme retaines by nature.”13 Scott emphasizes King Solomon’s reference to ants as “a people” and joins Moffett in his awe of this particular species, for “no creature subjected to man did ever obtaine this title, which is proper to man, but onely the Pismire, and the Bee; but these haue wonne it by their vertues, and man is constrained to acknowledge how much they resemble him, nay, how farre they exceed him.”14 If the moral excellence of ants is evident in their productivity, the opposite is true in Scott’s estimation of men. As he notes, idle men do not devolve into animality; rather, they start to resemble Satan: “Man was not created to idlenesse, nor to any base or vile employment: but enjoyned [to] labour to preserve by industrie what God himselfe had created. Adam in his integritie should have wrought, but without wearinesse; as the Angels now take pleasure in the diligent discharge of their offices. In idlenesse man seems to be like Satan; in action like God, his servant, his substitute, his coadjutor.”15 For both Moffett and Scott, idleness subverts the purpose of existence in Christ. “Sloth is a sinne, nay, it is the roote of all sinne, the mothersinne” and “the Nurserie of everie evill in a Common-wealth.”16 Scott asks his readers to imitate pismires to return to the image of God, aligning ants and their dedication to productivity with the angelic host as substitutes of God. As Moffett, Scott, and other early modern writers draw moral consequences from these and other unlikely comparisons, they zero in on the social, purposeful ant in its vast underground collective with wonder and imagination. They entertain the concept of pismire free will and learned behavior alongside the biological determinism to work that

BotelhoV1-final.indb 38

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Ants

|

39

constitutes its specieshood; they envy an ant world where labor uniformly empowers all who work; and they join Solomon in elevating an unlikely lesser creature until it ascends toward God. Perhaps Moffett’s anecdote of the exceptional ant who must be taught to work or suffer public execution plays a central role in his essay: free will among ants that normally choose to work enables Moffett’s praise in the first place.

Concord Without a Sovereign Pismires achieve much as strong, motivated creatures, yet their social intelligence and cooperation within a “Democraticall Government” lead to Moffett’s further admiration, since among men and more exalted beasts, an increase in a group’s size leads to a commensurate increase in rumormongering, jealousy, brawling, slaughter, and war.17 Ants bypass these difficulties by their selfless approach to collective labor. As a group, they join together to preserve life, help future generations, and locate victuals they consume in winter with pleasure. Offshoots from the collective’s sustained focus on these three priorities are legion: “piety, prudence, justice, valour, temperance, modesty, charity, friendship, frugality, perseverance, industry and art.”18 Much of Moffett’s praise requires the ability to place a philosophy of social relations associated with a utopian body politic within the ant colony. The ant commonwealth features a uniform work ethic across all of its members, an enormous strength in numbers, a shared culture of cooperation and selflessness, and an innate desire to be frugal and prudent, all of which lead to freedom from debt, charitable giving, extreme poverty or extreme wealth, and, by extension, the vicissitudes of fortune that cause unprepared species such as men, grasshoppers, and cicadas so much pain and suffering. In 1994, prominent myrmecologists Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson drew similar conclusions: “In our view, the competitive edge that led to the rise of the ants as a world-dominant group is their highly developed, self-sacrificial colonial existence. It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx had the wrong species.”19 Moffett does not refer to socialists, but he emphasizes that “to use Aristotles words,” pismires are “without any King, and under a popular government; yet every one of them is for himself a father of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 39

11/9/22 1:36 PM

40

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

his Countrey, and they do to their power increase the common good as if it were for themselves in particular.”20 Two points surface repeatedly about pismire government: the citizen-ant’s identity is indistinguishable from that of the entire commonwealth, and the citizen-ant lacks any oversight from “guide, governour, [or] ruler.”21 The cohesive strength of the group offsets the weakness of the lone pismire and proves to Scott that “privacie, whilst every man cares onely for himself, and neglects the Common-wealth,” will one day cause England’s downfall.22 Colony or commonwealth thrives in virtue and justice only when private property and personal gain do not exist. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, ants begin to appear as worker-heroes in prose pamphlets, broadsides, and beast fables. Thomas Deloney’s The Pleasant Historie of John Winchcomb (1597) retells the life of the legendary English cloth merchant known as Jack of Newberry through a handful of ant beast fables.23 During his negotiations with Cardinal Wolsey and the king, Jack meets fellow clothworkers near an anthill and names himself the King of Ants to diminish his seditious behavior and style himself as a harmless, loyal worker. Thomas Middleton’s 1604 The Nightingale and the Ant; and, Father Hubburd’s Tales relays an exchange of stories and songs between Philomel and an ant whose life she spares. The modest ant tells three stories detailing his experiences and painful memories from his past lives as a ploughman, a soldier, and a scholar. Not everyone shared the premise that collective labor was noble and entirely satisfying. In “The Pismire,” Lady Hester Pulter (ca. 1605–1678) finds “a hill of pismires, who their labor plied” an abhorrent “emblem of the world,” for the ants’ toil signified life without the spiritual wings of salvation and promise of eternity elsewhere: “for all, which from this earth do draw their breath, / still moil and labor in this dunghill earth” along with pismires.24 In Pulter’s eyes, the pismires’ nonstop toil to sustain life and improve the anthill is pathetic. By assuming that ants lack higher spiritual purpose to their work, she can diminish men, or “earthly clog,” whose chaotic, disorganized efforts to build cities, empires, and monuments amounted to a disappointing “chaos of confusion.” She uses “that distance”—the vaster spatial and temporal perspective offered by eternity—to diminish human accomplishments and “perceive (most plain) / that all our moiling here is but in vain.” Pulter’s theology levels distinctions between creatures and relies

BotelhoV1-final.indb 40

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Ants

|

41

on the premise that men, ants, and presumably anything else under the sky wastes time when not focused on God. Either building an anthill or founding a nation without sustained consideration of the afterlife should be regarded as equally trivial pursuits. The anonymous author of “A Description of the Four Seasons or Quarters of the Year” (1690) similarly gestures toward the ephemerality of worldly success with the uneasy reminder that despite ants’ celebrated diligence, labor, and foresight to bring home meat as if it were precious “Indian Ore” during the summer, one dash of “an angry Spade” can topple “country and People to a Pit.”25 For different reasons, Moffett, Pulter, John Donne, and Hooke need readers to adjust their ocular perception of ants to be persuaded of disparate philosophical and religious positions and abandon preconceived ideas. Unsurprisingly, vision matters for ant enthusiasts, for humans struggle to see the naturalist’s beloved, “lesser” or physically smaller creatures without a magnifying tool, and in most cases we cannot appreciate what we cannot see—a slender ant body “whose members cannot be distinguished by the most curious, sharpe, and inquisitive eye.”26 One of Moffett’s first facts about the pismire asserts that a creature with such intelligence is not blind, though it works well at night and uses its antennae as a staff. To humans, ants “seem slender and weak,” but relative to their size, they “carry a weight thrice as great and heavy as themselves.” The complexity of the pismires’ underground labyrinths far exceeds Argus, the best-equipped seer of myths and legends. Moffett’s return to the inadequacy of human vision throughout The Theater of Insects hints at the silent despair in his argument, which tries to persuade an indifferent world to first see, and then ponder, consider, and learn to appreciate insects (the small and invisible creatures of the world) with fresh eyes. Language fails Moffett at least twice in this section as he struggles to find the right words for the pismire’s “unspeakable prudence beyond all mans art.”27 Frustrated with his lost cause, he and other myrmecologists who follow him conclude that “no man can sufficiently set forth the excellent work” of the ant. Moffett’s words trail off, lost in inexpressible wonder and the isolation of a person who sees the world differently. Some of the claims he manages to articulate can scarcely be proven. How can Moffett know that ants “bury their dead with honor and state”? That they adore their young and raise them with great tenderness, or

BotelhoV1-final.indb 41

11/9/22 1:36 PM

42

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

that they engage in civil conversation with one another? Some more dubious claims are copied directly from Pliny’s Natural History. Pliny briefly considers ants, noting the highlights of the species: ants “are the only living creatures besides man that bury their dead,” work during a full moon, display diligence and industry, and busily “converse, so to speak, with those they meet, and press them with questions” on “certain days assigned for market.”28 Other praiseworthy virtues seem to have arisen from Moffett himself. Can we know that they only care for the public good? Is it really “very credible” that humans and ants share common ancestors and that “our parents” (“Masters of old Sobriety”) somehow bequeathed a frugal and pragmatic work ethic “into the Pismires”?29 How could ant-human sex exist?30 Although there were multiple stories of a commingled species relationship in the ancient mists of time circulating in early modernity, they usually went in the reverse direction: Herodotus, Ovid, and Virgil describe how ants transformed into men—the “most excellent” race of Myrmidons, Achilles’ loyal soldiers. Myrmidons gathered and retained great wealth due to their biological propensity to work, accumulate wealth, and defer pleasure. For other writers, a single race of ant-men is not enough to explain the similarities between the two species. Plato opined that all men who led a civil life without philosophy are reincarnated from ants, and upon death, the souls of these men will enter into ants once again. There were others who worried about the risk of descending into ants, since the human race was in spiritual and physical decline. Donne makes this argument in “An Anatomy of the World. The First Anniversary” (1611) as part of his tragic vision of the earth’s irreversible decay since his patron’s daughter, Elizabeth Drury, has died. For Donne, men have already devolved into ants due to their diminished life spans, cramped minds, and smaller bodies: “Mankind decays so soon, / we’re scarce our fathers’ shadows cast at noon,” he argues, pressing his readers to “be more than man, or thou’rt less than an ant.”31 Moffett clearly disagreed with Donne: mankind is already immeasurably inferior to ants on all accounts save physical size. There remain two important caveats on the story of united pismire commonwealths and commendable ant existence: the ant’s tendency to wage war and its ability to sting men. Moffett admits that ants fight one another, but only during a famine (when even the Athenians earn the name of “rebellious Subjects”) or in self-defense. Membership in their colony depends on a willingness to attack “the common enemy”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 42

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Ants

|

43

at some point, and heroic battles are recorded by classical writers, scientists, and everyday observers. In his preface to The Social World of Ants (1930), Swiss myrmecologist Auguste Forel (1848–1931) reflects on his boyhood love of ants, explaining that he was drawn to the field since ants both cooperate with one another and wage war: “Why did the ants of the terrace—my particular friends—live together with complete understanding, co-operating one with another and taking their food in common when I gave them bread or honey, while they fought savagely with the inhabitants of other colonies?”32 If ant warfare was fascinating, its capacity to sting was not. In I  Henry IV, Hotspur complains, “I am whipped and scourged with rods, / nettled and stung with pismires, when I hear of this / vile politician Bolingbroke.”33 Scott alludes to this painful sting in his title, The Belgicke Pismire: “Stinging the Slothfull SLEEPER.” According to entomologist Eric Grissell, ants, bees, and wasps belong to the Hymenoptera order of insects partly because of their wings and the capacity to sting. The most “toxic insect venom” of Hymenoptera is found in the ant, among which only the female stings.34 While Moffett acknowledges this sting, he makes two recuperative points: first, ants bite or sting only idle people who are near to the ground in a state of repose, and second, ants bring the remedy for the wound they cause. Mixing crushed flies and pismires and pouring them on the ant sting alleviates the pain. Scott would add a third benefit to the pismire sting. His words in praise of Dutch ingenuity function as the pismire itself, “Stinging the slothfull SLEEPER and Awaking the DILIGENT TO FAST, WATCH, PRAY: And worke out their owne temporall and eternall salvation with feare and trembling.”35 For Scott, the English need a salutary bite to alert them to the dangerous reality of Spain. Middleton justifies his beast satire with a similar metaphor. The “verie bittrest in me,” he writes, “is but like a Phisical Frost, that nips the wicked Blood a little, and so makes the whole Bodie the wholesomer.”36 Similar to a warning bell alerting a city to danger, the sting ironically protects its victim.

Conclusion By drawing from Solomon, Pliny, Plato, Juvenal, Virgil, and Aristotle, Moffett delivers a detailed, authoritative natural history of pismires narrated with humor and wit while offering readers direct lessons on

BotelhoV1-final.indb 43

11/9/22 1:36 PM

44

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

how to live a good human life and sustain a thriving commonwealth of self-reliant, prudent, and industrious men. Ants do not have greatness as defined by the corrupt, proud, and profligate descendants of Adam, but they have what they need within a far more reasonable measure, and they are happy. As Geoffrey Whitney insists in 1586, ants feed in winter with “joye.”37 No single member or social class in the ant commonwealth has more or less than another, and all work equally, though on rare occasion some must be taught to do so or are exiled or killed. In sum, it is within this lesser living creature’s nature to work the earth for the commonwealth, which makes it spiritually superior to men, whose fallen nature tends toward sloth, greed, and private property. As he concludes, Moffett remains hopeful about the destiny of humans who may be empowered by imitating the ant’s position toward labor, a sentiment echoed in John Ogilby’s fable of the fly and the ant in The Fables of Aesop Paraphras’d in Verse (1668). For Ogilby, the ant and its colonies do not simply survive; they far exceed the court and its global reach as it pertains to happiness, virtue, and sheer endurance as measures of success. As the ant explains, Though I inhabit Caves and narrow Cells, Yet mighty Kingdoms, and great Common-weals, Following examples of th’industrious Ant, Rise to their height; Who Labour shall not want.38 Kingdoms too can achieve this level of satisfaction if their numbers are filled with citizens who imitate the modest, extraordinary ant, who labors and expects no private economic gain for its individual effort other than the commonwealth’s collective survival. Notes 1. Bury, Husbandmans Companion, 78, 76. 2. Hooke, Micrographia, 204, 203. 3. More versions exist: the ant and the scarab beetle (plan for winter), the ant and the pigeon (one good turn deserves another), the ant and the fly (plan for winter), and the cicada and the ant (plan for winter). See Aesop, Complete Fables, 176–78, 246.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 44

4. Originally published in 1634 in Latin (Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum), Thomas Moffett’s field guide to insects was translated into English in 1658 and published as The Theater of Insects alongside Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents. Moffett lived from 1553 to 1604; all Insectorum publications are posthumous. All references

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Ants

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

to Moffett’s book are from the English edition. Ibid., 1079. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “pismire, n.,” 2. According to the OED, this word is still in use in certain regions. Moffett categorizes “ant” in a separate, much shorter chapter that also contains wasps and scorpions. In his “pismire” chapter, he uses the two terms interchangeably, with a slight preference for “pismire.” Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 63. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1075. Ibid., 1077. Mann, From Aesop to Reynard, 33. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1077. Ibid. Scott, Belgicke Pismire, 5. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 22, 26. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1077. Ibid., 1078. Hölldobler and Wilson, Journey to the Ants, 9. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1079. Scott, Belgicke Pismire, 25.

|

45

22. Ibid., 36. 23. Deloney, Pleasant Historie of John Winchcomb. Deloney originally printed the story in 1597 and died in 1600, but his tale of Jack of Newberry was reprinted at least six times: 1619, 1626, 1630, 1633, 1637, and 1655. 24. Pulter, “The Pismire,” 132. 25. “Description of the Four Seasons.” 26. Scott, Belgicke Pismire, 21. 27. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1075. 28. Pliny, Natural History, 501. 29. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1074. 30. For one example, see that of Jupiter, who becomes a pismire to deflower Eurymedusa (the mother of the Graces), mentioned by Moffett on 1078. 31. Donne, “Anatomy of the World,” 211. 32. Forel, The Social World of Ants, 1:xxxiv. 33. Shakespeare, I Henry IV, 1.3.239. 34. Grissell, Bees, Wasps, and Ants, 25. 35. Scott, Belgicke Pismire, t.p. 36. Middleton, The Nightingale and the Ant, 166. 37. Whitney, Choice of Emblemes, 159. 38. Ogilby, Fables of Aesop, 78.

Bibliography Aesop. The Complete Fables. Translated by Robert Temple and Olivia Temple. New York: Penguin, 1998. Bury, Edward. The Husbandmans Companion. London, 1677. Deloney, Thomas. The Pleasant Historie of John Winchcomb. London: H. Lownes, 1626. “A Description of the Four Seasons or Quarters of the YEAR; as SPRING, SUMMER, AUTUMN, and WINTER.” London: Robert Walton, 1690. Donne, John. “An Anatomy of the World: The First Anniversary.” In John Donne: The Major Works, edited by John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 45

Forel, Auguste. The Social World of Ants. Translated by C. K. Ogden. New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1930. Grissell, Eric. Bees, Wasps, and Ants: The Indispensable Role of Hymenoptera in Gardens. Portland, OR: Timber Press, 2010. Hölldobler, Burt, and Edward O. Wilson. The Ants. Cambridge, MA: Bel knap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990. ———. Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute

11/9/22 1:36 PM

46

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London: Jo. Martyn and Ja. Al lestry, 1665. Mann, Jill. From Aesop to Reynard: Beast Literature in Medieval Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Middleton, Thomas. The Nightingale and the Ant; and, Father Hubburd’s Tales. In Thomas Middletown: The Collected Works, edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Ogilby, John. The Fables of Aesop Paraphras’d in Verse. Los Angeles: Chancellor of the University of California, 1965.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 46

Pliny. Natural History III. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. Pulter, Hester. “The Pismire.” In Poems, Emblems, and The Unfortunate Florinda, edited by Alice Eardley. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014. Scott, Thomas. The Belgicke Pismire. London, 1622. Shakespeare, William. I Henry IV. In The Complete Works of Shakespeare, edited by David Bevington. 7th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2014. Sleight, Charlotte. Ant. London: Reaktion, 2003. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983. Whitney, Geoff rey. A Choice of Emblemes. Leiden: Francis Raphelengius, 1586.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 3

FLEA Annihilating the Copulative Conceit: John Donne’s Conversion of the “son of dust” into Uncertain Sacrilege

Gary M. Bouchard

Long before John Donne “marked” the flea as one of the most singularly provocative and complex conceits in English poetry, there were, as John Carey says, “scores of them in all European literatures,” functioning not as intricately layered metaphors, but as voyeuristic vehicles for “smutty old jokes.”1 The lyric ribaldry to which Carey refers originated in Carmen of Pulice, a composition by one Ofilius Sergianus, errantly attributed to Ovid, that became “the fountainhead of this tradition of ‘flea’ poetry.”2 The convention “reached its apogee in the 1582 collection La Puce de Madame des Roches, a work containing over fift y poems on fleas in five languages.”3 In all of these poems, the poet speaks with Petrarchan envy of a flea that uses its undetectable size and stealth to explore the voluptuous regions of a woman’s body, frequently dying a violent but blissful death on her breast. Helen Gardner was among the first to complain of the “monotony” of these poems.4 That nobody has refuted this assessment makes it all the more important to recognize that it is into this peculiar genre and its accompanying misogynistic expectations that Donne stepped when he set about to write his now iconic poem “The Flea.” His poem so radically reimagines the original paradigm and its bawdy contents that it seems to have sprung, just as the flea itself was imagined to have done, from its own spontaneous

BotelhoV1-final.indb 47

11/9/22 1:36 PM

48

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

self-generation. Our understanding of the poem, however, is enriched when we consider the flea as both the insect Donne and his contemporaries understood it to be as well as the wanton trope into which Donne’s literary predecessors had fashioned it. Having done so, we can better appreciate “The Flea” as a virtuoso display of equivocation whose ultimate meaning is calculatedly indecipherable. Thomas Moffett’s Theater of Insects offers readers the encyclopedia essentials of what was known by the seventeenth century about fleas. They are, Moffett reported, “not the least of plague, especially when in great numbers they molest men that are sleeping, and they trouble wearied and sick persons.”5 For Moffett and his contemporaries, the flea was no killer, just “a vexation to all men, but especially, as the wanton Poet hath it, to young maids, whose nimble fingers, and that areas it were clammy with moysture, they can scarce avoid.”6 Moffett’s crediting of “wanton poets” who identify the moist areas of “young maids” as an “especially” favorite habitation for fleas demonstrates the extent to which, by the seventeenth century, fleas had infested not just the clothing, blankets, beds, and bodies of early modern Europe, but its poetry as well. Having studied the flea under glass, Moffett reports accurately that it is “almost like a hog,” that its “feet are divided into two parts” that “are hooked and sharp.” To the more casual observer, the flea appears, according to Moffett, to be “black and shining”—hence, Donne’s “living walls of Jet.”7 Moffett notes that “in the Spring they multiply, at the beginning of Winter they die, for they cannot endure the cold” and makes the more dubious observation that “at all times [fleas] trouble men and Dogs, but chiefly in the night” and that “they withdraw themselves when the day breaks.”8 In fact, of course, the nighttime is when the flea’s human prey climbed into infested blankets and lay still. Moffett further informs his readers that fleas “seek for the most tender places, and will not attempt the harder places with their nibble.”9 Because the flea in Donne’s poem is wrought with so much potential symbolic meaning, readers can often forget its presence as an active insect. But in the poem’s third line, the flea’s industrious feeding is described: “Mee it suck’d first, and now sucks thee.” Sucks her where? Heeding Moffett, we would surmise “in the Spring,” “in the night” in one of “the most tender places” on the body, where it will certainly “leave a red spot as a Trophie of [its] force.”10 Suddenly a poem whose many critical explications focus on the perplexing connotations of its

BotelhoV1-final.indb 48

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Flea

|

49

tenor has a physical vehicle, which, before it is a metaphysical conceit or theological symbol, is simply a flea doing its worst on a woman’s breast on a warm night. Seeing it thus, we also recognize that the woman’s execution of this sucking flea is no unskilled maneuver. Once she marks the flea on herself, she acts reflexively. Had she hesitated at her lover’s emphatic request—“Oh stay”—the flea would, according to Moffett, have fled: “when they finde they are arraigned to die, and they feel the finger coming, on a sudden they are gone, and leap here and there, and so escape the danger.”11 Since Donne transforms the flea from a “symbol not of the lover’s desire but of the desired union,”12 we should consider what Moffett and his contemporaries understood about the flea’s own procreative abilities. Aristotle and Pliny, among others, believed that the flea was a selfgenerating creature, a quality contained within its etymology, the Latin pulvis meaning “dust,” or, as Moffett suggests, “son of dust.”13 Moffett acknowledges the self-generative ability of the flea: “Their first Originall is from dust, chiefly that which is moystened with mans or Goats urine. Also they breed amongst Dogs hair, from a fat humour putrefied, as Scaliger affirms. A little corruption will breed them, and the place of their original is dry filth.”14 He then adds to ancient learning his modern observation that fleas “copulate, the male ascending upon the female as Flies doe, and they both goe, leap and rest together. They stick long together, and are hardly pulled asunder. After copulation presently almost, the female full of Egges seems fatter; which though in her belly they seem long, very small, very many, and white, yet when they are layd, they turn presently black.”15 Significantly, when Donne deployed the flea as the central sexual symbol of his poem, he was using a creature that he and his readers understood as capable of both copulative procreation and self-generation. Donne was also, of course, deploying a literary trope whose only role prior to his remarkable remaking of it as “this flea” was as a playful sexual predator, a role best exemplified in its origins in the elaborate apostrophe that comprises Carmen de Pulice which begins, “Little flea, disagreeable pest, unfriendly to maids, / How shall I sing your warlike deeds?” (lines 1–2).16 The hyperbole of this mock-epic opening deteriorates predictably as the flea wages its conquest upon a young woman’s body. Only a few lines into the poem, we hear the speaker enviously chiding the flea, which dares to enjoy cunnilingus:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 49

11/9/22 1:36 PM

50

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

And about the lap will you wander; There, to you, ways are open to other members. You please Yourself wherever you wish; nothing is hidden to you, Savage. Oh! Disgusting! And I say that when the maid Lies reclining, you ravage the thigh, and cause the gore To flow. And meanwhile you have dared to broach even the Passionate parts, and to taste the pleasures born in Those places. (lines 8–15) Longing to experience these pleasures for himself, the speaker begs of nature: “May I perish if I do not desire to be immediately transformed into my enemy . . . if by any incantations I might be able to be changed, may I by chants become a flea, according to my desires” (lines 16–18, 20–21). For then, he fantasizes, “I should cling to the hem of the maid’s tunic. Wandering under her dress, up the legs, I will quickly bestir myself to those places which I choose!” (lines 27–30). Sergianus’s work found numerous early modern imitators like the French poet Ronsard, who in a sonnet of 1553 declared, Ha, Lord God, of graceful blossoming: I transform myself in 100 metamorphoses, When I see you, small twinned mountain, Like the spring of a new rose bush, Who welcomes roses each morning . . . . . . . . . . . . I pardon you. Ha, that I am a flea! The kisses, all the days that I am biting Her beautiful nipples.17 The most significant collection of such poetry came in 1579 when Etienne Pasquier supposedly visited “the house of the Des Roches women” and caught sight of “a flea that was laid in the beautiful middle of her breast.”18 Prevented from advancing in his desires “without this little creature,” Pasquier turns to the metonymic method prescribed by Sergianus, deriving special benefit from the coincidence that “little flea” in French—pucelette—can be used to designate both a flea and a young virgin.19 The result was over fift y poems under the title The Flea of Madame Des Roches, containing poems in French, Spanish,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 50

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Flea

|

51

Italian, Latin, and Greek. The genre found its way to England around this same time, notably in Thomas Watson’s The Century in 1582, in which the poet tells the reader, “In this Passion the Authour doth very busily imitate and augment a certaine Ode of Ronsard.”20 Evidence of the popularity of the flea’s lewd reputation can be seen in Doctor Faustus (1595/1604), where Marlowe depicts the allegorical figure of Pride as flea-like in both its demonic associations and the playwright’s explicit imitation of Sergianus’s original sexually adventurous flea: “I am Pride. I disdain to have any parents. I am like to Ovid’s flea; I can creep into every corner of a wench: sometimes, like a periwig, I sit upon her brow or like a fan of feathers, I kiss her lips; Indeed I do—what do I not? But fie, what a scent is here.”21 Whether it be Watson and Marlowe preceding Donne or Carew and Drummond following him, none besides Donne derived meaning from the tropological flea beyond the metonymic sexual play offered by their European predecessors.22 Even John Davies, one of Donne’s coterie of admirers, in a sonnet clearly inspired by “The Flea” uses the conceit of “our Blouds (thus mixt)” as little more than a playful punchline in his wooing: Since when, I do forbeare to murder Fleas, Least that (unkinde) our Yong I might spill, And for your sake, I let them bite with ease Sith so they ioyne and multiply us still.23 And in the centuries that followed, the flea would proliferate in literature as little more than a sexually inquisitive insect with stealth pornographic possibilities.24 Donne alone makes of the flea something more in his performative virtuoso display of argumentative wit. Selecting the flea as the device to use for sexual and marital union, he was nonetheless well acquainted with the less edifying predatory role it had played in the poetry that preceded him. In fact, his first use of the flea in writing was in a rakish reversal where he describes women preying on men like fleas. “Women,” he declares, “are like . . . Fleas sucking our very blood, who leave not our most retired places free from their familiarity, yet for all that their fellowship will they never be tamed nor commanded by us.”25 The youthful brashness of such rhetoric is but part of what informs the extraordinary poem that Donne fashioned at the end of the sixteenth

BotelhoV1-final.indb 51

11/9/22 1:36 PM

52

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

century, where he demands of readers what his determined lover asks of his lady: “Marke but this flea.”26 Early modern readers, familiar with all of the flea’s purported exploits, would have instantly marked this flea on a woman’s breast where it “now sucks thee” and would have been tantalized to watch its further enviable fleshy explorations. They would have been disappointed to see the flea instead transformed from a sexual adventurer into a perplexing symbol from which they, along with the poet’s beloved, must decipher meaning. Donne endows the flea with sacred significance, swollen “with one blood made of two,” and places all of the poem’s actions “off-stage” in the blank white space between his three stanzas. Even more significant, these actions all belong to the woman in the poem, who seizes the flea and prepares to kill it, who, unpersuaded by the speaker’s elaborate elevation of the insect to a “marriage bed,” a “marriage temple,” and a “cloyster,” follows through by cruelly and suddenly purpling her nail, an action that the speaker’s final lesson on how “false, feares bee” seems to have counted on all along. After his final appeal, the lady either complies with or rejects the lover’s determined advances, depending on one’s view. Referred to variously as “gymnastic,” “flamboyant,” “performative,” “outrageous,” and “ingenious,” Donne’s poem converts the flea, for the length of three brief stanzas, from the lewd, misogynistic, metonymic role it plays in the forgettable verse that precedes and follows it, into an emblem of marital unity. In doing so he serves up the most notorious premodern example of “heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together” in the English language.27 As Peter Rudnytsky observes, “The Flea” is ‘a poem directly and self-consciously concerned with the status of metaphor’ in which “there is no genuine relation between the component elements of Donne’s analogy.”28 Donne’s poem, in other words, has less to do with an actual flea on an actual woman’s flesh and more to do with the various meanings he imagines it to embody. H. David Brumble’s succinct summary serves as well as any to describe the poem’s demanding achievement: “In three short, incredible stanzas Donne manages to yoke a flea with copulation, pregnancy, the trinity, a marriage bed and a temple, while the crucifi xion and a loss of maidenhead are forced to serve as analogies to that same flea’s demise.”29 All this is presented not just with the backdrop of the scurrilous flea tradition but with the much more prevalent and revered Petrarchan love genre that had been the dominant engine of English lyric poetry for five decades.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 52

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Flea

|

53

As Brumble notes, it was customary for the Petrarchan lover to “spiritualize his lady, but Donne, characteristically, has transformed the convention. The lover spiritualizes his lady by first identifying her with a flea, and then spiritualizing the flea!”30 By swelling a pedestrian conceit with mixed and potentially profound meanings, Donne yields a veritable Rorschach test for readers, as seen in the persistent disagreement among critics about what actually happens in the poem’s twenty-seven lines and their immediate aftermath, as well as ongoing speculation about the poem’s ultimate meaning. Is “The Flea” a playful and comic parody of Petrarchan sexual politics, a minidrama in which the outcome of sexual consummation is a foregone conclusion? This was the view offered by Doniphan Louthan nearly seven decades ago, who saw the poem as a “mock battle of wits,” a pleasurable “give and take.”31 This view is echoed a decade later in Patricia Meyer Spacks’s succinct observation that “the woman’s yielding is inevitable, the rest is only talk,” and a decade after that by Dwight Catheart, who claimed that “even before one hears the speaker, it is clear that they have agreed, with smiles, to end between the sheets.”32 Other critics have argued that Donne is up to something more serious than sexual give-and-take. Murray Roston points to what he regards as “the obvious untenability of the conclusions at which the [speaker’s] argumentation arrives” and contends that “the deliberate speciousness of the reasoning” with which Donne presents his readers “is carefully staged to expose by subtle ridicule the weakness of ratiocination itself.”33 Brumble sees an even more substantive critique being presented in the poem, arguing that the speaker’s “arguments are indications of the extent to which reason, the divine faculty, has been corrupted” by the “persona’s spiritual aridity.”34 More recently, Laurence Perrine has come to chivalric defense of the silent lady in the poem. “Are we to believe,” he asks, “that the girl suddenly turns gullible, or loses concern for her honor, just because the man has made a clever answer?” He insists instead that she is an intelligent, moral, and sensible lady, undeceived by “the young man’s sophistry” and “holding out for an honorable marriage.”35 Some, however, suggest that the poem belongs to the most serious moment in the young Donne’s life. Ilona Bell makes the case that “The Flea” is “a carefully constructed rhetorical artifice, written to be

BotelhoV1-final.indb 53

11/9/22 1:36 PM

54

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

performed” by Donne for Anne More “to amuse her with his wit, to dazzle her with his mental agility, to reassure her with his attentiveness to her concerns, and to embolden her with his passion—and his principled but unconventional code of ethics.”36 Giving careful attention to the dating of the poem and its likenesses to the content of the Loseley letters that Donne wrote to Anne, Bell’s argument requires that readers “give up the notion that the woman is a virgin.”37 Having done so, according to Bell, “the reasoning makes very good sense at each stage in the poem.”38 Anne needs persuading, Bell contends, not because she is a maid, but “because she is afraid of getting pregnant, and she’s under a lot of pressure to end the relationship.”39 Bell thus interprets the speaker’s claim, “Just so much honor, when thou yeeld’st to mee / Will wast,” as part of a secret courtship that, the murdered flea and Sir George More’s grudging notwithstanding, prefigures Donne and Anne More’s clandestine marriage.40 Still other critics suggest that the secrets that “The Flea” conceals or permits the reader to spy in on are neither sexual nor marital but religious: that there is another “More” who haunts the poem, and Donne is using the tiny metonymic trope of the executed flea as a religious symbol. Over four decades ago in “The Mask of John Donne,” Marius Bewley suggested that the blending of “erotic experience” together with “religious imagery . . . Scholastic terminology and logic” in poems like “The Flea” endow Donne’s poems with “the emotional satisfaction which the lapsing Catholic in him stood in need of.”41 More recently, M. Thomas Hester has argued that Donne’s inclusion of this imagery is much more calculated, that he appropriates “the lexicon of the current doctrinal war” between Catholics and Protestants “in order to say what ‘cannot be said’ about his continuity with his heroic ancestor,” Thomas More.42 Incorporating Recusant hermeneutics, the poem ultimately presents, in Hester’s view “a dialogue d’amour between a ‘Catholic’ exegete and his ‘Protesting’ lady about the significances of the last supper and death of a metonymical flea to the ‘honor[able] incarnation of their love (which she ‘denyst’).”43 Joining with Hester in his recognition of the applicability of “The Flea” ’s theological allusions to the contemporary religious debate, Theresa DiPasquale argues that “the seductiveness of the speaker’s theological wit is a function not of its rigor, but of its delightful flexibility.”44 DiPasquale argues that the poem’s language “functions simultaneously

BotelhoV1-final.indb 54

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Flea

|

55

on each of several mutually contradictory levels; for, by inscribing the speaker’s argument in eucharistically charged language, Donne has ensured that his signs and verbal gestures will be polyvalent and as open to debate as the signs and gestures of the sacrament.”45 DiPasquale’s attention to the poem’s ambiguous treatment of the Eucharist ultimately steers us back to the broader difficulty of assigning any ultimate meaning to “The Flea.” Just as the Last Supper is interpreted differently by different Christians, DiPasquale says, Donne’s poem may be read as a Petrarchan tribute, libertine entrapment, or true lover’s persuasion.”46 We may ask, as Hester does, “But just where (‘O where?’) Donne does ‘stand,’ ” but it “is an inquiry that his works seem most often to raise without answering,” so that, in DiPasquale’s words, “we can insist on no one reading, no one way of taking the sacrament”—and thus no one way of “taking” the blood-swelled flea.47 This embedded ambiguity, so to speak, may be, as Hester argues, part of a “stratagem of deniability,” whereby Donne presents in “The Flea” a brilliant exemplum of the art of equivocation, an art, as he notes, that was “continuous to Donne’s ‘learned’ family tradition as a traditional Catholic vehicle by which to ‘tell’ what the law denied could be said against the ‘grudge’ of public decency and private practice.”48 Whether Donne’s secret beloved bearing the last name of England’s most famous Catholic martyr might have deciphered such religious meanings in the marks of this amorous argument; whether she is the artfully addressed “More” in “more then wee would doe” and “more then maryed are,” we cannot say with certainty. Whether Anne ever heard or read “The Flea” at all, or whether it is part of the discarded libertine literary sport of Donne’s earlier years—even this is matter for debate. Whether the “Cruell and sodaine” “sacrilege” of the flea’s purpled death represents a false fear that amounts to “just so much” or is an emblem endowed with dangerous ecclesiastical connotations, critics will continue to debate. Whether, in the end, love is celebrated between the sheets or remains “a consummation devoutly to be wished”—even this we do not know. As readers of “The Flea,” we live with Donne’s lady in the provocative white spaces between stanzas and must imagine what action has taken place before the poem and in the vacancy after the final line. In the end, we discover that whatever ultimate meaning we may wish to take away from the poem, it has been annihilated with the flea. This

BotelhoV1-final.indb 55

11/9/22 1:36 PM

56

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

annihilation of meaning, I believe, is quite self-consciously deliberate. As Bewley long ago observed, “Donne’s mask of impersonality is always so well maintained that it is difficult ever to penetrate it.”49 Having championed Donne for a modern readership, T. S. Eliot confessed, from the other side of his own religious conversion, that he “found it quite impossible to come to the conclusion that Donne believed anything.”50 The sobering postscript from centuries later, of course, is that for of all the real or imagined things contained within the emblematic “walls of Jet,” the most ominous was the bacteria transporting the bubonic plague. But long before science intruded with this grim epidemiological knowledge, here within the space of this memorable lyrical masterpiece at the end of the sixteenth century, the flea found its only truly meaningful life as a literary trope, making an astounding leap from its smutty origins in Sergianus’s Carmen de Pulice to the bare flesh of Donne’s lady, where it became a dramatic, violent, and ambiguous sacrifice on her purpled nail. Since nobody could successfully replicate this feat, the flea returned again to playful parlor indiscretions in the doggerel verse and melodramas of subsequent centuries, leaving “The Flea” (long after the red spot of a trophy had vanished) the pinnacle performance in any theater of insects. Notes 1. Carey, John Donne, 146. 2. Rudnytsky, “The Sight of God,” 188. Françon surmises that “the author of Carmen was named Ofi lius Sergianus” and explains the misattribution to Ovid: “[N.E.] Lemaire thinks that, because of the resemblance of names between Ovide and Sergians, it is likely to have caused confusion with the Latin poet from the Augustan era and the medieval neo-Latin poet” (313). Françon’s “A Motif of Love Poetry in the 16th Century” offers the earliest thorough summation of flea poetry in early modern Europe. 3. Rudnytsky, “The Sight of God,” 188. 4. The poems, Gardner notes, “fall monotonously into two types. The poet either wishes to be a flea or he envies the flea its death at his

BotelhoV1-final.indb 56

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

mistress’s hand on her bosom.” See “Commentary” in Donne, Elegies and Songs, 174. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1101. Ibid. Ibid., 1102; Donne, “The Flea.” All quotes from “The Flea” are from Gardner’s edition of Donne’s poems, Elegies and Songs. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1102. Moffett’s observation about the insect’s flourishing in the warmer months substantiates what is now so obvious to us, but not to Moffett and his contemporaries: that the flea was the primary spreader of bubonic plague, the outbreak of which increased dramatically in the warmer months. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Flea 12. Gardner, “Commentary,” 174. 13. Brumble, “John Donne’s ‘The Flea,’ ” observes: “The flea was one of those creatures which Guillaume DuBartes considered to have been bred ‘of lifeless bodies, without Venus’ deed” (“John Donne’s ‘The Flea,’ ” 147). “Pliny, in the Natural History,” Brumble notes, explains the same phenomenon: “Fleas, he tells us, ‘are generated out of the dirt by the rays of the sun’ ” (147). 14. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1102. 15. Ibid. 16. Brumble, “John Donne’s ‘The Flea,’ ” 148. Brumble quotes the thirty-nineline poem in its entirety from Poetae Latini Minores. It is attributed in this volume to Ofi lii Sergianii. For an explanation of the poem’s mistaken attribution to Ovid, see ibid., 148n3. 17. Françon, “Motif de la Poésie Amoureuse,” 310. Françon offers numerous examples of these kinds of poems, including Ronsard’s “Flirtatious VI” (1553): “That crying to God as I can / For a night to become a flea” (310), and Brisson: And you the flea of which the hand Of which the uncertain author Immortalizes your glory In the temple of memory . . . If, by another sort, You die a beautiful death, Is there a more beautiful tomb Than the breast of a virgin? (318) 18. 19. 20. 21.

Ibid., 317. Ibid. Ibid., 312. Marlowe, Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, 5.278–81. 22. William Drummond, for instance, writes: Poore Flea, then thou didst die, Yet by so faire a Hand . . . Thou didst, yet didst trie

BotelhoV1-final.indb 57

|

57

A Louers Delight, To vault on virgine Plaines, her kisse, and bite: Thou diedst, yet hast thy Tombe Between those Pappes, o deare and stately Roome! 23. Kerins, “Contemporary Variation,” 540, lines 9–12. Kerins offers a convincing case that Davies’s sonnet from Scourge of Folly is a clear imitation of Donne’s “The Flea.” Davies, who addressed the “complimentary epigram” in this volume “to the no less ingenious than ingenuous Mr. John Dun,” “was,” Kerins argues, “at least on the fringe of Donne’s intimate circle of friends” and “part of the circle of men among whom Donne’s poems were circulating” (539, 540). 24. What “set the flea among the pages of pornography,” according to Brendan Lehane (the only one to devote an entire book to the disparaged insect), was its “power of seeing.” He notes Alexander Pope’s observation that “Man’s whole frame is obvious to a flea,” a quality which kept the flea “the great arthropodic voyeur, or Peeping Tom—without, we may guess, concomitant ecstasy” (The Compleat Flea, 48). Unlike the Donne poem under consideration here, “flea pornography,” Lehane observes, “offers a deal of indecent exposure without striking revelation” (55). 25. Donne, Complete Poetry, 281. The passage is from Donne’s “A Defence of Womens Inconstancy,” in Juvenilia: Or Certaine Paradoxes, and Problemes; Paradoxe I. Donne biographer John Stubbs dismisses these remarks as merely part of typical rhetorical exercises: “The swaggering ‘paradoxes’ Donne spoke of here were prose exercises, written throughout the 1590’s, that exhaustively pursued and bore out an apparently unreasonable assumption” (121).

11/9/22 1:36 PM

58

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

26. While there is not complete agreement on the dating of “The Flea,” most critics agree that it is not a composition Donne would have risked after his controversial marriage to Anne Donne and the resulting need to repair his reputation with his fatherin-law and Jacobean power brokers who could provide him with meaningful employment. The main disagreement in dating the poem is whether it is a bachelor’s poem written in the 1590s for a coterie of other male poets or whether it belongs to the actual clandestine courtship of Anne, which would place it in 1600 or 1601. 27. This familiar description of metaphysical poetry comes from Samuel Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets (571), where the life of Cowley becomes an occasion for assessing all of the so-called metaphysical poets. I concur with Rudnytsky, “ ‘The Sight of God,’ ” that while descriptors of this poetry get softened beginning with T. S. Eliot in the twentieth century, “Johnson’s unsympathetic definition . . . actually comes closer to laying bare the nature of Donne’s poetry” (185). 28. Rudnytsky, “ ‘The Sight of God,’ ” 188–89. 29. Brumble, 147. 30. Ibid., 150. 31. Louthan, Poetry of John Donne, 83. 32. Spacks, “In Search of Sincerity,” 593; and Catheart, Doubting Conscience, 60. 33. Roston, Soul of Wit. 34. “John Donne’s ‘The Flea,’ ” 153. 35. Perrine, “Explicating Donne,” 7. 36. Bell, “Courting Anne Moore,” 75. 37. Ibid. Bell notes, “Indeed, the first stanza of ‘The Flea’ ends, ‘And this, alas, is more then wee would doe,’

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48.

49. 50.

with the same delicate allusion to the names Donne and More that we have already encountered in the first and most impassioned Loseley letter, ‘Thou might easily do much more.’ ” Ibid., 74. Ibid., 79–80. Ibid., 70, 74. Bell argues, “Since ‘honor’ was commonly used to mean both virginity and the female pudenda, the conclusion can be read as a cynical seduction poem—a seduction that makes better sense, I would argue, if the speaker knows the woman is not a virgin” (70). Bewley, “Mask of John Donne,” 25. Hester, “this cannot be said,” 374. Ibid., 377. Hester points, among other things, to the poet’s repetition of “ ‘this’ (six times in the first nine lines,” echoing the centrally debated words of the Eucharist, “Hoc [this] est corpus meum,” and the use of the word Marke, “whose significance” within the context of the theological debate that preoccupied Donne’s life “can only be read in the physical incarnation.” DiPasquale, “Receiving a Sexual Sacrament,” 82. Ibid. Ibid. Hester, “this cannot be said,” 368; DiPasquale, “Receiving a Sexual Sacrament,” 90. Hester, “this cannot be said,” 368, 362. Hester suggests that Donne equivocates in “The Flea” and elsewhere to conceal a Recusant’s leanings and that this clever concealment is a plausible reason why he limited the circulation of his poems to a small coterie of trusted friends. Bewley, “Mask of John Donne,” 26. Quoted in ibid., 14.

Bibliography Bell, Ilona. “Courting Anne More.” John Donne Journal 19 (2000): 59–86.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 58

Bewley, Marius. “The Mask of John Donne.” In Masks and Mirrors: Essays

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Flea in Criticism, by Bewley. New York: Atheneum, 1974. Brumble, H. David, III. “John Donne’s ‘The Flea’: Some Implications of the Encyclopedic and Poetic Flea Traditions.” Critical Quarterly 15 (1973): 147–54. Carey, John. John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. Catheart, Dwight. Doubting Conscience: Donne and the Poetry of Moral Argument. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975. DiPasquale, Theresa M. “Receiving a Sexual Sacrament: ‘The Flea’ as Profane Eucharist.” In John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi, 81–95. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1995. Donne, John. The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. Edited by Charles M. Coffi n. New York: Random House, 1994. ———. The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. Edited by Helen Gardner. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965. Françon, Marcel. “Un Motif de la Poésie Amoureuse au xvie Siècle” (“A Motif of Love Poetry in the 16th Century”). PMLA 56, no. 2 (June 1941): 307–35. Translated for the author by Zachary S. Camenker. Gardner, Helen. “Commentary.” In The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Hester, M. Thomas. “ ‘this cannot be said’: A Preface to the Reader of Donne’s Lyrics.” Christianity and Literature 39, no. 4 (Summer 1990): 365–84. Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the Poets in the Restoration and the Eighteenth

BotelhoV1-final.indb 59

|

59

Century. Edited by Martin Price. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Kerins, Frank. “A Contemporary Variation on John Donne’s ‘The Flea’ by John Davies of Hereford.” Notes and Queries 22 (1975). Lehane, Brendan. The Compleat Flea. New York: Viking Press, 1969. Louthan, Doniphan. The Poetry of John Donne: A Study in Explication. New York: Bookman Associates, 1951. Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. In The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M. H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 1993. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects; or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Reprinted with an introduction by Willy Ley. New York: Da Capo Press, 1967. Perrine, Laurence. “Explicating Donne: ‘The Apparition’ and ‘The Flea.’ ” College Literature 171, no. 1 (1990): 1–20. Roston, Murray. The Soul of Wit: A Study of John Donne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. Rudnytsky, Peter L. “ ‘The Sight of God’: Donne’s Poetics of Transcendence.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 24, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 185–207. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2002. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. “In Search of Sincerity.” College English 29 (1968): 591–602. Stubbs, John. John Donne: The Reformed Soul. New York: Norton, 2006.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 4

FLY Of Flyes: The Insect Mind of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

Perry Guevara

I hasten to supper as the Fly, without any invitation. —Thomas Moffett

A flit. A flutter. A hair’s breadth ’scape is how the fly, according to Thomas Moffett, got its name.1 His Theater of Insects identifies the fly as “the least” of the winged insects (see figure 1.4.1). “So hateful to all men” yet divinely articulated by the “omnipotency of God,” flies materialize a strange paradox for Moffett. They are, on the one hand, therapeutic— Cleopatra’s De Ornatu insists on the healing properties of their bodies— while, on the other, deadly as harbingers of calamity. The appearance of a fly may presage “foul weather” or “an approaching disease,” and if a fly enters a man’s “mouth or nostrils, he is to expect with great sorrow and grief imminent destruction.”2 Not only do flies infiltrate the orifices of the human body, so too do they take hold of the brain. Moffett warns that they are particularly fatal to dreamers: “If a mean or ordinary man dream the like, he shall fall into a violent Feaver, likely may cost him his life.” Early moderns were well aware of these dangers, concocting herbal repellants and practicing superstition to keep them at bay: “Bury the tail of a Wolf in the house, and the flies will not come into it.”3

BotelhoV1-final.indb 60

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly

|

61

Figure 1.4.1. Illustrations of fl ies in Thomas Moffett’s Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum (London, 1634). Call #: STC 17993b. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

It is true that flies kill, but they are also easily killed. Moffett is mindful of their short life spans, observing that “some of them do not live out a short day.”4 Following Moffett, I argue that flies function as figures of killability, animal bodies made available for death that in turn expose the fragility of human life. The early modern stage was in many ways the primary site where anxieties surrounding such deadly reciprocity played out, not only as ground zero for the spread of plague but also in the unprecedented appearance of insects in the period’s drama. While human characters inspired by flies, such as Ben Jonson’s Mosca (Italian for “fly”) from Volpone, introduced an exciting element of danger, endopterygotes—molting arthropods with segmented and metamorphic anatomies—lay bare the tenuous bonds among species. I turn to William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus to make salient Moffett’s injunction to dipteric mindfulness: “We should by them be put in minde of our frailty, and of the uncertainty of this vanishing life.”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 61

11/9/22 1:36 PM

62

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

It is in the theater of the insect where the play’s eponymous character comes to such a realization. In the grim aftermath of Lavinia’s rape, Titus explores possibilities of cross-species grief when Marcus offhandedly exterminates a fly at the dinner table. The corpse of the mutilated creature summons the bereaved father to an affective ecology where humans and insects express emotion across the species divide, even in the direst of straits. In what follows, I draw on cognitive ecology and neurobiology to argue that Shakespeare’s fly, because of its killability— its capacity to inflict and endure suffering, to kill and be killed—registers the primary emotional conflict of Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare’s fly reveals the deep literary and biological entanglements of the play’s ecology. By the seventeenth century, an early modern culture of dissection sought to understand the inner workings of not only human and mammalian bodies but also the infinitesimal anatomies of invertebrates, including insects. The microscope functioned as an anatomy theater in miniature, providing a stage on which to view the insides of organisms too small for the doctor’s slab. In the years following the publication of Moffett’s Theater of Insects, Robert Hooke in his Micrographia recorded the dissection of a fly under the lens of a microscope (see figure 1.4.2). First he describes its exterior, “a very beautifull creature,” and its wings, “very beautifull Objects” that “afford no less pleasing an Object to the mind to speculate upon, than to the eye to behold.”5 Dissecting the thorax, he continues, “Nor was the inside of this creature less beautifull than its outside, for cutting off a part of the belly, and then viewing it.”6 Hooke’s assessment of the fly is striking not only for its attention to insectile beauty, both inside and out, but also for his assertion that the fly’s parts invite speculation and mindfulness. It seems that through an appeal to vision—specifically, microscopical vision—the fly’s body and its “peculiar ornaments and contrivances” summon the viewer to what Timothy Morton calls “the ecological thought.” That is, for Morton, “a practice and process of becoming fully aware of how human beings are connected with other beings—animal, vegetable, or mineral.”7 Connection across ontological boundaries, however, is not always benevolent. The ecological thought to which the insect summons its viewer also has a dark side—what Morton might qualify as “dark ecology”—in the violence behind the science.8 In The Insect and the Image, Janice Neri notes that Hooke’s “specimens required a great deal of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 62

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly

|

63

Figure 1.4.2. “Schem. XXVI” from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (London, 1665). Courtesy of the British Library (public domain).

manipulation and preparation in order to make them visible through the microscope. . . . Insects were of course dismembered, pinned, and killed in the course of preparing and dissecting specimens” for viewing.9 The microscope allowed early moderns to see differently—on a larger scale and in more detail—but it is the bug’s brittle body on the stage that urges us to look differently, to recognize the vulnerability of entomologic bodies cut into pieces. Implicit in the “ecological thought” is that thought occurs within an ecosystem, a set of neural relationships that organisms make with

BotelhoV1-final.indb 63

11/9/22 1:36 PM

64

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

their environment. The study of these is aptly referred to as cognitive ecology. It is no coincidence that Evelyn Tribble and Nicholas Keene begin their study on cognitive ecologies in Reformation England with an insect. Following philosopher Andy Clark, the coauthors suggest that the peculiar reproductive behaviors of the mole cricket demonstrate a core principle of extended mind theory: that cognition is not “brainbound.”10 Rather, cognition involves a body “with particular perceptual and motor capacities” interacting, thinking, and feeling with and through its environment.11 Esther Thelen elaborates: “To say that cognition is embodied means that it arises from bodily interactions with the world . . . [forming] the matrix within which memory, emotion, language, and all other aspects of life are meshed.”12 This “body” can be human or nonhuman. In Clark’s example, it belongs to a particular species of cricket that amplifies its “mating song” by digging acoustic, subterranean burrows that guide sound waves across long distances to potential mates. “The mole cricket,” Tribble and Keane write, “prompts consideration of where the organism ends and the environment begins.”13 The insect and the earth “form a single acoustic system” in which the brain, the body, and the earth interact.14 Cognition, for insects as well as for humans, involves promiscuous neural gestures that occur both within and outside the brain, crossing boundaries of nerve and skin and manipulating earthly matter into excitatory systems. Thought is not a solitary phenomenon but instead carries on in cooperation with “others.” For the mole cricket, a song of seduction attunes the biological to the environmental; the animal shapes the earth and the earth, in turn, expresses its desires. Tribble and Keene “recognize that not many books about early modern religion begin with thinking about mole crickets.”15 The figure of the insect, in their critical context, is extraneous, beside the point. Indeed, Tribble and Keene are not interested in the cricket as such but rather in what the cricket’s behavior allegorizes—the way something so small manages to stand in for a clever theoretical concept. Their interest in the insect extends as far as it pertains to human cognition and to the “cognitive burrows” that English Reformers created “to establish new forms of memory and attention.”16 The mole cricket recedes into the background. What is perhaps missing in their line of inquiry is a sustained engagement with nonhuman modes of cognition, alternative ways of knowing and shaping the world according to logics that, on

BotelhoV1-final.indb 64

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly

|

65

the surface, may seem unfamiliar or perhaps even acognitive. But what about the cognitive capacities of mole crickets? Or the muddy logic of burrows? “Cognitive burrows,” considered materially, indicate just as much, if not more, about insect cognition as about human cognition. The field of cognitive ecology in neurobiology has become increasingly interested in questions of nonhuman cognition. Reuven Dukas laments cognitive science’s “strong bias toward the examination of human cognition and behavior on the basis of proximate models of brain activity” and criticizes a general resistance to the idea of “cognitive resemblance” between less complex organisms and humans even when research has shown striking genetic similarity.17 He supports combining strategies from evolutionary biology and ecology to better understand “information processing and decision making” in animals.18 In doing so, Dukas aims to show that animal cognition has been shaped by forces of natural selection. Whereas Tribble and Keene use cognitive ecology to understand “a complex human activity such as religion,” cognitive ecology in neurobiology provides a conceptual apparatus with which to postulate thought and feeling in animals.19 I propose expanding what cognition means in literary ecosystems by considering the cognitive potential of nonhumans, who comprise and contribute so much dynamism, context, and contingency to a text. What if the fly’s cognition were our primary subject? What if we concerned ourselves with the ways insects interact with their surroundings? How do they manipulate matter and bodies, including human ones, to satisfy their appetites? I am not advocating that we occlude human cognition, but rather that we account for the harmony and cacophony of simultaneous thoughts, hums and chirps, drives and feelings, buzzing through a text’s cognitive ecosystem. Insects occupied a distinctly theatrical space in early modern England. Moffett’s Theater of Insects attests to their performativity. The insect’s relationship to the theater, Eric C. Brown argues in Insect Poetics, “is partly embedded in the etymology: the Greek ‘en-toma’ whence ‘insect’ was applied by Aristotle to capture the most important identifying characteristic of these creatures: segmentation.”20 This was later reiterated in Philemon Holland’s 1601 English translation of Pliny’s Natural History: “And well may they all be called Insecta: by reason of those cuts and divisions.”21 Brown points out that in classical literature entoma signified “the hewn fragments involved in ritual sacrifice. The

BotelhoV1-final.indb 65

11/9/22 1:36 PM

66

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

transferal of this religious enterprise into a theatrical one can be read in the sparagmos of classical drama—or the sort of sacred cutting that the sons of Shakespeare’s Titus make of the captive Alarbus when his “limbs are lopped” (1.1.143). Lucius initiates the sacrificial scene by calling for “the proudest prisoner of the Goths / That we may hew his limbs, and on a pile / Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh” (1.1.96–98). Shakespeare’s scene of sparagmos emphasizes the vulnerability of the human body, its capacity to be dislocated and violently divided into segments. When Aristotle writes of entoma, he too has vulnerability in mind. This vulnerability, however, belongs not to humans but to insects: “The body of an insect is made of segments .  .  . to enable it to bend in such a manner as may protect it from injury.”22 In Historia Animalium, entoma refers to the ways in which the segmented, chitinous matter of an insect’s body preserves its survival. Aristotle continues: “Those that do not roll up increase their hardness by closing up the insections.”23 Insections are bodily sites of simultaneous vulnerability and resistance, apertures that open and close in response to the environment. Perhaps most remarkable about Aristotle’s entomology is his comparison of insects to plants. “Plants can live when they are cut up; so can insects,” he says, and even if these detached segments persist for only a limited time, they display a degree of liveliness and autonomy that betrays bodily unity.24 The entomologic body is a “body in parts,” with each part displaying its own agency.25 The Oxford English Dictionary links the word insect to the Latin insecare (to cut into), which, in the case of sparagmos, recalls the Latin root of vulnerability, vulnerare (to wound).26 If Alarbus is a figure of entomologic life, then so too are the play’s other characters who suffer dismemberment: Lavinia, who is bereft of her limbs and tongue at the hands of her rapists, and Titus too, who willingly amputates his own hand to join his daughter’s suffering. Shakespeare’s insected bodies dramatize human suffering, but it is his black fly that draws our attention to the possibility of animal suffering. The infamous fly scene begins with the dismembered Andronici seated at a banquet table, an integral set piece to the tragedy’s plot not only here but also in the play’s cannibalistic finale. A table is a symposial site of consumption and conversation where, as J. Allan Mitchell observes of medieval tables, “kinship bonds are forged and maintained.”27 Titus Andronicus tests this truism, for at the Andronican table, bonds of kinship are in jeopardy. Martius and Quintus,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 66

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly

|

67

previously executed, leave behind empty chairs, and Lavinia, whose vocal talents for song and repartee are lingually amputated, struggles to communicate through bodily gesture.28 Titus laments to Marcus, “Thy niece and I, poor creatures, want our hands, / And cannot passionate our tenfold grief / With folded arms” (3.2.5–7). For as much as language fails to convey the extent of familial trauma, Titus persists. His prolixity more than offsets Lavinia’s speechlessness. He even describes his tongueless daughter as a “map of woe, that thus dost talk in signs,” signs he believes he can interpret: “Hark, Marcus, what she says— / I can interpret all her martyred signs” (3.2.12, 35–36). He promises to “learn [her] thought” by “wrest[ing] an alphabet” from her sighs, her raised stumps, her winks and nods (3.2.39–45). His desire to know Lavinia means learning her speechless language, both the subtle and overt motions and exhalations of her butchered body. Then, as he consoles his grief-stricken grandson—“Peace, tender sapling! Thou art made of tears, / And tears will quickly melt thy life away” (3.2.50–51)— he is suddenly interrupted by a stage direction: “Marcus strikes the dish with a knife.” The noise turns Titus’s attention to the cause: Titus. What does thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife? Marcus. At that that I have killed, my lord—a fly. (3.2.52–53) Marcus has committed the ultimate faux pas: murdering the dinner guest. The Andronican encounter with the fly actualizes not only killability—the determination of whose lives are more or less expendable—but also the dilemma of hospitality described by Michel Serres in The Parasite: “The host, the guest,” in French, are “the same word,” hôte.29 While the slippage between host and guest is slight, the parasite is the clearly excluded third. At first glance, the roles of the Andronican table seem clear. Titus is the host; his family, the guests; the fly, the parasite, which has come in search of a meal and maybe even an open wound in which to deposit its larvae. These roles are important, for as Serres warns, “it might be dangerous not to decide who is the host and who is the guest, who gives and who receives, who is the parasite and who is the table d’hote, who has the gift and who has the loss, and where the hostility begins with hospitality.”30 Titus, however, muddies these categories. If the parasite is characterized by “interruption, a corruption, a rupture of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 67

11/9/22 1:36 PM

68

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

information,” as Serres argues, then who’s to blame for interrupting the meal?31 The intruder or the assassin? The black fly that, “with his pretty buzzing melody, / Came here to make us merry,” or the man who “hast killed him” (3.2.64–65)? Titus sides with the black fly, excoriating Marcus for insecticide: Out on thee, murderer. Thou kill’st my heart; Mine eyes are cloyed with view of tyranny; A deed of death done on the innocent Becomes not Titus’ brother. Get thee gone; I see thou art not for my company. (3.2.52–58) Marcus and the fly momentarily swap roles—guest to parasite, parasite to guest—as Titus disinvites his brother from the table to then sympathize with the “poor harmless” insect (3.2.63). The concept of the animal as a figure of innocence discovers its roots in Christian theological discourse. In her reading of John Calvin’s Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Laurie Shannon in The Accommodated Animal turns animal innocence toward the doctrine of sin: “Notions of ‘animal innocence’ derive not just from some rising sense of wild freedom from culture or law that develops with industrialization or from their infantilization. . . . Instead, ‘animal innocence’ derives from its legal and biblical sense at this pivotal moment in biblical mythography. As Calvin points out here (and as Donne later echoes), when it comes to sin, animals must be found not guilty—yet they still bear the burden of its penalties.”32 The lack of a soul, that which differentiates animals from humans, means that animals are incapable of sinning. Damnation is an exclusively human plight in the aftermath of Eden. The black fly is “harmless” by design. With that said, insect innocence in Titus Andronicus seems to resonate in a different register, a more familial one. In a moment of cross-species identification—what feminist science scholar Donna Haraway might characterize as “shared suffering”—Titus witnesses his family’s tragedy in the theater of the insect. He imagines the fly to exist within a model of kinship: “How if that fly had a father, brother?” (3.2.60).33 The fly is pitiable to Titus because it might have a family, kindred creatures who would mourn its death just as he grieves the mutilation of his daughter and the murders of his sons. He then visualizes how the fly’s parent

BotelhoV1-final.indb 68

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly

|

69

would “hang his slender gilded wings / And buzz lamenting doings in the air,” a veritable performance of arthropodic grief. Moffett, following Byzantine poet John Tzetzes, similarly records the fly’s capacity to mourn another’s passing: “Such is their love of their own kinde, that they bury their dead corpses.”34 As Titus vows to “wrest an alphabet” from Lavinia’s gesticulation, so too does he interpret the hypothetical whirs of flies.35 Marcus, however, seeks to maintain the conventional separations among host, guest, and parasite. His decision to kill the fly—“to decide is to cut,” Serres reminds us—is to eliminate noise and exclude the interruptive parasite.36 From a biological perspective, insecticide is justifiable. Flies were (and still are, of course) notorious vectors of disease, transferring opportunistic microorganisms from one body to another. Evolutionary biologists might even insist that Marcus’s impulsive death strike is genetically determined—automatic as a reflex—as he recognizes the fly as a hazard to his and to his family’s health.37 Flies at the banquet table were common during the early modern period, especially if the weather was warm, when, as Mary Dobson observes in Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England, “food is most easily contaminated, organisms are readily trapped in rivers and streams at low discharge, bacteria multiply more rapidly and flies’ eggs are hatched at an increased rate.”38 The Andronican table offers the fly its choice: food, blood, flesh. While Marcus’s assassination of the fly might be read as biologically altruistic, he fails to justify it as such. He responds to Titus’s tongue-lashing with a terse rebuttal: “Alas, my lord, I have but killed a fly” (3.2.59). His “but” diminishes the fly’s claim to life, a rhetorical gesture meant to reinforce the killability of insects and the superiority of humans.39 Marcus maintains the order of the table, a piece of household furniture that, by its very geometry, insinuates the invidious distinctions of host, guest, and parasite, human and animal, by organizing bodies in hierarchized space. The table bends and conforms bodies to its shape with what Mitchell would describe as a willful “tenacity.”40 “The table is indeed a complex mess” of organic and inorganic matter, a diverse assemblage where species meet and where the dead join the living.41 Mitchell encourages us to consider “the whole zoogastronomy of the table,” from the dead animal matter plated with silver and ceramic, to the hunting animals, who trekked their prey in the forest,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 69

11/9/22 1:36 PM

70

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

to the rodents and insects hankering for crumbs. Although the table is a meeting place for unlike others, it is also “a physical scaffold . . . [that] aids in the separation of species, stratifying an immanent field.”42 With the swipe of a knife, Marcus affirms the conventional logic that “the animal body is always supposed to remain subordinate, carved up and served to human guests.”43 This commonplace is, of course, flipped when the Andronici prepare Chiron and Demetrius as the main course for their mother, Tamora, and her husband, the emperor Saturninus. Titus instructs his daughter: Lavinia, come, Receive the blood, and when that they are dead, Let me grind their bones to powder small, And with this hateful liquor temper it, And in that paste let their vile heads be baked. (5.2.195–200) Shakespeare serves edible humanity in the same way that edible animals are morcellated, singed, seasoned, and ultimately laid bare for consumption. Titus’s dinner party suffers a fate worse than Haraway’s “indigestion” in When Species Meet: “Trying to make a living, critters eat critters but can only partly digest one another. Quite a lot of indigestion, not to mention excretion, is the natural result, some of which is the vehicle for new sorts of complex patternings of ones and manys in entangled association.”44 The word parasite itself recalls these gastric entanglements—para meaning “alongside,” sitos meaning “food”— in which humans and animals eat together as they eat each other. Indeed, indigestion serves as an “acidic [reminder] of mortality made vivid in the experience of pain and systemic breakdown, from the lowliest among us to the most eminent.”45 Hospitality turns to hostility as Titus skewers Tamora. Saturninus returns the gesture, and then Lucius reciprocates: “Can the son’s eye behold his father bleed? / There’s meed for meed, death for deadly deed” (5.3.64–65). Mitchell puts it best in his assessment of animals and medieval tables: “The cutting that takes place at the mess table stands at the inauguration of the consciousness of shared human and animal frailty, and, in the end, mortality.”46 Animal emotion in Titus Andronicus is all too frequently regarded as pathetic fallacy. The fly scene especially is routinely construed as extreme anthropomorphism tending toward lunacy, as the grieving

BotelhoV1-final.indb 70

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly

|

71

Andronican patriarch “hovers perilously near the brink of true insanity.”47 Marcus’s remark at the scene’s end seems to indicate as much: “Alas, poor man! Grief has so wrought on him, / He takes false shadows for true substances” (3.2.78–79). I pause here and question the stakes of this assumption. Does cross-species sympathy indicate madness? Does the proposition of insectile cognition suggest psychosis? Is it irrational for Titus to imagine that insects might have feelings of their own? Critical readings of the play up to this point seem to suggest as much. Robert Watson admits that Titus’s “helpless misery . . . enables a piteous identification with other forms of life, and a recognition that murder, tyranny, and innocence are terms applicable outside of the realm of the human.”48 In the end, however, “insect grief is a false shadow” cast by anthropomorphism. The anthropomorphizing of the fly, Charlotte Scott argues, “moves from empathy to malice, from Lavinia to Aaron, retaining a human imperative in an animal world.”49 In her view, the natural world, as it is represented in the play, behaves in accordance not with its own imperatives but with those of humans. She further suggests that Shakespeare’s anthropomorphism turns to anthropocentrism: “The view of tyranny that [Titus] faces in the loss of his own hand and his daughter’s mutilation is replayed in the petty destruction of a life. Titus’s empathy with the natural world and his anthropomorphic application of human values to the fly seek to amplify rather than compromise his own humanity.”50 But what if anthropomorphism is not the primary logic at play in this scene? What if Shakespeare’s fly is in fact capable of experiencing emotion? Do animals, even those as “simple” as insects, inhabit deeply felt, emotional lives? Anthropomorphism imposes an inherently anthropocentric logic on nonhuman experiences that might be apprehended in alternate ways from disciplines, especially in the sciences, that are more acutely attuned to insects as biological organisms and not as symbols. One of the earliest forays into insect psychology was Eugene Louis Bouvier’s 1919 La Vie Psychique des Insectes (The Psychic Life of Insects), which declared the death of anthropocentrism in entomology: It is the fact that these wonderful analogies are well calculated to emphasize the contrast between the world of the articulates and our own. We have a feeling that the psychic evolution of these animals is not less original than their structure, and that they

BotelhoV1-final.indb 71

11/9/22 1:36 PM

72

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

are never so widely separated from us as when they appear to resemble us the most. The old anthropocentric school is, indeed, dead: we no longer attempt to explain insects by man; we rather try to grasp the mechanism that allows these animals to evolve mentally and to acquire activities which seem human.51 Resemblance is marked by radical difference. For Bouvier, insects merely “seem” human, and it is his goal to understand this relation of seeming in terms of the insect, independent of humanity.52 New studies in neurobiology and entomology are attempting the same. A special issue of the journal Current Biology asks: “Emotion in Invertebrates?” Michael Mendl, Elizabeth Paul, and Lars Chittka recognize that such a question breeds even more: “Do non-human animals have emotions? If so, how can we measure them? And why should we be interested?”53 A group of researchers at the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University suspect honeybees might hold the answer. In their experiment, Melissa Bateson and her team attempted to induce a “negative affective state” in honeybees by simulating “a predatory attack.”54 In other words, they shook the bees’ habitat because “physical agitation is likely to be a good predictor of imminent attack” and “because brood predators such as the honey badger (Mellivora capensis) have been observed to use their accomplished digging skills to break into beehives.” The researchers then observed that “distressed” honeybees not only exhibit lower levels of dopamine and serotonin, neurotransmitters also involved in human cognition, but also display “a pessimistic cognitive bias” in decision making. This negative bias, they argue, is further seen in how agitated honeybees withhold their feelers—that is, their proboscis extensions—from odor stimuli. These neurochemical and behavioral responses, they suggest, have “more in common with vertebrates than previously thought” and might indeed count as emotion, or at least as emotional: “Using the best criteria currently agreed on for assessing animal emotions, i.e. a suite of changes in physiology, behavior, and especially cognitive biases, we have shown that honeybees display a negative emotional state. Although our results do not allow us to make any claims about the presence of negative subjective feelings in honeybees, they call into question how we identify emotions in any nonhuman animal.”55 Vertebral similitude is a point of contention in debates on invertebrate pain, especially considering the widespread use of invertebrate

BotelhoV1-final.indb 72

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly

|

73

species in biomedical research. In neurobiology, pain is generally defined in two ways. The first is nociception, the nervous system’s ability to recognize harmful stimuli and evoke a reflexive response that moves the organism (or the affected part of the organism) away from the source. The second is the emotional dimension of pain, often regarded as the internalized or privatized experience of suffering. Jane Smith confirms that “most, if not all, invertebrates have the capacity to detect and respond to noxious or aversive stimuli.”56 That is, like vertebrates, invertebrates experience nociception. Many invertebrate species, including insects, possess specialized sensory neurons called nociceptors that respond to dangerous stimuli. Whether insects suffer, in the emotional sense, remains undetermined. To those who might deny insect suffering, Smith retorts that “such a view simply reflects a paucity of (human) imagination,” and she warns against the dangers of uncritical anthropomorphism, “which could lead to incorrect conclusions about the experiences of invertebrates. Thus, it might be inferred, incorrectly, that certain invertebrates experience pain simply because they bear a (superficial) resemblance to vertebrates—the animals with which humans can identify most clearly. Equally, pain might incorrectly be denied in certain invertebrates simply because they are so different from us and because we cannot imagine pain experienced in anything other than the vertebrate or, specifically, human sense.”57 Simply because we do not recognize suffering in another does not diminish its sensory or affective intensity. From the periaqueductal gray of the human brain to the sudden twitch of a motor neuron, from the mammalian spinal cord to the electric rush across a membrane, where do we locate feeling? And more important, who are we to deny it to the insect? The very possibility of insect emotion allows Shakespeare’s fly scene to be something other than exclusively anthropomorphic. Shakespeare portrays a moment of cross-species attunement as a consequence of trauma and the subsequent vertigo of the animal-other’s cognition. Although Titus fabulates the imaginary narrative of the fly’s griefstricken parent, that is not to say that grief belongs only to Titus or to those gifted with speech. To be “articulate,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is to be “capable of conveying meaning,” its primary definition, but “articulate” also identifies a phylum of invertebrates characterized by hinged, valved, and jointed anatomies.58 In Titus Andronicus, articulate bodies are violently disarticulated, but their capacity to “mean” and especially their capacity to “feel” is undiminished.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 73

11/9/22 1:36 PM

74

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

Moffett, Theater of Insects, 944. Ibid., 945. Ibid., 950. Ibid., 951. Hooke, Micrographia, 172. Ibid., 184. Morton, Ecological Thought, 7. Morton uses “dark ecology” to put “hesitation, irony, and thoughtfulness back into ecological thinking,” for the ecological thought “includes negativity and irony, ugliness and horror.” See ibid., 16–17. Neri, Insect and the Image, 120. Clark says of the brain-bound model, “The (nonneural) body is just the sensor and effector system of the brain, and the rest of the world is just the arena in which adaptive problems get posed and in which the brain-body system must sense and act. If BRAINBOUND is correct, then all human cognition depends directly on neural activity alone” (“Embodied, Embedded, and Extended Cognition,” 276). Thelen, “Dynamics of Embodiment,” 4. Ibid., 1. Tribble and Keene, Cognitive Ecologies, 1. Ibid. Ibid., 2. Ibid. Dukas, introduction to Cognitive Ecology, 5–6. Ibid., 1–2. Tribble and Keene deploy “cognitive ecology” as a model with which to explore the “cognitive mechanisms, objects, and social systems” of religion in Reformation England, while emphasizing the importance of an analysis that looks “across the entire system” to include “constraints on memory, perception and attention, or the biological resources that govern our encounters with the world; the means by which the material and

BotelhoV1-final.indb 74

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

social environment is rebuilt.” Of crucial import is their observation that cognition, by nature of its extension into the world, “is by defi nition historically situated” (Cognitive Ecologies, 4, 12–13). Brown, “Reading the Insect,” 29. Pliny, Natural History, 310. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 343. Ibid. Ibid., 345. In The Body in Parts, Carla Mazzio and David Hillman characterize the early modern period as an age of fragmentation—bodily, socially, culturally, and aesthetically—and made up of cuts and divisions that trouble the part’s relationship to the whole. OED, s.v., “insect, n.” Mitchell, Becoming Human, 124. The fly scene is absent from the 1597 quarto of Titus Andronicus but appears in the 1623 folio. Most scholars agree that the scene was added between 1597 and 1600. Serres, The Parasite, 15. Ibid., 15–16. Ibid., 3. Shannon, Accommodated Animal, 57. “Shared suffering” is Haraway’s concept for a sort of practical orientation or sensibility attuned to species difference, power differentials, and the reality of nonhuman suffering. Focusing her analysis on animals in research, she thinks about how some lives are more easily slated for death than others. This killability speaks to the ways in which less familiar, less similar lifeforms are laid bare, exposed for the preponderance of humanity. Humans share a “semiotic materiality, including the suffering inherent in unequal and ontologically multiple instrumental relationships” (When Species Meet, 72). Moffett, Theater of Insects, 931.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Fly 35. The word parasite in French, in addition to denoting side-by-side consumption, also signifies noise. The parasite, Serres contends, generates noise and therefore “produces disorder” by interfering with communication. The clatter of dishes at the Andronican table constitutes such noise. So too does the fly’s buzzing. But might an interruptive “buzz” also double as music or entertainment? Indeed, “the exchange of singing and food is evoked,” in Serres’s words, as the fly’s buzzing turns to “melody” at the banquet table (Parasite, 3, 52, 91). 36. Ibid., 23. 37. Evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson entertains a heredity basis for our “mixture of apprehension and morbid fascination” with bugs, arguing that “hundreds of thousands of years” is “time enough for the appropriate genetic changes to occur in the brain” to respond to organisms that “have been a significant source of injury and death” to humans (In Search of Nature, 23). 38. Dobson, Contours of Death, 463. 39. David Sterling Brown links the fly’s killability to antiblack violence and the Black Lives Matter movement in “ ‘Is Black So Base a Hue?’ ” 40. Mitchell, Becoming Human, 118. 41. Ibid., 123. 42. Ibid., 156. 43. Ibid., 153. 44. Haraway, When Species Meet, 31.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

|

75

Ibid., 31. Mitchell, Becoming Human, 156. Deroux, “The Blackness Within,” 99. Watson, “Shadows of the Renaissance,” 57. Scott, “Still Life,” 261. Ibid. Bouvier, Psychic Life of Insects, xiv–xv. Erica Fudge argues in Perceiving Animals that anthropocentrism dangerously leads to anthropomorphism, which ultimately disallows the separation of species. Mendl, Paul, and Chittka, “Animal Behaviour,” 463. Bateson, Desire, Gartside, and Wright, “Agitated Honeybees,” 1070. In order to induce stress in honeybees, the experimenters vigorously shook their habitats in such a way as to simulate predatory attack. The observed behavior was proboscis extension (or the delay thereof) in response to odor stimulants. Neurotransmitter levels were measured in the honeybees’ hemolymph. The researchers suspect that fluctuations in serotonin, octopamine, and dopamine affect the neural circuits that encode olfactory memories and might therefore lead to the expression of negative bias. See Bateson et al., “Agitated Honeybees,” 1070, 1072. Smith, “Question of Pain,” 26. Ibid., 25, 29. OED, s.v., “articulate, adj.”

Bibliography Aristotle. Parts of Animals. Translated by A. L. Peck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945. Bateson, Melissa, Suzanne Desire, Sarah Gartside, and Geraldine Wright. “Agitated Honeybees Exhibit Pessimistic Cognitive Biases.” Current Biology 21 (2011): 1070–73. Bouvier, E. L. The Psychic Life of Insects. Translated by L. O. Howard. New York: Century, 1922.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 75

Brown, David Sterling. “ ‘Is Black So Base a Hue?’: Black Life Matters in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” In Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies, edited by Miles P. Grier, Nicholas R. Jones, and Cassander L. Smith, 137–55. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Brown, Eric C. “Reading the Insect.” In Insect Poetics, edited by Brown. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

76

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Clark, Andy. “Embodied, Embedded, and Extended Cognition.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science, edited by Keith Frankish and William M. Ramsey. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Deroux, Margaux. “The Blackness Within: Early Modern Color-Concept, Physiology and Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.” Mediterranean Studies 19 (2010): 86–101. Dobson, Mary J. Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dukas, Reuven. Introduction to Cognitive Ecology: The Evolutionary Ecology of Information Processing and Decision Making, edited by Dukas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Fudge, Erica. Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London, 1665. Mazzio, Carla, and David Hillman, eds. The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge, 1997. Mendl, Michael, Elizabeth Paul, and Lars Chittka. “Animal Behaviour: Emotion in Invertebrates?” Current Biology 21 (2011): 463–65. Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 76

Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Neri, Janice. The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Pliny. Book 11 of Natural History. Translated by Philemon Holland. London, 1601. Scott, Charlotte. “Still Life? Anthropocentrism and the Fly in Titus Andronicus and Volpone.” Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 256–68. Serres, Michel. The Parasite. Translated by Lawrence Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Smith, J. A. “A Question of Pain in Invertebrates.” ILAR Journal 33 (1991): 25–31. Thelen, Esther. “The Dynamics of Embodiment: A Field Theory of Infant Perservative Reaching.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 1 (2001): 1–34. Tribble, Evelyn B., and Nicholas Keene. Cognitive Ecologies and the History of Remembering. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Watson, Robert. “Shadows of the Renaissance.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Wilson, E. O. In Search of Nature. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 5

GNAT The Clamor of Things: Moffett’s Gnats, Spenser’s Complaints

Steven Swarbrick

How aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. . . . [If] we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. —Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”

“Hearken a little to the Gnat,” Thomas Moffett writes in the preface to his The Theater of Insects (1658).1 On the face of it, Moffett’s exhortation is unexceptional—“little,” in fact. The Theater of Insects contains many such imperatives to look, notice, and augment our knowledge, or, if not our knowledge per se, at a minimum our awe before nature’s lesser creatures. “I shall add this,” Moffett remarks, “concerning the dignity of this History of Insects, (lest we should think God made them in vain, or we describe them) that in the universal world there is nothing more divine than these, except man. For however in shew they are most abject and sordid, yet if we look more nicely into them, they will appear far otherwise than they promise in the bare outside.”2 Moffett’s regard for the insect world scales in proportion to his displeasure with his readers, who, for want of imagination, seek virtue in larger

BotelhoV1-final.indb 77

11/9/22 1:36 PM

78

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

matters alone. Why, in comparison with the lion, elephant, or other megafauna, should one care about lesser living creatures? Such is the question that buzzes throughout his preface. “Yet if they look exactly to the matter,” “they” being doubtful and invidious readers, “it will be easie to observe,” Moffett writes, “that the divine force and power shew themselves more effectually in mean things, and they are far more miraculous, than those things the world with open mouth respects so much and admires.”3 Against those whose “vice” it is to see “Handworms, Worms in Wine, Earwigs Fleas,” and other such tiny animals, “as they were but the pastimes of lascivious and drunken Nature,” Moffett demurs: “yet where is Nature more to be seen than in the smallest matters, where she is entirely all?”4 Where else is the perfection of God more evident than in the minuscule bodies and parts of lesser living creatures? “How unspeakable is the perfection?”5 In defending the worthiness of his subjects and the “dignity” of his book, Moffett tips the order of things on its head: what was considered insignificant (“drunken Nature”) now is essential, and what was thought to contain so little, the body of a worthless gnat, for example, now contains “all.” In fact, Moffett instructs his readers to turn their attention to the lives of insects to better understand the mind of both God and mankind, for they are, in miniature, models of human virtue. “Do you require Prudence?” Moffett asks, “regard the Ant; Do you desire Justice? regard the Bee; Do you commend Temperance? take advice of them both. Do you praise valour? See the whole generation of Grashoppers. Also look upon the Gnat (a little Insect not worth speaking of) that with her slender hollow nose will penetrate so far into the thick skin of the Lion, that thou canst hardly or not at all thrust a sword or javelin so far.”6 Moffett’s allegory of insects achieves by way of rhetoric what natural philosopher and polymath Robert Hooke performs in his Micrographia (1665): both authors magnify the insect world to reveal passions and pursuits that would have otherwise remained imperceptible. Even Hooke, in his “Observ. XLV. Of the great Belly’d Gnat or female Gnat,” notes the “Armor” of this little insect, thus magnifying the strength of the gnat, though in terms less quixotic than Moffett chose.7 Moffett, for his part, scales up the drama of the gnat’s knightly persona. In his preface, the gnat is a defender of human virtue, a figure to be admired—and feared. As Renaissance historian Brian W. Ogilvie observes, humanist scholars like Moffett routinely “emphasized the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 78

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

79

moral and aesthetic benefits of a precise knowledge of nature.”8 Where medieval philosophers concentrated on universal essences and natures, humanists focused on outward appearances and particulars—in rhetoric, history, and philology, but also in the study of nature. In the case of nature, this approach harmonized with an aesthetic judgment rooted in the particular: humanists derived greater pleasure from nature when they knew it intimately. According to Ogilvie, Renaissance natural history grew out of this double movement between the study of classical texts, on the one hand, and the reformist tendency toward the study of nature, on the other. The impulse toward the particular precipitated the early modern “science of describing,” an empirical science that emerged soon after the beginnings of natural history in the late fifteenth century and by the turn of the sixteenth century took the description of nature as an end in itself. Moffett’s place in this history is a curious one at best. Though he partakes of the early modern science of describing and magnifies the reader’s curiosity on the smallest of scales, his approach is by no means harmonious. It is remarkably shrill. Through his rhetoric of magnification, Moffett defends lesser living animals from the threat of harsh critics. He swipes at them, as one would a gnat. “Perhaps I might be thought over-curious,” he objects, “in these small things, (of which the Law takes no notice) and more negligent in greater matters.”9 Pedantry aside, Moffett maintains that “how small soever this my pains may appear (for it cannot be thought no pains) he that shall make trial in something of this nature, he will rightly perceive my labour, and will of his own accord take heed how he go to repair old and decayed houses, with new matter.”10 Moffett’s Theater of Insects furnishes the reader with new and untold creatures—“new matter”; it also repairs the “old and decayed houses” of natural history, which his predecessors, Aristotle and Conrad Gesner, had left “tattered.”11 Moffett’s preface is never voiced in the singular. It can be read as serving at least two discordant purposes: exemplarity on the one hand and complaint on the other. Moffett’s wish to represent the insect world’s divine resemblance jars with the broader perspective of Theater of Insects. The gnat is, first of all, a model of humanist virtue, yet it also represents the limit or threshold of Moffett’s whole enterprise. Not only are those who show no regard for insects treated as cruel and wicked, but also Moffett himself complains at great length and shows no

BotelhoV1-final.indb 79

11/9/22 1:36 PM

80

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

shortage of envy and sting for those he dislikes. The complaint against envious critics, “wicked” and “unlearned men,” thus borrows much of its rancor from the armies of “cruel” and “irksome” gnats.12 Moffett’s Theater of Insects is, in this sense, audibly agonistic. In fact, one could be forgiven for thinking that what most attracts Moffett to the gnat isn’t its virtue but its sound. “Hearken a little to the Gnat,” Moffett enjoins. But what he says next is just as important, if not more so: “in whose small beak the great Master workman hath formed that horrid and clanging sound of the Trumpet.”13 Page after page of Theater of Insects describes that awful sound and comments on the gnat’s cruel business. Consider the following examples: The Gnat certainly is a very mischievous little creature .  .  . annoying men both day and night, both with his noise and his sting; especially those that live near the fens or rivers. Of whom Tertullian .  .  . speaketh thus: Endure, if thou be able, the trunk and launce of the Gnat; who doth not only offend the ear with the shrillnesse of his sound, but with this launce strikes through the skin, yea and veins also. . . . But those which are in the hotter Regions, and live by the sides of rivers and fens, are of a more fierce disposition, and sting more cruelly, as Massarus hath informed Gesner, and our countrymen the English under Captain Drake in their expedition into Hispaniola felt by experience.14 The tendency to waver between remonstration and praise is common throughout Moffett’s book. As we saw in relation to Hooke’s Micrographia, Moffett’s gnat can be the bravest of knights, a noble trumpeter and soldier, and a figure of anarchic disorder, of foreign import (“Hispaniola”), malicious, noisy, and blood-sucking, often in the same paragraph. By praising the gnat’s Christian virtue, Moffett seems to repress (while at the same time giving voice to) the very cruelty and disorder that he describes elsewhere in his book. Indeed, it seems that much of the labor of ennobling and divinizing that goes into Moffett’s theater of insects serves as a mask or prosopon (in the Greek theatrical sense) for screening the reader’s eyes and ears from the very same clamor that he seeks to unleash on the world, one page at a time. This is not to say that the gnat is without its virtues. On the contrary, Moffett’s high regard for the military prowess of the gnat (or,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 80

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

81

better yet, gnats in the plural, since they are rarely if ever seen in the singular, except as a swarm) is without question. In the following passage, Moffett commends these “well trained souldiers” for moving in tight geometric formation, like flying stanzas or shapes, unbreakable in “rank” and resolve. In that, they are to be lauded: These like expert and well trained souldiers, alwaies march in an exact pyramidal Figure, and although in themselves infinite, yet not any one of them break his rank. Thus they move upwards and downwards, when as in the twinkling of an eye, and while you can say, what’s this? They bring their Army into a square body, and presently again into wings; the which if you rout with a fly-flap, or with water sprinkled amongst them, or with a strong blast of breath, they will instantly rally again, and before you can give a fillip bring their whole body into a pyramidal figure.15 Gnats, according to Moffett, figure endlessly. Their swarms are infinite yet steadfast, insensible yet the cause of much pain. No doubt, Moffett marvels not a little at their distributed intelligence, for their schooling in geometry attests not only to nature’s bookishness but also to “the excellency of the minde which is in man,” who, if he would only study these creatures, would “ascend to Divinity.”16 Such is Moffett’s wager. But what strikes one in reading Moffett’s Theater of Insects is the agonistic role gnats embody. “To these (as to all other the like hurtfull Insects) the merciful Creator hath granted but a very short life,” Moffett admits, avowing what in the preface he sought to conceal: that although the Book of Nature is written in figures, some big and some small, these figures—gnats—are themselves dissemblers, shape-shifters, agonists to both God and Man.17 The clamor of things that we hear stirring in Moffett’s Theater suggests that what these tiny creatures reveal at last is the outlandishness of nature’s figures, which trumpet their abominable sound.

Spenser’s Complaints The “Trumpeter,” like so many of Moffett’s insect-personae, upends the very size and scale of the creaturely world with its “clanging sound,”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 81

11/9/22 1:36 PM

82

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

making the minuscule—an object “not worth speaking of”—the instrument of something so “horrid,” so intolerable to the senses, that it is unclear whether this tiny trumpeter, the “Gnat,” announces merely its own arrival or something more prodigious: a monstrous sound for a monstrous revelation.18 If we recall the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse, revealed to John of Patmos in the book of Revelation, we might wonder whether Moffett’s image of a clamorous gnat, whose wings are certainly not angel wings, does not anticipate Nietzsche’s vision of a world without us, without “center,” a world in which even the tiniest of animals, “feeling” within itself a world of its own, reveals humanity’s “aimless and arbitrary” appearance in nature.19 Could not the same be said of Moffett’s history of insects? After all, what the Theater of Insects reveals isn’t simply lesser living creatures, but the clamor of things that makes scalar relations of lesser and greater come undone. In what follows, I read the figure of the gnat as an agonistic figure, one that claims our attention by clamoring against human indifference. Of the several meanings that buzz around the word clamor, the first entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is the one most relevant to my purpose: “Loud shouting or outcry, vociferation; esp. the excited outcry of vehement appeal, complaint, or opposition: commonly, but not always, implying a mingling of voices.”20 A clamor is not just a sound, however monstrous; it is also a “mingling” or swarm, of the kind that so many posthumanisms conjure today with the language of assemblage (Jane Bennett), network (Bruno Latour), and rhizome (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari).21 Unlike the more celebratory images of the posthuman swarm, however, what makes Moffett’s image so “horrid” is that it gives us an image that is precisely not that of man but of Nietzsche’s superman, here understood in the sense of the supernumerary, a number too great to comprehend. The phrase “clamour of being” appears at the end of Gilles Deleuze’s ontological study, Difference and Repetition.22 It has since been popularized by Deleuze’s contemporary and rival, Alain Badiou, who uses the phrase as the subtitle to his book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being.23 I adapt the phrase here to highlight the molecularizing force of complaint, particularly in its literary and natural-historical contexts. For Deleuze in particular, complaining gives voice to a universal “clamour of being,” which is divorced from the speaking subject. “Underneath the self which acts,” Deleuze writes, “are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject.”24

BotelhoV1-final.indb 82

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

83

Underneath the active “self” there are thousands of larval selves. We speak or do, in this sense, only to the extent that we are first traversed by this inhuman force, a force that, according to Deleuze, is none other than a life—impersonal and inhuman. “Selves,” Deleuze writes, “are larval subjects.”25 How might we read Edmund Spenser’s Complaints (1591), a significant text in the poetic history of the clamor, alongside Moffett’s natural history of insects? Who better than the Spenser of Complaints to turn to when thinking about the larval subjects that stir within us? Told from the perspective of a plaintive gnat, Spenser’s Virgils Gnat, one of two insect poems written among the Complaints, gives voice to the “larval subjects” or “lesser living creatures” (Moffett) that penetrate and dissolve the self. Spenser’s complaint imagines what Eugene Thacker describes starkly as “a world ‘without us’ (the life sans soi). It is the challenge of thinking a concept of life that is foundationally, and not incidentally, a nonhuman or unhuman concept of life.”26 Following Deleuze, I claim that both Moffett and Spenser theorize a complaint in which hierarchies of greater and lesser, and human and nonhuman, come undone. Already in the 1590 Faerie Queene, Spenser had anticipated Moffett’s Theater of Insects by highlighting the gnats’ fearful numeracy, sound, and sting. Spenser writes: As when a swarme of Gnats at euentide Out of the fennes of Allan do arise, Their murmuring small trompets sounden wide, Whiles in the aire their clustring army flies, That as a cloud doth seeme to dim the skies; Ne man nor beast may rest, or take repast, For their sharpe wounds, and noyous iniuries, Till the fierce Northerne wind with blustering blast Don’t blow them quite away, and in the Ocean cast.27 With respect to gnats, Spenser and Moffett would agree: “Their manners and conditions are very ill disposed.”28 Although Spenser’s depiction of gnats as antagonistic figures does not change in the Complaints, his relation to gnats does. As Richard Rambuss points out, in the interval between the 1590 and 1596 Faerie Queene, Spenser turned to several minor poetic genres

BotelhoV1-final.indb 83

11/9/22 1:36 PM

84

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

including beast fable, fabliau, dream vision, and of course complaint.29 This turn to minor poetry marked a return to gnats. For the Spenser of Complaints, the gnat’s “murmuring . . . trompets” became a way of disrupting allegorically the world conceived as a world “for us,” from which emerges an unhuman conception of life (the life sans soi, to echo Thacker). By “interrupting in midcourse his path along the rota Virgilii, Spenser is also staging an implicit challenge to the example of Virgil as the normative model for the poetic career.”30 Taking this mantle instead, Rambuss argues, is Chaucer: “The strategic reprioritization of Chaucer here in Complaints goes hand in hand with Spenser’s critical detachment from the court and its values, along with a return to the poetics of lowliness, seemingly set aside in the exchange of pastoral pipes for epic trumpets.”31 Although Rambuss reads Spenser’s Complaints as setting aside epic, my claim is that Spenser amplifies its terrible sound. In other words, Spenser turns the war machine of epic against itself. Where Moffett, in Theater of Insects, enlarged the gnat’s humanist virtue (its “valour”), Spenser amplifies its complaint. The result is an agonistic theater in which the gnat’s riotous sound stands in for the author’s biting criticisms of the court and, more importantly, represents nature as noise, protest, and discord. What Moffett kept to the margins of his book, Spenser brings to the center: the clamor of things. Spenser’s version of posthumanism isn’t democratic; it’s radically divisive. Whereas ecocriticism has tended to harmonize human and nonhuman actors in ever wider participatory networks, Spenser asserts division, or antagonism, as what is most common to all living creatures, lesser and greater.32 His poetry invites us to see ourselves in the little gnat, to complain louder.

How to Become a Complaint Without Organs: On Virgils Gnat But what so by my selfe may not be showen, May by this Gnatts complaint be easily knowen. —Edmund Spenser, dedicatory sonnet to Virgils Gnat

Like the insect from which its name derives, Virgils Gnat appears to us in sections, as stories set within stories of classical mythology, which

BotelhoV1-final.indb 84

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

85

frame, divide, foreshadow, and forestall the fate of the gnat. These inset stories—including, most prominently, the story of Orpheus and Eurydice—form a mise-en-scène of frames within frames, giving Spenser’s mock-epic poem a formal quality that is both insect-like (from the Latin insecare, meaning “to cut into”) and highly inventive. As numerous scholars have observed, Spenser draws on well-known sources in crafting his insect poems, including Lucian’s encomium on a fly, the Homeric battle of frogs and mice, Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest Tale, and Virgil’s Culex. Other scholars have pointed to epic allusions such as the Iliad and the Aeneid, and Spenser’s own epic, The Faerie Queene, as essential to the poem’s framing structures. That Spenser magnifies his art of framing—letting the intertext overtake the text—is of course not unique to Spenser’s insect poetry; it is, after all, the very stuff of romance. What does seem singular, however, is that Spenser figures this art of framing in and through the image of a gnat, giving his poetics a distinctly larval form. As scholars of pastoral poetry have long argued, the image of pastoral life that we find in a poem like Virgils Gnat has less to do with “nature” or the “natural” and more to do with our ideas of the Good Life. Nature, in this sense, is the screen of our desires; as such, it is typically defined against the alienated life of the city, where man no longer dwells in his species-being but falls prey to corruption, selfinterest, and, as Spenser is wont to say, “enuie.”33 From this oppositional standpoint, the visual perspective afforded by the pastoral enables the speaker to fantasize a scene of wholeness and natural perfection where (and this is the important point) we are not, but could “be” if only we allowed our gaze to deliver us to the life figured by the shepherd and his flock. In psychoanalytic terms, pastoral is defined by the ellipse, by the space separating the subject of fantasy from the fantasied image or object. Jacques Lacan uses ellipses not only to illustrate the distance that separates subject and object in fantasy, but also, and more important, to emphasize the impossibility of traversing that distance, since it is the gap between fantasy and fulfillment that structures the subject and his scene. Both Virgil’s poem and Spenser’s translation lavish readers with images of a proper “scene” in which “ease, tranquility, and peace” dominate.34 The speaker of Virgil’s poem says at one point that it is “a picture of contentment for which we, in the city, / sometimes feel a yearning,”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 85

11/9/22 1:36 PM

86

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

and then asks, “Which of us has never thought of becoming a herdsman / and accepting the invitation of that pastoral scene?”35 Today this question echoes in the ears of so many posthumanisms that fantasize a scene of ecological connection. But what is this “scene,” and why does it hold our fascination? It could be said that the manifest content of the poem is a complaint against alienated being. Thus, the speaker’s call to “become” is a call to rejoin our proper nature. Numerous critiques of the pastoral genre have repeated this normative call to “become.” For example, if, as Raymond Williams has argued, the scene of proper nature is the product of a wish fulfillment or social construction, the root of which is man’s alienated labor, then the response proper for man is to “become” again who man truly is: an active and creative subject.36 If, however, we are, like the speaker, stuck on an image of nature that is not ours, it is perhaps because there is more at play in this scene than our false consciousness, which the call to “become” would have us overcome. Like the shepherd in Virgil’s poem who “enjoys” the “country life,” “but only of more and more of the same,” our enjoyment of this pastoral “scene” suggests an enjoyment in repetition itself. This repetition goes beyond the manifest content of the poem (i.e., the argument against cities), beyond even the pleasures of the Good Life, toward something like the pure enjoyment of complaint. When, at the start of Virgil’s poem, the speaker refers to it as a jeu d’esprit (game of the spirit)—Spenser’s translation is “iest”—referring to the size and subject of the poem as something childish, the “playful making of miniatures,” he points to a dynamic of childish play that Sigmund Freud observes to be the very structure of unconscious enjoyment. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud watches as his grandson throws a cotton reel in and out of his cradle, uttering Fort and Da (gone and there). As Freud argues, it is not just that the game results in the child having achieved a greater mastery of perspectival space, the reel serving to symbolize the mother’s absence; more important is the fact that the game works to repeat that absence. Writing in the interval between the 1590 and 1596 editions of The Faerie Queene, Spenser turns to the minor genre of complaint as if to underscore, in Freud’s sense, the childish enjoyment of suspended action.37 His companion insect poem, Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie (1591), can be understood like Virgils Gnat as mock-epic

BotelhoV1-final.indb 86

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

87

because of its size and subject matter, but it is above all a complaint against epic itself. If epic sings of “Arms and a man,” as in Virgil’s Aeneid, then Muiopotmos sings only of man’s dissolution among inhuman forces.38 I turn to it now briefly in order to highlight a claim that runs throughout this chapter: that it is above all the power not to act, to engage in a clamorous repetition beyond the pleasure of external action, that forces the self to think and create. In what is perhaps its quintessential act of poetic invention, Muiopotmos departs from its literary master text, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, by crowning Minerva’s tapestry with an embroidered fly. The image, we read, . . . seem’d to liue, so like it was in sight: The veluet nap which on his wings doth lie, The silken downe with which his backe is dight, His broad outstretched hornes, his hayrie thies, His glorious colours, and his glistering eies.39 Competing with Arachne “to compare with her in curious skill / Of workes with loome, with needle, and with quill,” Minerva creates an image that “seem’d to liue, so like it was in sight.” The familiar contest between art and nature wavers in this image as life and labor, poetry and techne, intermix. Not to be outdone by Minerva’s art, Arachne too creates an image that tests the boundary between life and artifice: Arachne figur’d how Ioue did abuse Europa like a Bull, and on his backe Her through the sea did beare; so liuely seene, That it true Sea, and true Bull ye would weene. (lines 277–80) Despite the liveliness of Arachne’s tapestry, it is, however, Minerva’s image of the butterfly, “Fluttring among the Oliues wantonly,” that prevails: Which when Arachne saw, as overlaid, And mastered with workmanship to rare, She stood atonied long, ne ought gainsaid, And with fast fi xed eyes on her did stare,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 87

11/9/22 1:36 PM

88

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

And by her silence, signe of one dismaid, The victorie did yield her as her share: Yet did she inly fret, and felly burne, And all her blood to poisonous rancor turne. (lines 337–44) According to Judith Dundas, “Spenser derives his other myth, of the spider’s origin, from Ovid, from whom he deliberately departs by making Arachne transform herself by envy into the spider.”40 Spenser’s revision to the Ovidian text not only prefigures Clarion’s death: the epic hero will appear, as in Minerva’s tapestry, framed by the spider’s web; it also identifies the art of weaving with the poem itself, making it, in Ayesha Ramachandran’s words, a highly gendered commentary on the “triumphant craftsmanship” of poetry.41 By framing the matter of epic in the form of a minor poetics, indeed, a beast fable, Spenser appears to be using the interval marked by the publication of the Complaints as an opportunity to revise or reframe the power of epic in relation to the “wanton” and seductive powers of romance.42 By foreshadowing Clarion’s death, Minerva’s web suggests the problem that a poet such as Spenser faces when epic action is wasted in favor of nonaction or suspended animation. On the other hand, if the Complaints are in some sense about the loss of epic agency, they are also experiments in the art of becoming animal or, in this case, becoming insect. As Spenser’s insect poem unfolds, the relation between art and nature transforms as the image of nature, formerly the allegorical representation of nature as other, gives way to an image that nature—this time the spider—invents. In the poem’s final episode, our hero, “The luckles Clarion,” flies unwittingly into the web set by Aragnoll, the spider, who “Lay lurking couertly him to surprise” (lines 417, 386). The spider’s web mirrors the tapestry of Minerva, but with a difference: whereas the latter used the image of a butterfly as a metaphor for the human soul, Spenser undoes this humanist conceit by giving the spider the power to build, construct, and thereby reinvent Minerva’s story. Spenser writes: Into the cursed cobweb, which is foe Had framed for his final ouerthroe. There the fond Flie entangled, struggled long, Himselfe to free thereout; but all in vaine. For striuing more, the more in laces strong

BotelhoV1-final.indb 88

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

89

Himselfe he tide, and wrapt his winges twaine In lymie snares the subtill loupes among; That in the ende he breathlesse did remaine. (lines 423–30) The poem weaves Clarion’s identity among multiple others and in the final frame gives us an image of invention in which Clarion, however construed (human or insect), cannot be disentangled from the poem’s inhuman web.43 The frame that captures Clarion in the end is not the life-giving frame of Minerva; against the vitalism of the former, the spider’s web vitiates the fly’s body as he strives, unsuccessfully, to free himself of the web’s framing “snares”: “he breathelesse did remaine” (line 429). Spenser’s repetition of the Ovidian text is therefore not about mastering the distance between art and nature; rather, like Freud’s Fort/Da game, it is about annihilating that distance. In Virgils Gnat, Spenser again crosses the distance between art and nature to give voice to the larval subjects that labor beneath the self. Both the speaker and shepherd in Virgils Gnat feel themselves overtaken by feelings of nostalgia for the Good Life. When the shepherd wakes to find himself threatened by “an huge great Serpent,” his “vew” suddenly changes from pastoral reverie to “felonious intent”; his “feruent eyes to destruction bent” (lines 250, 294–96). Spenser writes: The scalie backe of that most hideous snake Enwrapped round, oft faining to retire, And oft him to assaile, he fiercely strake Whereas his temples did his creast-front tyre; And for he was but slowe, did slowth off shake, And gazing ghastly on (for feare and yre Had blent so much his sense, that lesse he feard;) Yet when he saw him slaine, himselfe he cheard. (lines 305–12) Here, the same “eye” that sees nature as the space of man’s proper dwelling becomes a murderous and “ghastly” eye, and the nostalgia that had formerly saturated the scene turns to “feare and yre.” So violent is this murder that not even the speaker seems willing to condone it: “But whether God or Fortune made him bold”—here, the enjambment after “bold” marks the speaker’s hesitation—“Its hard to read” (lines 302–303).

BotelhoV1-final.indb 89

11/9/22 1:36 PM

90

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Not even the shepherd himself can quite recognize what has happened; because “feare and yre / Had blent so much his sense,” it is only after the event of the murder (“Yet when he saw”) that he, from a different perspective, “saw him slaine”—as if a third party carried out the act. These hesitations and delays point to a different dynamic of the eye/“I” at play in Spenser’s poem. In Spenser’s counterpastoral telling of the encounter with the snake, the latter appears not only with “glittering breast,” but also with “proud vaunt” and “creste aboue spotted with purple die” (258–60). While these may appear as the obvious signifiers of the Protestant poet’s anti-Catholicism, they are also signs suitable to describe the epic heroes Spenser (and Moffett in Theater of Insects) lists favorably throughout Virgils Gnat. By contrast, the shepherd is “Deuoid of care” and thus given to “careles sleep” and “slowth” (lines 246, 243, 311). When the shepherd is found sleeping by the snake, it is the shepherd who is wrong for usurping the snake’s rightful place: “Much he [the snake] disdaines, that anie one should dare / To come vnto his haunt” (lines 273–74). Just as the shepherd was late realizing that he had killed the snake, he is too late to arrive in his “proper” place of nature, which the speaker suggests already belonged to the snake. Even the snake’s “weapons . . . Nature to him hath lent” (lines 275–76). The shepherd is repeatedly shown to be a belated and unwelcome presence in nature, an after-effect of inhuman powers that long preexisted him. What began as a fantasy of human immersion in nature thus transforms into an encounter with nonhuman forces. Spenser’s poem finds something beyond the “invitation of the pastoral scene,” inviting an awareness of something else, an enjoyment not accounted for by the “satisfactions of the shepherd,” who “enjoys” only “more and more of the same.” When the poem’s eponymous insect (“A litle noursling of the humid ayre” [282]) arrives on the scene, before the killing of the snake, it does so, like Moffett’s horror-inducing gnat, with “needle” point and “hollow nose” aimed directly at the shepherd’s eye. Lulled by sleep, the shepherd’s eye appears passive. Unlike the encounter with the snake, which results in horror at the self’s nonmastery (“And gazing ghastly on for feare and yre / Had blent so much his sense”), the encounter with the gnat results in a different kind of “becoming”—not the becoming eye/“I” of the human observer but rather the “becominganimal” or “becoming-complaint” of the body, now fractured into a thousand tiny clamoring perspectives. Spenser writes,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 90

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

91

A Gnat vnto the sleepie Shepheard went, And marking where his ey-lids twinckling rare, Shewd the two pearles, which sight vnto him lent, Through their thin couerings appearing fayre, His little needle there infi xing deep, Warned him awake, from death himselfe to keep. (lines 283–88) Mineralized by sleep, the shepherd’s eyes become the object of a tiny blazon: half shuttered by “their thin couerings,” and “twinckling rare,” the shepherd’s “two pearles” serve as touchstones of blazon and its rhetoric of bodily fragmentation, as in Ariel’s song from The Tempest: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.”44 The “two pearles” can be read to symbolize the pleasure taken in the eye’s mastery, reducing bodies and things to so many objects. Conversely, we can read the “two pearles” as a form of resistance to the eye’s visual mastery, unveiling, from the cracks of the “ey-lids,” an inhuman perception in which the eyes no longer belong to human perception but appear instead like two pearl oysters (or two lips: Valerie Traub identifies the pearl as a “metonymy of female pleasure,” linking it to both early modern representations of female genitalia and representations of the nonhuman, particularly mermaids).45 So read, the eyes do not act on the world but passively receive it, being its mineral manifestation. Spenser renders the observing body a body without order: the eye that slumbers reveals an inhuman perception—timeless, like “two pearles”—that the active eye represses. When the gnat returns, after dying at the hand of the shepherd (“And life out of his members did depart” [line 293]), it returns as a complaint: “There now they all eternally complaine / Of others wrong, and suffer endles paine” (lines 407– 8). There, in the nocturnal world of the dreamer, the gnat is no longer “lesser” but is “Lord of himselfe,” comparable in measure to “Vlysses” and “goodly Agamemnon,” as well as “manie other like Heroës” (lines 113, 531, 545, 593). The heroic signs that we saw registered in the figure of the snake appear in the image of the gnat, which is nobler and more sovereign than his rustic counterpart, the shepherd. The tilt in scale from greater to lesser in the poem reveals a complaint without measure. The following lines showcase Spenser’s flirtation with non-Euclidean scale as the gnat becomes equal in size and importance to the image of Eurydice:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 91

11/9/22 1:36 PM

92

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

And sad Eurydice thence now no more Must turne to life, but there detained bee, For looking back, being forbid before: Yet was the guilt thereof, Orpheus, in thee. Bold sure he was, and worthie spirite bore, That durst those lowest shadowes goe to see, And could beleeue that anie thing could please Fell Cerberus, or Stygian powres appease. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . She (Ladie) hauing well before approoued, The feends to be too cruell and seuere, Obseru’d th’appointed way, as her behooued, Ne euer did her ey-sight turne arere, Ne euer spake, ne cause of speaking mooued: But cruell Orpheus, thou much crueler, Seeking to kisse her, brok’st the Gods decree, And thereby mad’st her euer damn’d to be. (lines 433–72) If Spenser’s poem begins with a turn to life, in the manner of a pastoral, it ends with a refusal of that turn: “sad Eurydice thence now no more / Must turne to life.” Eurydice, a surrogate for the gnat’s complaint, represents the other side of the pastoral scene: she “Ne euer did her ey-sight turne arere, / Ne euer spake, ne cause of speaking mooued.” Eurydice is, according to the speaker, nobler than “cruell Orpheus,” who, in “looking back” to life and wholeness, turns life into a project, an object to be had. By contrast, the gnat’s complaint is not for anything—not the Good Life, not “Iustice”—except complaint itself (line 359). Spenser tells us as much in the dedicatory sonnet to Virgils Gnat. There, Spenser tantalizes the reader with the “secrete” of his “riddle.” He writes: But if that any Oedipus unware Shall chaunce, through power of some diuining spright, To reade the secrete of this riddle rare, And know the purporte of my euill plight, Let him rest pleased with his owne insight, Ne further seeke to glose upon the text: For griefe enough it is to grieued wight

BotelhoV1-final.indb 92

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat

|

93

To feele his fault, and not be further vext. But what so by my selfe may not be showen, May by this Gnatts complaint be easily knowen. (lines 5–14) Spenser’s poem is explicitly anti- Oedipus. It warns the reader not to look back at life, as Orpheus did in search of Eurydice, and not to exhume the past, as Oedipus did in search of secrets. Against those figures, who took it upon themselves to become subjects of truth and reacted in horror at the discovery of something beyond their power, Spenser entrusts his “secrete” to the figure of a gnat, “a little Insect not worth speaking of” (Moffett). In his poem’s final gesture of nondisclosure, “my selfe may not be showen,” Spenser’s “selfe” hovers between the individual life of the speaker and the anonymous life that no longer has a name. This is the life sans soi, according to Thacker. For Deleuze, it is the latter, anonymous life, that art, when it is an art of the inhuman, approximates and makes livable.46 In Spenser’s poem, the “little Insect not worth speaking of” speaks volumes of this anonymous life. Whereas Moffett recoiled at its “horrid” sound, Spenser gives it the freedom to reverberate. Spenser’s poem does not accommodate the animal complaint, as Moffett’s Theater of Insects tries and fails to do.47 Nor does it unfold in a democracy of actors. The animal complaint, I’ve tried to show, cannot be accommodated. Its noise violates our world. By hearkening to the gnat’s complaint, Spenser leaves our world, and the world of his poem, audibly disjointed. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 93

Moffett, Theater of Insects, sig. Fff f6r. Ibid., sig. Fff f5v. Ibid., sig. Fff f5v. Ibid., sig. Fff f5v. Ibid., sig. Fff f5v. Ibid., sig. Fff f5v. Hooke, Micrographia, 195. Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 92. Moffett, Theater of Insects, sig. Fff f5v–6r. Ibid., sig. Fff f5v. Ibid., sig. Fff f5v. Ibid., sig. Fff f6v, 955, 956. Ibid., sig. Fff f6r. Ibid., 952–53. Ibid., 953.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

Ibid., sig. Fff f6r. Ibid., 955. Ibid., sig. Fff f6r. On Spenser’s insect eschatology, see Brown, “Allegory of Small Th ings.” OED, s.v., “clamour | clamor, n.” For a discussion of early modern swarms, see Campana, “Bee and the Sovereign.” On the language of assemblages, see Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus; and Latour, Reassembling the Social. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 304. Badiou, Deleuze.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

94 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 75. Ibid., 78. Thacker, After Life, xv. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 2.9.16. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 952. Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, 85. Ibid., 87. Ibid. My emphasis on a divisive ecocriticism draws on Jodi Dean’s challenge to see antagonism as the structuring principle of the commons (Communist Horizon, 121). Spenser, Virgils Gnat, in Shorter Poems, line 6. Subsequent references to Virgils Gnat are cited parenthetically by line number. Virgil, Gnat, 7. Ibid., 7. See Williams, Country and the City. For an account that takes issue with the prevailing notion that Spenser’s career was shaped by a single-minded pursuit of the rota Virgilii from pastoral to epic, see Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career. Virgil, Aeneid. Spenser, “Muiopotmos,” in Shorter Poems, lines 332–36. Subsequent

40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

references to “Muiopotmos” are cited parenthetically in the text by line number. Dundas, “Complaints,” 186. Ramachandran, “Clarion in the Bower.” On the clash between epic and romance, see Campana, Pain of Reformation, especially the introduction. In “Psyche,” Derrida allegorizes the human subject’s nonidentity and dispersal by positing “a ‘we’ that does not find itself anywhere, does not invent itself,” but rather gives itself over to the inventiveness of the other (45). While Derrida does not refer to this “other” as human or nonhuman, elsewhere, in “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” he extends his allegorical reading to the invention of a worm (353). Shakespeare, The Tempest, 1.2.397. Traub, Renaissance of Lesbianism, 129–32. See Deleuze, “Literature and Life.” This contrasts with Laurie Shannon’s argument in The Accommodated Animal, which makes inclusion and accommodation key to its ecological politics.

Bibliography Badiou, Alain. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Translated by Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Brown, Eric C. “The Allegory of Small Things: Insect Eschatology in Spenser’s Muiopotmos.” Studies in Philology 99, no. 3 (2002): 247–67. Campana, Joseph. “The Bee and the Sovereign? Political Entomology and the Problem of Scale.” Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013): 94–113. ———. The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 94

Masculinity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Dean, Jodi. The Communist Horizon. London: Verso, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. “Literature and Life.” In Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Gnat Derrida, Jacques. “Psyche: Invention of the Other.” Translated by Catherine Porter. In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, edited by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. ———. “A Silkworm of One’s Own (Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil).” Translated by Geoff rey Bennington. In Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar. New York: Routledge, 2002. Dundas, Judith. “Complaints: Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie.” In The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon. London, 1665. Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense.” In The Portable Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1954. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 95

|

95

Ramachandran, Ayesha. “Clarion in the Bower of Bliss: Poetry and Politics in Spenser’s Muiopotmos.” Spenser Studies 20 (2005): 77–106. Rambuss, Richard. Spenser’s Secret Career. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. In The Norton Shakespeare, 3rd ed., edited by Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 2016. Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene, 2nd ed. Edited by A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman, 2007. ———. The Shorter Poems. Edited by Richard A. McCabe. London: Penguin Books, 1999. Thacker, Eugene. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Traub, Valerie. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990. ———. The Gnat and Other Minor Poems of Virgil. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 6

MAGGOT Mutable Maggots: Corruption, Generation, and Literary Legacy

Emily L. King

Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. —Shakespeare, The Tempest

I Of the valuable lessons imparted by ecostudies in recent years, the inseparability of the human and the animal is perhaps the most prominent.1 As Erica Fudge contends of the early modern period, “[animals] raised the specter of human limitations; they provoked unease about the distinct nature of humanity; they undid the boundaries between human and beast even as they appeared to cement them.”2 But even as many insist rightly on the artificiality of the distinction, there emerges a proverbial (though literal) fly in the ointment. “Where is the dividing line between animals and other living things?” Karen Raber queries.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 96

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Maggot

|

97

“Do insects qualify as animals? Living organisms such as fungi or bacteria?”3 Where indeed? Although insects have always accompanied humans, their ubiquity alone rarely qualifies them as suitable companions. They do not readily lend themselves to anthropomorphism, and even as Homo sapiens and Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, share an estimated 60 percent of their genes, one embraces more eagerly animals as brethren than insects.4 Then, of course, there is the matter of repugnance that extends to particular insects. While humans admire the industry of the bee or the metamorphosis of the caterpillar, as in fact our early modern contemporaries did, certain species exist beyond the pale. Maggots are one such group. At first glimpse, they offer neither aesthetic pleasure nor emulatable characteristics: their appearance revolts, their grotesque movements prompt shudders of disgust, and their symbolic associations with death and decay urge a wide berth. Human exceptionalism, though anathema to the legacy of ecostudies, rears its head in an encounter with a maggot, while critiques of anthropocentrism are troubled by this strange worm. As maggots disturb well-intentioned political and theoretical projects, they also refuse tidy categorization.5 In The Theater of Insects, Thomas Moffett introduces them by way of digression: The same Aristotle, the Monarch of our modern learning, saith that the small worms of Wasps, before they have any wings at all, are somewhat long, not much unlike those worms which Hippocrates calleth Eulai, that breed in flesh, called (as I judge) Maggots, but in our Countrey, Gentiles: and these Waspish worms are somewhat white, known and easily discerned by their slits or dashes, the hinder part of their body being very thick and grosse, having a black list or line running along their backs, without feet, not creeping, but rolling and tumbling themselves this way and that way confusedly.6 Despite its straightforward tone, Moffett’s description obscures rather than clarifies, balking at the radical indeterminacy of the maggot. Commencing with wasp larvae and the associations they provoke, Moffett moves briefly to maggots and then resumes his initial discussion of the “small worms of Wasps.” Or so it seems. Yet is the description

BotelhoV1-final.indb 97

11/9/22 1:36 PM

98

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

of grotesque mobility—“not creeping, but rolling and tumbling themselves this way and that way confusedly”—in reference to wasp larvae or to maggots themselves? Insofar as “waspish” modifies worms, “waspish worms” refers to insects that bear resemblance to but do not coincide with the “worms of Wasps”—the passage’s original focus. And the use of “these” connects the worms to various names for maggots just introduced. In its asymptotic approach, Moffett’s writing reveals the maggot’s taxonomic opacity. Determining the name for the insect we now call a maggot proves no easier. As Moffett moves from “Eulai” to “maggots” and from “gentiles” to “waspish worms,” it is, at best, an exercise in sliding signifiers.7 But the problem of naming is not particular to Moffett’s work. Numerous early modern writers—an unwieldy archive that includes the work of William Bullein, Thomas Dekker, John Donne, William Shakespeare, and even English translations of Pliny—substitute “worm” for “maggot.” For instance, Bullein writes: “From henceforth therefore now shall I bee tourned into a stinkyng carrion, for wormes delite.”8 As Hamlet details Polonius’s decay to an aghast Claudius, Shakespeare careens between “worms” and “maggots,” deploying the terms interchangeably. While the early modern world classified maggots as worms, not all worms (e.g., parasites in the gastrointestinal tract of living creatures) were considered maggots. In fact, many of the sources on which I rely refer to worms in lieu of maggots, as the former was generally a more popular term, but I differentiate earthworms and parasitic worms from the maggot-like worms that feed on decaying flesh and other organic matter. It is through the worm’s proximity to flesh, to death, and to the mysteries of putrefaction that we arrive at the maggot. Yet even as we aim to anatomize maggots, they wriggle and squirm away. We might understand the ambiguity as born out of their perpetual state of transition; as fly larvae, maggots are always transforming themselves and that on which they feed. The multiple names they are accorded, in addition to Moffett’s mixed-up description, symptomatize the confusion prompted by a creature that refuses to stay put. In spite of these challenges, I chart quotidian encounters with the maggot in early modern England in the following pages, tracking its squirming self along a variety of symbolic registers through which it operates in a few cultural and literary artifacts. In particular, I will argue that early modern fears concerning death, decay, and oblivion condense in the figure of the maggot. To circumvent death’s inevitable annihilation,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 98

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Maggot

|

99

literature emerges as one possibility through which one could generate legacies to outlast or extend beyond the vulnerability of the body. Yet maggots thrive here too—alongside our epitaphs and in our libraries— and I will read their intractable presence as staging the inadequacy and impermanence of language.

II Encounters with maggots were sufficiently commonplace that Moffett opines: “There is no man almost that hath not seen these in Carrion and corrupt flesh, and sometimes in limbs that are dead by the negligence of Chirurgions, when as they apply a remedy that putrefies together with the wound or ulcer.”9 Elsewhere he specifies remedies that include cleaning infected parts with the “gall of frogs, the juice of Celandine . . . or brackish water” into which were dissolved decoctions of astringent plants that include wormwood, horehound, and the leaves of the peach tree.10 Husbandry manuals also proffered recipes to keep animals’ sores free of maggots, which, when left untreated, could endanger their lives. Following the gelding of kids, for example, farmers took particular care to keep resultant wounds clean with salves made of soot, tar, and thick cream.11 Ointments of goose grease, tar, and brimstone were applied to sheep.12 A nuisance to households as well, maggots were deterred from feasting on stored fish and meat through liberal salting.13 Despite their eradication efforts, the early modern world admitted that maggots possessed some utilitarian value. Because they were especially plentiful in the late summer, fishing handbooks encouraged their use as bait.14 Moffett writes, “The worms of Flesh-flies, which we English call Maggots and Gentles, Fishes are very much taken with.”15 It is perhaps with this use in mind that Robert Herrick pens an epigram decades later on the unsightly eyes of his neighbor: Reapes eyes so raw are, that (it seems) the flyes Mistake the flesh, and flye-blow both his eyes; So that an Angler, for a daies expence, May baite his hooke, with maggots taken thence.16 Though Herrick’s parenthetical bars readers from taking the infestation as literal, the imagery nevertheless courts cannibalism insofar as

BotelhoV1-final.indb 99

11/9/22 1:36 PM

100

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Reape’s eyes serve as the medium from which maggots feed the fish which humans will eat. Investigators also relied on maggots as forensic evidence in at least one documented case of murder, that of Anthony Ferne-seede in 1608. Despite Ferne-seede’s death being staged as a suicide, the presence of maggots gave insight into the time and place of death, details that led to the eventual conviction of his wife, Margaret, for murder.17 The early modern world understood the maggot’s ubiquity as a direct result of its powerful, near-magical capacity for reproduction. From Aristotle onward, maggots were presumed capable of spontaneous generation when exposed to natural heat in the forms of sun or putrefying matter.18 It is for this reason, then, that Ian MacInnes sees maggots, not flowers, as most representative of early modern fertility.19 Given their peculiar fecundity, maggots materialize as the unlikely embodiment of God’s edict in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply.” When Hamlet warns Polonius of Ophelia’s vulnerability, his punning hinges on this notion of spontaneous generation: “If the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a good kissing carrion—have you a daughter? Let her [Ophelia] not walk i’th’ sun. Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter may conceive.”20 Though these lines are conventionally understood as Hamlet’s deliberate exploitation of Polonius’s fears regarding his proximity to Ophelia, we might also see that the “good kissing carrion” refers to Polonius himself and his corrupting alliance with King Claudius. If one follows this line of logic—that Polonius is akin to the dead dog breeding maggots—then Ophelia, insofar as she originates from that corrupted flesh, remains similarly vulnerable. To be exposed to the literal sun (rather than the homophonous “son”) would consequently render her a breeding ground for maggots, signifying further the familial corruption. Of course, her tragic death twists Hamlet’s false prophecy to an uncannily accurate end. As the example from Hamlet foreshadows, the maggot’s association with fertility is inextricable from its mingling with death and corruption. Donne’s final sermon, Deaths Duell, epitomizes this strange paradox: “In the grave the wormes do not kill us, wee breed and feed, and then kill those wormes which wee ourselves produc’d.”21 Despite the frenzied breeding and feeding that issues forth from our corpses, Donne hypothesizes, the space of the grave retains its traditional associations with deathliness as we “kill” the very products our postmortem

BotelhoV1-final.indb 100

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Maggot

|

101

bodies have generated. But beyond the abhorrence that maggots provoke in their involvement with material decay is a broader concern about spiritual corruption. Michael Neill reads the worm’s similitude to the serpent as an echo of original sin, and maggots, by extension, would embody this as well.22 In Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, for instance, obsequious courtiers are likened to “flesh-flies [whose eggs become maggots] that will buzz against supper time” in their proximity to the corrupt Lussurioso.23 Vindice exports that corruption to women, as he essentializes the relationship between femininity and artifice. Apostrophizing to his beloved bonny lady, he pontificates: Does every proud and self-affecting dame Camphor her face for this . . . all for this? Here might a scornful and ambitious woman Look through and through herself; see, ladies with false forms You deceive men but cannot deceive worms.24 Though Vindice’s argument is indebted to the vanitas and memento mori traditions, his is a distinctly gendered rendering. In his rhetorical question, he underscores the futility of the pursuit of beauty, for the “this” to which he refers is the skull and the inevitable result of cosmetic deception. Worms or maggots, then, materialize as the uncanny litmus test for veracity and purity, even as they must penetrate the sacrosanct body in order to “prove” this.25 As they digest the superficial layers of flesh, maggots reveal the austere truth that lies beneath. Against the maggot’s associations with corruption and decay, Samuel Purchas hedges a more optimistic interpretation in his preface to A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects as he insists that “there is some good in all creatures, the meanest hath a beam of Gods Majesty, yet some have more than others.”26 Elsewhere Purchas turns his attention to the maggot, or the worm “who eats but dust”: What Creature ist’ that God hath made? But emblems forth some signal shade Of that divine and highest power, Who makes, unmakes, all in an hour, The sea is fill’d with small and great, The earth as full, and most compleat,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 101

11/9/22 1:36 PM

102

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

The glorious heaven beyond compare, That place where Saints and Angels are: The basest worm, who eats but dust, Speaks glorious praise, and that most just Unto that God who made us all In his own way; mysterial.27 Here, the logic is unsurprisingly orthodox: insofar as God creates and resides in all creatures, each reflects a facet of its divine maker. And if we recall the maggot’s contradictory associations with fertility and decay alongside Purchas’s assessment of God as one “who makes, unmakes, all in an hour,” the strange similarity between maggots and divinity comes to the fore. For this reason, then, it is not mere rhetorical flourish to assert that this lowly creature “speaks glorious praise and that most just.” Yet in this same claim, the maggot undergoes a transformation that gifts it with speech—that is, if we take seriously the image that the maggot turns human with its newfound capacity for language. Consequently, its feeding on “but dust” appears not just as any kind of speech but prayer, and in this way, the maggot exists at the border between the sacred and profane.

III In his introspective Religio Medici, Sir Thomas Browne reconciles science and religion, spending some time in an examination of the emotions prompted by death. Though Browne does not “convulst and tremble” at the prospect of death, he is nevertheless overtaken by its concomitant disgrace: “I am not so much afraid of death, as ashamed thereof to the very disgrace and ignominy of our natures, that in a moment can so disfigure us, that our nearest friends, Wife, and Children stand afraid and stare at us.”28 As death’s agent of metamorphosis, the maggot facilitates this physical transformation, in part, I would argue, with its voracious appetite, feeding on and fertilizing the corpse’s flesh with its eggs. Consequently, it effects a radical estrangement from the category of the human as our most beloved “stand afraid and stare at us”—a frightful spectacle that instantiates an almost inconceivable shame on the part

BotelhoV1-final.indb 102

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Maggot

|

103

of the witnessed dead. As if in resistance to that ungodly transformation, Browne refuses to inhabit the space of alterity, even momentarily, and insists nonetheless on an “us” from whence “we” could speak in the postmortem universe, as if our identities could remain unscathed by hungry maggots and worms. By situating the deathly metamorphosis as part of “our natures,” Browne intimates that whatever occurs is not altogether alien. “What is uncovered at the very core of the human fabric,” as Neill posits, is “the figure of Death itself,” such that death, for Browne, functions to reveal “our [ignominious] natures” embedded in otherwise lively bodies.29 Insofar as the maggot works to uncover the deathliness within, it might also serve as the mirror for our transitory, transformational natures—a figure in which anxieties about death condense. Browne appears to confirm this hypothesis, writing: “But it is the corruption that I feare within me, and the contagion of commerce without me. It is that unruly Regiment within that will destroy: It is I that doe insert my selfe the man without a Navell, who yet lives in me. I feele that originall canker corrode and devoure me, and therefore Defienda me Dios de me, Lord deliver me from my selfe.”30 As death qua maggot strips away recognizably human attributes, the newly dead are left to endure an awful confrontation with the moral and physical corruption inside. If Browne fears his death, he more specifically fears the “man without a Navel,” or the Adam within himself—that is, the intractable traces of original sin that persist as a perverse variant of everlasting life. Although Browne’s use of “originall canker” extends the prior allusion to original sin, it also suggests other creatures: caterpillars or, more generally, the larval stages of insects. The canker bears a resemblance to the maggot, then, especially as Browne “feele[s],” rather than merely imagines, a creature that exists simultaneously on the level of the symbolic (as an emblem of spiritual corruption) and the material (as an entity that consumes him). If we read the canker as proximate to the maggot, we must also remember its refusal to be held steady within the chain of signification. In this regard, Religio Medici is no anomaly, as the “originall canker” metamorphoses once more in Browne’s exclamatory prayer. Its previous incarnations as Adam, as original sin, and even as a maggot are resolved in the final revelation that it is also “my selfe.” Not only does Browne reveal the discomfiting proximity of the maggot

BotelhoV1-final.indb 103

11/9/22 1:36 PM

104

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

in its many guises; he also demonstrates how fears of death and, in particular, of a liveliness present in the postmortem universe are mapped onto the figure of the maggot. If death unveils the alterity within while maggots obliterate meaning, might something endure? This is invariably the question to which such morbid meditations return. If our bodies remain vulnerable, might our words persist as extensions of ourselves and guarantee our legacies? Such is the possibility that John Webster extends in his prefatory address to his patron in The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: “I am confident this worke is not unworthy [of] your Honors perusal for by such Poems as this, Poets have kist the hands of Great Princes, and drawne their gentle eyes to looke downe upon their sheetes of paper, when the Poets themselves were bound up in their winding-sheetes. The like curtesie from your Lordship, shall make you live in your grave, and laurell spring out of it when the ignorant scorners of the Muses (that like wormes in Libraries, seeme to live onely, to destroy learning) shall wither, neglected, and forgotten.”31 Here, Webster refashions the grave, replete with associations of disgust and decay, into a site of alternative relationality. That is, in imagining his work’s futurity, he anticipates a corporeal mingling in which deceased poets shall “have kist the hands of Great Princes,” exemplifying an unexpected, though not grotesque, postmortem animation. In the twinned media of winding and writing sheets, which weave together death and literature, this peculiar communication occurs. Yet it is not only poets who are permitted a postmortem liveliness, for patrons of literature persist too. In the following sentence, Webster veers from his contemplation of dead poets to anticipate his patron’s death such that he may then animate him “to make him live in [his] grave.” As Webster fleshes out his fantasy, he revises the macabre imagery of death such that the not-quite-dead patron generates not maggots and corruption but rather sprigs of laurel, emblematic of victory and learning. But as Webster locates worms and maggots in libraries instead of graves—creatures animated solely to erode the word, in his formulation—he also undermines the optimism and availability of an ongoing literary legacy. Like Webster, a troubled Richard II ponders his legacy but explicitly disavows self-aggrandizing fantasies. To those impelled to console him, Richard instructs:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 104

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Maggot

|

105

Of comfort no man speak. Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs, Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth. Let’s choose executors and talk of wills— And yet not so, for what can we bequeath Save our deposed bodies to the ground?32 Confining further conversation to “graves, of worms, and epitaphs,” the final item in this list appears as an outlier insofar as it consolidates and secures one’s personal narrative. Inherent in the epitaph’s function is its capacity to outlast the body, and whereas both graves and worms gesture toward the alchemical process of decay, epitaphs are finite and static. But if one depends on the epitaph as a bulwark against all that endless change, it is a temporary oasis at best, for the lines that immediately follow trouble its associations with stability. As Richard supplies his interlocutors with the instruments of writing, he exchanges “paper” for “dust” and “rainy eyes” for pens, thereby connecting one’s legacy and writing to the dust from whence all bodies originate and return. And the capacity to remember—achieved by reading the epitaph—is contingent on sympathetic readers with their own “rainy eyes” whose tears will eventually dry. Thus, the passage reveals epitaphs to be as vulnerable to change as the graves and maggots that transform our corpses. Yet Richard’s imperative is stranger still. To “make dust our paper” is to embrace insubstantiality and ephemerality, to welcome the deliberate erasure of legacy and language. It accedes, in other words, to illegibility, futility, and the impossibility of a future from which one could apprehend the past or even Richard himself. I wish to emphasize, though, that despite this grim reality—that the narrative that would consolidate one’s identity gets wasted in the grave—the grief-stricken monarch remains invested in the (all too temporary) salutary effects of narrative. Write, even as it is pointless. Write, even as obscurity is certain. Write, even as no one will read your words. The futility broached by Richard II meets its logical conclusion in Hamlet. While Richard admits the long-term problems of narrative, Hamlet refuses altogether its temporary comforts, making maggots the markers of unraveled meaning. In his conversation with Claudius

BotelhoV1-final.indb 105

11/9/22 1:36 PM

106

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

regarding the whereabouts of Polonius, Hamlet responds that he is “at supper,” clarifying: “Not where he eats, but where a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service— two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.”33 By transforming Polonius from consumer into consumed object, Hamlet underscores his undignified metamorphosis, casting it as a form of contrapasso insofar as “politic worms” partake of his corpse. The temporal logic of “at supper” emphasizes that what was once Polonius is now an actively consumed object. Hamlet then shifts registers to the universal implications of decay in which not Claudius but the worm is crowned monarch of the ultimate feast at which social distinctions are leveled entirely. That this is “the end” to which Hamlet darkly refers suggests both the teleological conclusion of biological life (to die and be consumed by maggots) as well as the absence of life’s broader purpose or meaning. Indeed, what Hamlet proposes is a causal relationship between the maggot and meaninglessness. Confronted with this pessimistic end, Claudius can only erupt in exclamation (“Alas, alas!”), which Hamlet takes as a sign of his intellectual incomprehension and offers a more precise, though unwelcome, explication of postmortem ecology: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.”34 Though Hamlet’s addendum appears in the guise of clarification, its contents are oriented differently from that of his initial explanation. Here, inadvertent cannibalism implicates humans: with our indiscriminate feeding, much like that of the maggot, we eradicate distinctions not only between social groups but also between species.35 Aghast at the macabre revelation (and, perhaps, by the implications it heralds for his sovereign body), Claudius insists on significance in his reply: “What does thou mean by this?” His question is an attempt to shore up the signification unraveled by the predilections of the maggot and a refusal that this is “the end.”36 To his uncle’s incredulity, Hamlet responds with little more than an adolescent shrug: “Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.”37 For Hamlet, there is no redemptive end that would mitigate, repair, or make meaning of this unflinching depiction of the maggot’s life cycle and, indeed, of our own. If we take

BotelhoV1-final.indb 106

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Maggot

|

107

seriously his “nothing,” we see a rejection of narrative from which we could (re)cover ourselves amid the trauma of death and decay. If the maggot’s instantiation of meaninglessness is a claim too bleak to brook, let us return to the epigraph with which this chapter begins, for The Tempest realizes more fully the transformational possibilities of “nothing” into something beyond comprehension. In his hypnotic song of consolation to Ferdinand, Ariel transmutes the fundamental elements of Alonso’s “corpse” (bones and eyes) into oceanic objects that have great market value. And as the process of “sea-change”—the gentle decay and reconstitution accomplished by the briny deep—replaces Alonso’s eyes with pearls, the text highlights the illegibility of this metamorphosis. Read as a homophone, this sea-change admonishes readers to see change, a command that emerges as impossible, if not ironic, for pearls are of no use for sight. Like this sea-change, maggots effect radical transformations on the creatures they consume. There is something, surely, but its result is nothing that one could apprehend or recognize. Yet whereas Hamlet pursues this reality to its grotesque end, The Tempest heralds other possibilities, alternatives in which original objects are reconstituted into things wondrous and precious, “rich and strange.” Notes 1. For instance, see Boehrer, Animal Characters; Bruckner and Brayton, “Introduction”; and Shannon, Accommodated Animal. 2. Fudge, introduction to Renaissance Beasts, 13. 3. Raber, “How to Do Things,” 107. 4. NIH, “Comparative Genomics.” 5. Although this chapter examines the literal maggot in the early modern world, one might also consider the acts of digestion, metaphorical or other wise, that the insect invokes. In his examination of how documents in colonial archives are digested by bureaucrats and academics alike, Zeb Tortorici demonstrates how the subsequent narratives generated by these intermediaries are steeped in

BotelhoV1-final.indb 107

euphemism and often elide queer(er) traces in the original documents themselves. For Tortorici, this archival digestion encompasses not only incorporation but also classification, and these twinned phenomena, metaphorical with archivists and perhaps literalized by the maggot, are inextricably related to power structures and colonial rule. See “Visceral Archives of the Body.” 6. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 654. In citing early modern texts, I have preserved their original spellings but modernize typography in the following fashion. Consonantal u and i are revised to v and j; vocalic v is revised to u; long s is revised to s; vv is revised to w, & is altered to and; where a

11/9/22 1:36 PM

108

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

macron indicates the suspension of m or n, I supply the letter. Unless otherwise noted, all emphases appear in the originals. Moffett’s use of “gentiles” is a corruption of “gentles.” Later in the designated section for maggots, Moffett reviews once more their many names: “Hippocrates calls Eulas Worms bred in dead bodies. Suidas calls them ill beasts, flesh-eaters. Lucretius calls them cruel Vermin, and Plutarch, Worms from corruption and putrefaction of the excrements boyling forth” (1122). Bullein, Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence, sig. L4r. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1122. Ibid., 1123. Markham, Cheape and Good Husbandry, sig. M2v. Ibid., sig. K4r. Pliny, Historie of the World, 342. See, for instance, Berners, Hawking, Hunting, Fouling, and Fishing. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 946. Herrick, “Upon Reape.” For an analysis of aversion in Herrick’s work, see Eschenbaum, “Desiring Disgust.” Araignement and Burning of Margaret Ferne-seede, sig. A3v. The Aristotelian belief in spontaneous generation bears a resemblance to bugonia, a ritual sacrifice of bulls enacted to prompt the materialization of bees, which were believed to generate spontaneously through bulls’ carcasses. Perhaps the best-known episode of bugonia involves the Aristaeus episode in book 4 of Virgil’s Georgics. For a full overview of the term and

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

its presence throughout classic history, see Osorio, “Vergil’s Physics of Bugonia.” MacInnes, “The Politic Worm,” 254. Shakespeare, Tragedy of Hamlet, 2.2.182–86. Donne, Deaths Duell, sig. B3v. For a study of Donne’s reliance on aversion in this sermon, see King, Civil Vengeance, 57–76. Neill, Issues of Death, 76. Middleton, Revenger’s Tragedy, 5.1.12–13. Ibid., 3.5.83–97. Judith Haber argues that female chastity is “created by penetration and violation” in The Revenger’s Tragedy (Desire and Dramatic Form, 66). Purchas, Theatre of Politicall FlyingInsects, sig. A4r. Ibid., sig. B4r–v. Browne, Religio Medici, 72, 76. Neill, Issues of Death, 44. Browne, Religio Medici, 146. Webster, Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy, sig. A3v. Shakespeare, Richard II, 3.2.140–50. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.3.20–25. Ibid., 4.3.26–27. On the relationship between decay and cannibalism, see Watson, “Giving Up the Ghost,” 207. Extending this premise, Raber argues that parasitism is constitutive of human consumption (“Vermin and Parasites,” 31). One might say that the desire for meaning insists on sovereignty or, at the very least, its reconstitution. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 4.4.30–31.

Bibliography Araignement and Burning of Margaret Ferne-seede for the Murther of Her Late Husband Anthony Ferne-seede. London: E. Allde, 1608.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 108

Berners, Juliana. Hawking, Hunting, Fouling, and Fishing. London: Adam Islip, 1596. Boehrer, Bruce. Animal Characters:

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Maggot Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Browne, Sir Thomas. Religio Medici. London: Andrew Crooke, 1642. Bruckner, Lynne, and Dan Brayton. “Introduction: Warbling Invaders.” In Ecocritical Shakespeare, edited by Bruckner and Brayton, 1–9. New York: Routledge, 2011. Bullein, William. Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence. London: John Kingston, 1564. Donne, John. Deaths Duell, or a Consolation to the Soule, Against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body. London: Thomas Harper, 1632. Eschenbaum, Natalie K. “Desiring Disgust in Robert Herrick’s Epigrams.” In Disgust in Early Modern English Literature, edited by Eschenbaum and Barbara Correll, 53–68. New York: Routledge, 2016. Fudge, Erica. Introduction to Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, edited by Fudge, 1–17. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Haber, Judith. Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Herrick, Robert. “Upon Reape.” In The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by J. Max Patrick, 371. New York: Norton, 1968. King, Emily L. Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. MacInnes, Ian. “The Politic Worm: Invertebrate Life in the Early Modern English Body.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 253–74. New York: Palgrave, 2012.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 109

|

109

Markham, Gervase. Cheape and Good Husbandry for the Well- Ordering of All Beasts, and Fowles. London: T[homas] S[nodham], 1614. Middleton, Thomas. The Revenger’s Tragedy. In English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, edited by David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisa man Maus, and Eric Rasmussen, 1297–1369. New York: Norton, 2002. Moffett, Thomas, The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Neill, Michael. Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. NIH: National Human Genome Research Institute. “Comparative Genomics.” Accessed April 21, 2022, http://www .genome.gov/11509542/comparative -genomics-fact-sheet. Osorio, Peter. “Vergil’s Physics of Bugonia in Georgics 4.” Classical Philology 115 (2020): 27–46. Pliny the Elder. The Historie of the World. London: Adam Islip, 1634. Purchas, Samuel. A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects. London: R. I., 1657. Raber, Karen L. “How to Do Things with Animals: Thoughts on/with the Early Modern Cat.” In Early Modern Ecostudies: From the Florentine Codex to Shakespeare, edited by Ivo Kamps, Raber, and Thomas Hallock, 93–114. New York: Palgrave, 2008. ———. “Vermin and Parasites: Shakespeare’s Animal Architectures.” In Ecocritical Shakepeare, edited by Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton. New York: Routledge, 2011. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and

11/9/22 1:36 PM

110

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. ———. The Tempest. In The Norton Shakespeare, 3047–107. New York: Norton, 1997. ———. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. In The Norton Shakespeare, 1659–759. New York: Norton, 1997. ———. The Tragedy of King Richard The Second. In The Norton Shakespeare, 943–1014. New York: Norton, 1997). Shannon, Laurie. The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean

BotelhoV1-final.indb 110

Locales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Tortorici, Zeb. “Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (2014): 407–37. Watson, Robert. “Giving Up the Ghost in a World of Decay: Hamlet, Revenge, and Denial.” Renaissance Drama 21 (1990): 199–223. Webster, John. The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy. London: Nicholas Okes, 1623.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 7

BEE “Some say the bee stings”: Toward an Apian Poetics

Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana

Moses Rusden, in his treatise A Further Discovery of Bees (1679), lays out, in the manner of an equation or a chart of analogies, some of the proverbs that follow this “little creature,” the honeybee, Apis mellifera: Profitable Laborious Loyal As{ Swift }as a Bee. Nimble Quick of Scent Neat1 Each of these terms, fascinating in its own right, beckons. That bees would be profitable and laborious, loyal and swift, nimble and neat, and even quick of scent makes sense with respect to the way bees thrived in the early modern world. And to many of these terms we will turn. But the first and most important assertion to make about the early modern bee concerns the way bees function as sovereign creatures at the heart of networks of association. Certainly other creatures do as well; this

BotelhoV1-final.indb 111

11/9/22 1:36 PM

112

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

was an age keen to think with creatures of all varieties. But what Rusden’s chart reveals is not just a list of qualities but the extent to which these “little creatures” existed not at the top of a food chain but as the constitutive ground of a chain of analogical relationships. What could happen with any creature happened with greater frequency and density with bees. Imagine, then, that in this chart, the center column was actually a dial that could spin and each turn revealed a new term. Profitable, laborious, and loyal, to be sure, but also (although not listed here) other terms arise as virtues bees demonstrate, including the following, which regularly appear in bee treatises up until the late 1690s: obedience, harmony, nobility, usefulness, industriousness, wisdom, art, fortitude, and diligence. Perhaps what most defines this creature in early modernity is a kind of figural flexibility. It is not, most certainly, the case that bees were merely metaphors—hives of analogy, in other words, that lived in language, discourse, or the imagination alone. More potent, these creatures were provocations to think not only of the way concepts and qualities adhere to particular creatures, like bees, but also might cross species in complex relations of comparison and cohabitation. Bees were sovereign creatures, charismatic creatures to be sure, and, more than anything else, the source of an apian poetics that, while utterly vivid in the literature and theater of the era, was a way of understanding how creatures live on and off the page at the same time, in the minds of early moderns and in hives no longer extant. When we look to, for instance, Shakespeare’s famous extended metaphor regarding bees in Henry V (1599), we find Canterbury employing analogical thinking, comparing the “diverse functions” of the men of England to the multiple roles the bees take inside the hive. As Thomas Moffett writes of the bees in the hive in The Theater of Insects (1658), “every one hath his work, and his art wherein he doth imploy himself,” noting that the bees have “their commanders, Captains, Lieutenants, Trained-bands, Corinets, Trumpeters, Fifes, Scoutmasters, Watchmen, and Souldiers, an Army which do (as if it were a little City) guard and defend their Honey.”2 Compare to Canterbury’s take as he says, They have a king, and officers of sorts, Where some like magistrates correct at home, Others like merchants venture trade abroad, Others like soldiers, armed in their stings.”3

BotelhoV1-final.indb 112

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Bee

|

113

At the outset of the speech, Canterbury remarks, “For so work the honey bees, / Creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom” (1.2.187–89). Canterbury’s aim is to reveal to the king that they must go to war with France, and by adopting the ways of the hive (some stay at home, others go abroad), England may thus become as “ordered” as the bee. Bees, according to John Worlidge in his 1676 Apiarium, were “Industrious and Profitable Insects.”4 Typical, by this time, would be a sense of the utility of bees, whose exemplary work ethic was always articulated with reference to, and in the hopes of, extractability. Indeed, the motivating and initiating cause of the great burst of seventeenth-century bee books was what Worlidge and others referred to as ordering, or “an Improvement and Advancement of Bees, to make them more profitable, and bring them into greater esteem amongst us than formerly; and that by novel Ways and Methods of Ordering them, some Persons of very good Quality and Parts, have taken a great deal of pains and used much skill to observe the Nature of these Curious, Industrious and Profitable Insects.”5 Thus, we see the links in the chain of human-apian relations. The force of apian industry directed and modified through acts of improvement, advancement, and ordering makes for maximum profitability. And although bees are sometimes described as curious creatures, human curiosity about the nature of bees here seems not to be a good in and of itself but rather a product of base motives. This would be no surprise, of course, given the general principle, especially applied to bees, of a fundamentally service-oriented understanding of the world. As Edmund Southerne querulously laments in a letter to the reader prefacing his 1593 A Treatise Concerning the Right Ordering of Bees, “What creatures soever the Lord hath made for the use of man, and especially those of most profit, although by nature they are decked with the chiefest ornaments for their defense, yet for want of guiding by man, how soon do they go to wreck and decay?” And yet Southerne worries, too, “that very few within this realm, especially of such as best may have any regard at all of Bees, and yet how far English honey passeth that of other countries, who knoweth not.”6 What accounted for the buzz of bee books in Britannia? It is important to remember that writing on bees in the period fell into two categories: what learned men said about beekeeping (advice and observations

BotelhoV1-final.indb 113

11/9/22 1:36 PM

114

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

that are often repeated from text to text) and what those who kept bees, and who had knowledge and understanding of them from their own experiences of ordering hives, said. The Englishness of bee books isn’t remarkable at all; a larger European phenomenon existed, as Eva Crane has outlined in The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting.7 But there was indeed a deluge of English writing on all things apian beginning in the late sixteenth century through the late seventeenth century—in treatises by Southerne (1593), Charles Butler (1603), John Levett (1634), Richard Remnant (1637), John Day (1641), Samuel Hartlib (1655), Gervase Markham (1668), Worlidge (1676), John Gedde (1677), and Rusden (1679).8 Worlidge, in his 1676 Apiarium; or a Discourse of Bees, remarks upon the outpouring of bee writing in his prefatory “To The Reader”: “Others on the contrary, wanting that Reason and Experience they pretended to, have abused the World with their fictitious Notions concerning Bees, which have made a greater Humm than all the Bee-books that have been published before. That humming noise was the occasion of my reviewing those Observations I had formerly made concerning these small, profitable, laborious, loyal, nimble, cunning, industrious and resolute Animals.”9 Of note here is that four of these same descriptors— profitable, laborious, loyal, nimble—would be repeated three years later in Rusden’s proverbs quoted earlier. Nevertheless, this “Humm” to which Worlidge refers—here used to indicate the false opinions concerning bees—is analogous to what today some might call “fake news.” Worlidge, like Southerne some eighty years before him, takes issue with those who talk about bees even though their opinions are not based on practical, hands-on knowledge that derives from the actual experience of human/animal contact. Such a “humming noise” interestingly connects to how Shakespeare, for one, used the similar term buzz to indicate something annoying, stale, or incorrect—for instance, in Hamlet’s derisive response to Polonius’s remark that the actors have arrived: “Buzz, buzz” (2.2.376). Worlidge claims that humans can perpetuate false knowledge about the care of bees, potentially causing harm to bee populations. Yet it is also prudent to understand how early moderns viewed a wider set of natural (environmental/animal) threats to the hive. In The Feminine Monarchie, Butler lists fourteen: “1. the mouse, 2. the woodpecker, 3. the titmouse, 4. the swalow, 5. the hornet, 6. the waspe, 7. the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 114

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Bee

|

115

moth, 8. the snaile, 9. the emet, 10. the spider, 11. the toade, 12. the frogge, 13. the Bee, and 14. the weather.”10 Most of these threats are quite literally garden-variety enemies; they are the creatures who might desire to avail themselves of the sweet stores or the substantial shelter of the hive. In a startling turn of events, however, bee-on-bee violence seems to be the greatest threat. “But not any one of these,” Butler claims, “nor all these together, do half as much harme to the bees as the bees.”11 Butler seems to have transformed the Latin phrase Homo homini lupus est (Man is a wolf to man) to Apes api as homo homini lupus. The cruelty of bees is then legendary with respect to other bees: their will to secure storehouses and shelters makes them merciless raiders of other hives, for “as they of the same hive live in inviolable peace with one another, so they have no other intercourse, no friendship or society with others but are rather at perpetual defiance and deadly feud with them.”12 Likewise, drones, when they are no longer useful to the hive, become apes non grata and are kept out of the inner workings of the hive, castaways either dispelled or killed by their brethren. What these fascinating observations suggest is that apian virtues have limits associated with the parameters of the singular social unit of the hive. The famous penchant for collectivity is much more tribal, one might say, than proverbial language suggests. Much has been written about the industry of the bee, but much proverbial wisdom gleaned from apian life reveals an elevation of the bee’s senses. In fact, it is fascinating to look at how the numerous English bee books and treatises published during the early modern era discuss sensory embodiment in the bee, some three hundred years before someone like Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch’s own experiments and discoveries about apian sensory communication. Rusden writes that bees are full of wonders and that instinct guides them, for “there do not appear those outward organs of the senses that other Animals have.”13 Nonetheless, the treatises often devote sections to marveling at the sensory experiences of the bee. The discussions about bee senses seem to be grounded in the practices of the latter. Take hearing, for instance, where Remnant, in A Discourse or History of Bees (1637), notes that bees’ hearing is very good and that “they delight in musical sounds,” but as Moffett remarks in The Theater of Insects, “they are likewise very fearful of an Eccho, thunder and lightning, and the like sudden crackling noise; as on the contrary

BotelhoV1-final.indb 115

11/9/22 1:36 PM

116

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

with a soft still whistling, or murmuring noise, and tinkling of brasse they are exceedingly taken and delighted.”14 In chapter 10, “Swarm,” in volume 2 of Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance, Derek Woods emphasizes the veritable musicality of the hive. Butler, also a composer, not only attempted to transcribe the sound of bees in 1609 in the first edition of The Feminine Monarchie but also created a more elaborate hymn or madrigal, “Melissomelos,” for four voices, the score of which was included in the second and third editions of The Feminine Monarchie. Butler’s assertion that this composition reflected the song of a newly hatched queen imploring the old queen to leave more than stretches credulity.15 But as Gerald Hayes notes, “In the later editions the music is so elaborated that without a reference to the first edition our author might be thought to credit the bees with a power of composition worthy of an accomplished musician. It is not at once obvious that the song in four parts . . . is only his own fashion of describing the less elaborate notes from the first edition.”16 Thus, the bee has become a maker not just of honey or wax or hives but of a song of labor and industry. “Melissomelos” reminds us of two other facets of Butler’s publishing life. In 1633 he published The English Grammar, which advocated that orthography should follow the sound of words, to which dictate the third edition of The Feminine Monarchie adhered. Butler then published in 1636 The Principles of Musick, and although there exists as yet no comprehensive consideration of Butler’s thoughts on bees, grammar, and music, one has to wonder to what extent it was that whatever Butler heard—or thought he heard—in the swarms of bees in springtime might have had an impact on how he imagined human speech and music. Moreover, the breadth of a writer like Butler may have been special, but most bee books of the era were highly multidisciplinary in the knowledge they assembled; the discourse of bees reached wide audiences and harbored many and varied implications. Of course, the sound of Butler’s bees has by no means been silenced by time. While 1623 may have marked the entry of Butler’s madrigal in The Feminine Monarchie, 1954 marked the installation of a commemorative window in the Church of Saint Lawrence, Wootten Saint Lawrence, where Butler long ago had served as a vicar (figure 1.7.1). Carved in panes of stained glass is an image of Butler before a honeycombed background with a series of bees, one crowned, and the motto “Solertia

BotelhoV1-final.indb 116

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Figure 1.7.1 Commemorative window, the Church of St. Lawrence, Wootten St. Lawrence. Bigstock .com.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 117

11/9/22 1:36 PM

118

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

et Labore.” Butler was not the only subject of commemoration here. Indeed, although the window depicts Butler, it celebrated the accession of Elizabeth II the year before, for which occasion the great legacy of Butler’s “notable book on bees, The Feminine Monarchie” seemed fitting no doubt both for the coronation of a queen and for the invocation of a hive-like national unity under her rule. More recently, the Choir of Little Saint Mary’s performed the piping of Butler’s bees, which can be found on YouTube and in a recording funded by the Leverhulme Trust.17 Butler’s musical vision of the hive may have suggested harmony, but The Feminine Monarchie, like so many other bee books, focused considerable attention on discord from within and without. It is not surprising to find weather might be a threat—too much heat, cold, wind, or rain. But we should be equally unsurprised to find that the greatest threat to bees is apparently so great that it does not appear in a list organized around increasing severity of threat. Butler at last lavishes attention on “another enemie worse than all those” previously discussed: the human. Moffett, in his Theater of Insects, points to a certain type of human that threatens the hive: “Unclean persons, or any that use sweet oyls or perfumes about them, or those that wear curled or ruffled locks, or red clothes (as resembling the colour of bloud) they cannot in any wise endure.”18 And in his 1679 A Further Discovery of Bees, the beemaster of Charles II, Rusden, articulates his ambition to “show how bees may be best understood, enjoyed, and preserved alive, to the benefit of cruel and ungrateful Mankind, who hitherto, like the worst of Robbers, hath spoiled them at once of their lives and treasures.”19 This is no doubt also why the great epic-romance author Ludovico Ariosto featured as his impresa “Pro Bonum Malum” (good rewarded with ill) and an image of a beehive harassed by the very smoke that still enables humans to extract the sweet products of the hive. That bees were seen simultaneously as creatures admirable because they were “bred for the behoof of man” and as creatures likely to be despoiled by humans is one of the many fascinating paradoxes that structures millennia of fascination with apian analogies and observation.20 Rusden recalls the exquisite architecture of the hive, noting, “Their Art appears further in their excellent Architecture, which is by the framing of their several Combs, and hexagonal Cells, so mathematically exact, that the bottom of each Cell of one side, hath its foundation

BotelhoV1-final.indb 118

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Bee

|

119

upon three lines of three Cells on the other side, meeting all in one angle right in the middle of the opposite bottom, by which the strength as well as the beauty of the same is much augmented.”21 Moffett makes note of their “skilful Architecture” that “may seem to put down Archimedes himself in his own Art.”22 Worlidge, speaking of the benefits of watching these tiny creatures “in Motion and full of business” through the window of a glass hive, laments that he is still unable to partake in the “promised pleasure of the view of their Architecture.”23 It is interesting that early modern bee treatises all devote attention to how man can build hives in order to receive swarms in the springtime. Tortona in Levett’s Ordering of Bees notes that in England, “the hives made of wickers or of straw are principally in use,” warning that it is essential not to purchase loose or thinly bound hives, as they will not last and will “so mar the Combs and kill the Bees.”24 The choices over wicker or wheat or rye straw are often debated, particularly with respect to whether they will help to keep bees warm in the winter but also whether they will prevent destruction from weather or pests. As Markham notes, “The straw hive is subject to breed mice, and nothing destroyeth Bees sooner than they.”25 To look upon hives is to marvel at the (often undisclosed) wonders of their interior architecture and at the bee, “that great little Architect of houses made of wax.”26 Thomas Browne, in Hydrotaphia, UrneBurial (1658), compares the “confused houses of pismires” to “the edificial palaces of bees.”27 As Lisa Jean Moore and Mary Kosut note, an arcology, “a combination of the terms ‘architecture’ and ‘ecology’ . . . is a self-contained, high-density living environment” that in its efficiency shows that the “egalitarian hive is an example of how the natural world seemingly ‘gets it right.’ ”28 Bees are rightfully considered some of nature’s best engineers, presenting to humans a model, an “arcology,” that humans are unable to achieve. Truly, bees do “get it right” when it comes to architecture, but early moderns often got things wrong about bee reproduction and about the question of the queen versus king bee. Bemused, confused, and even tortured were the conversations about what was, in various sources, referred to as the king, the master, or the queen bee. In fact, the sexing of sovereignty was one of three questions about sex that drove would-be apian experts to great leaps of logic and sometimes fancy: What was the sex of the sovereign bee and the drone? Do bees have sex? And how

BotelhoV1-final.indb 119

11/9/22 1:36 PM

120

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

do bees reproduce? Such debates were by no means new in the era of Moffett. Aristotle’s History of Animals insisted on a king. In the Georgics, Virgil insisted, “You will marvel that this custom has found favor with bees, that they indulge not in conjugal embraces, nor idly unnerve their bodies in love, or bring forth young with travail, but of themselves gather their children in their mouths from leaves and sweet herbs, of themselves provide a new monarch and tiny burghers, and remodel their palaces and waxen worlds.”29 Although the Loeb translation prefers “monarch,” the original, regem, suggests a king bee. Pliny’s Natural History, a vital precedent and source for Renaissance natural historians, also refers to a king bee. That bees’ greatest love seems to be held in reserve for “flowers and their glory in begetting honey” suggests pleasures and sexualities oriented otherwise than a male-female coupling of any variety.30 Virgil also advances in the Georgics, in a famous recasting of the story of Orpheus, the theory of generation through corruption as Aristaeus learns to restore his hive not only by propitiating the gods but also by harvesting the rotting flesh of a bullock from which a new swarm arises. This would be repeated by Augustine in The City of God, Isidore in his Etymologies, and many, many others. Indeed, Renaissance naturalists might cite lines of the Georgics as proof of this “fact” of apian reproduction, as did Worlidge in Apiarium, who endorsed the Greek notion of bugonia as “not improbable.”31 Thus, it is no wonder that Moffett and his colleagues continued to debate various facets of the sexing of bees, citing earlier theories respectfully even when they diverged. Consider some of the bee books cited earlier. Butler’s Feminine Monarchie was in its very title a clarion call with respect to this subject, but the conversation did not end then. Southerne, who wrote before Butler, refers to king and master bees, as does Levett, who prefers Southerne to Butler as an interlocutor. Remnant, no doubt with Butler in mind, refers to “an entire female Monarchy.”32 Day’s Parliament of Bees dramatizes a definitively masculine master bee named Prorex. The letters that constitute Hartlib’s Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees refer at different points to queen and to king bees, reflecting the range of opinions and lack of consensus. Markham refers to a “king” or “commander.” Worlidge defers to Butler on all things, including the sex of sovereign and drone. Butler and Rusden form a special kind of pair. That the former was the great advocate for the presence of a queen bee is plain. Rusden, like so many others who wrote in Butler’s wake, described him in the most

BotelhoV1-final.indb 120

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Bee

|

121

reverential of terms even at points of departure. And on no point might he have disagreed more than on the subject of the sovereign’s sex. The idea that females might rule the hive is described as a “mistake” and a biological “absurdity.”33 And the idea that the sluggish drones were male? “Not probable,” Rusden insists.34 Was this a difference wrought by several decades of evolving scientific thought and observation? Like Rusden, we too must say “not probable.” The main difference, we might note, is that while Butler was Queen Elizabeth’s beemaster, Rusden held the same post for Charles II. In that context, Butler’s account of apian sex became an inconvenience. Many of these treatise writers also talk about reproduction in terms of reproducing the gendered hierarchies of the hive in human society. Remnant, in his A Discourse or History of Bees, offers a compelling example. He writes, “Out of the experience of ruling Bees may be learned how to rule most women: for there is some resemblance between them,” further noting that “Bees if they be well governed, and kept in good order, are very industrious, but let them be out of order, or ill handled, and there comes no good of them, but hurt and trouble.”35 Careful management of the beehive, then, according to Remnant, teaches a man how to manage a woman to “be both profitable and a comfort,” oddly recalling Canterbury’s famous claim discussed earlier in Shakespeare’s Henry V that honeybees are “creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of order to a peopled kingdom” (1.2.188–89). Yet in this same extended simile, Shakespeare notes, “They have a king,” reinforcing earlier beliefs about the sex of the hive’s monarch (1.2.190). Given the promiscuity of apian analogizing, it should come as no surprise that other literary authors too entered the fray. Although Edmund Spenser was not the greatest of lovers of bees—he seemed to prefer butterflies and gnats when it came to lesser living creatures— his use of apian analogy to describe the Amazonian queen Radigund’s followers seems to tip the scales, ambivalently so, toward what Butler would call The Feminine Monarchie. When Arthegall and his companions first approach her city, they are spied by the watch, prompting a defensive response: Eftsoones the people all to harnesse ran, And like a sort of Bees in clusters swarmed: Ere long their Queene her selfe, half like a man Came forth into the rout, and them t’array began.36

BotelhoV1-final.indb 121

11/9/22 1:36 PM

122

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Here bees are neither industrious nor perfectly ordered. They represent a certain kind of swarm, the swarm that seems to connote not anarchy but malignant order. Once Radigund defeats Arthegall in battle—at a critical moment, he is distracted by her beauty and ruthlessly disarmed—the apian analogy withers away, leaving in its wake a substantial dose of gender trouble. Radegund forces Arthegall to serve her in women’s clothing, as Hercules served Omphale: Such is the crueltie of womenkynd, When they haue shaken off the shamefast band, With which wise Nature did them strongly bynd, T’obay the heats of mans well ruling hand, That then all rule and reason they withstand, To purchase a licentious libertie.37 Here we have the dilemma compactly stated. Although the bees cluster in an organized formation, the language of the swarm suggests the desire to see this Feminine Monarchie as a pernicious chaos produced by “licentious libertie” and not masculine “reason.” And yet how can it be said that female rule violates “Nature” given the comparison between humans and bees? If bees provided an image of perfect divine order in nature, what were students of the hive to do with the possibility—later recognized as a fact—that the ideal society was governed by a queen? One might have thought Queen Elizabeth’s long reign would have prepared the way for such thoughts—in part, it did—and yet the exceptional logic that often governed Elizabeth made for strange compromises. After all, the Virgin Queen was celebrated as a singularity, not evidence that all or any women were suited to rule or that her refusal or inability to reproduce was to be thought of as a norm. Other disturbing facts arise: the males of the species are exemplars of sloth, proverbially so, and seasonally killed or exiled from the hive. “The first workings of nature are as dark as midnight,” Samuel Purchas wrote.38 And much was mysterious about bees. This mystery was a source of wonder and terror alike. As Frederick R. Prete remarks in a survey of English bee books, “Beginning in 1609, discoveries came to light that seemed to challenge the very idea of an orderly universe. As the century wore on, an increasing number of seemingly anomalous discoveries about honey bees forced the authors of beekeeping texts to

BotelhoV1-final.indb 122

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Bee

|

123

deny or distort scientific findings in order to continue to use the honey bee as a metaphor for the ideal English society; some authors continued to do so, however, going to fantastic explanatory extremes, until the sheer weight of scientific evidence to the contrary could no longer be denied.”39 How dangerous—in fact, as threatening as swallow, hornet, or wasp—were the alluring analogies constructed around bee, honey, drone, swarm, hive, and wax. Every exemplary moment of order carried with it a shadow, and perhaps no shadow was greater than that of sex. In smallest things are the greatest mysteries and rewards, or so the lovers of bees have always thought. In fact, bees became sovereign creatures in an age inclined to think with animals of all varieties. The bee has always been, and continues to be, the charismatic beast. Whether we speak of mega- or microfauna, it is the bee to which we continually return to make sense of what is human and what is natural experience even as we try to understand these little wonders. From Aristotle’s Historia Animalium to the present day, writers have been fascinated by bee society, praising its organization and diligence as a model for humans. Our own modern affinity for bees seems to come from our renewed attention to this creature in light of colony collapse disorder, which has made news headlines around the world. But bees have always had charms; one only has to look to ancient Greece, where we learn that Aristaeus, a beekeeper, wept when he discovered his bees had died. Today there has been a renaissance of bees marked by a recognition of their work as a central pollinator of the human food supply. In truth, twenty-first-century humans have become attuned to the bee once again only because they must grapple with what the bees’ absence might mean to their futures. The real and imagined potency of the bee—steeped in history as a sacred beast—has elevated it as a sovereign creature. As Clare Preston has articulated, the wonder, mystery, and mythology of the bee have allowed it to stand “as an emblem of man’s relation to nature and to himself.”40 Humans will continue to overlook the sting to partake in the bee’s sweetness and light. This tiny wonder’s pull on our collective imaginations remains as undeniable now as it was in the great age of early modern bee writing, an age in which tiny wonders were big news, making writers like Moffett, Butler, and Rusden tower, not to mention Southerne, Levett, Remnant, Hartlib, Markham, Worlidge, Gedde, and Rusden, who alike seem to swarm and multiply even centuries after their hives went quiet.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 123

11/9/22 1:36 PM

124

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Notes 1. Rusden, Further Discovery of Bees, 14. 2. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 893. 3. Shakespeare, Henry V, in Norton Shakespeare, 1.2.190–93. Subsequent references to Shakespeare’s plays are from Norton Shakespeare and are cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number. For more on Canterbury’s speech and its relation to issues of labor and order, see Grinnell, “Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees.” 4. Worlidge, Apiarium, A2r. 5. Ibid., A2v. 6. Southerne, Treatise, A4v. 7. See Crane, World History of Beekeeping. 8. See Southerne, Treatise; Butler, Feminine Monarchie; Levett, Ordering of Bees; Remnant, Discourse or History of Bees; Day, Parliament of Bees; Hart lib, Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees; Markham, Cheap and Good Husbandry; Worlidge, Apiarium; Gedde, New Discovery; and Rusden, Further Discovery of Bees. 9. Worlidge, Apiarium, A2v. 10. Butler, Feminine Monarchie, H4r. 11. Ibid., I1v. 12. Ibid., H7r. 13. Rusden, Further Discovery of Bees, 8. 14. Remnant, Discourse or History of Bees, 11; Moffett, Theater of Insects, 901. 15. On Butler’s musical legacy there has been little comment. See Hayes, “Charles Butler”; and Pruett, “Charles Butler—Musician, Grammarian, Apiarist.” 16. Hayes, “Charles Butler,” 513. 17. See Choir of Little Saint Mary’s, “Melissomelos, or the Bees Madrigal.”

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

The Leverhulme Trust has also recently awarded a major research grant to Jennifer Richards (Newcastle University) for a project called “Bee-ing Human: An Interactive Bee Book for the Twenty-First Century” to create a digital edition of Charles Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie, one that draws from interdisciplinary research in the arts, sciences, and humanities and also accounts for his expertise in both entomology and music. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 895. Rusden, Further Discovery of Bees, A5r. T. R., Short Treatise, 1.50. Rusden, Further Discovery of Bees, 9. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 895. Worlidge, Apiarium, 14. Levett, Ordering of Bees, 16–17. Markham, Cheap and Good Husbandry, 139. Hawkins, Partheneia Sacra, 70. Browne, Hydriotaphia, 143. Moore and Kosut, Buzz, 140. Virgil, Georgics, 4.200–203. Ibid., 4.205. Worlidge, Apiarium, B3r. Remnant, Discourse or History of Bees, 2. Rusden, Further Discovery of Bees, 39. Ibid., 38. Remnant, Discourse or History of Bees, 39. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 5.4.36. Ibid., 5.5.25. Purchas, Theatre of Politicall FlyingInsects, 43. Prete, “Can Females Rule the Hive?,” 117. Preston, Bee, 8.

Bibliography Browne, Thomas. Hydriotaphia, UrneBurial. London, 1658. Butler, Charles. The Feminine Monarchie. London, 1609.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 124

Choir of Little Saint Mary’s. “Melissomelos, or the Bees Madrigal,” by Charles Butler, directed by Simon Jackson. Eastwood Records, February 21,

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Bee 2017, YouTube video. https://youtu.be /p2eonteQEps. Crane, Eva. The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting. New York: Routledge, 1999. Day, John. The Parliament of Bees, with Their Proper Characters. London, 1641. Gedde, John. A New Discovery of an Excellent Method of Bee-House, and Colonies. London, 1677. Grinnell, Richard. “Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23, no. 4 (November 2016): 835–54. Hartlib, Samuel. The Reformed CommonWealth of Bees. London, 1655. Hawkins, Henry. Partheneia Sacra, or, The Mysterious and Delicious Garden of the Sacred Parthenes. Rouen, 1633. Hayes, Gerald R. “Charles Butler and the Music of Bees.” Musical Times 66, no. 988 (June 1, 1925): 512–15. Levett, John. The Ordering of Bees. London, 1634. Markham, Gervase. Cheap and Good Husbandry for the Well- Ordering of All Beasts. London, 1668. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Moore, Lisa Jean, and Mary Kosut. Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. New York: New York University Press, 2013. Preston, Claire. Bee. London: Reaktion, 2006.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 125

|

125

Prete, Frederick R. “Can Females Rule the Hive? The Controversy over Honey Bee Gender Roles in British Beekeeping Texts of the Sixteenth–Eighteenth Centuries.” Journal of the History of Biology 24, no. 1 (1991): 113–44. Pruett, James. “Charles Butler—Musician, Grammarian, Apiarist.” Musical Quarterly 49, no. 4 (October 1963): 498–509. Purchas, Samuel. A Theater of Politicall Flying-Insects. London, 1657. Remnant, Richard. A Discourse or History of Bees. London, 1637. Rusden, Moses. A Further Discovery of Bees. London, 1679. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus. New York: Norton, 1997. Southerne, Edmund. A Treatise Concerning the Right Ordering of Bees. London, 1593. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by A. C. Hamilton. New York: Longman, 1999. T. R. A Short Treatise on the Excellency of Bees. London, 1681. Virgil. Georgics. In Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid 1–6, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Worlidge, John. Apiarium; or a Discourse of Bees. London, 1676.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 8

WASP What Is It Like to Be Like a Wasp?

Donovan Sherman

I begin by offering a twist on an archetypal literary scene. Early in the Aeneid, Aeneas and Achates, disguised in mist, perch on a rocky promontory to witness the construction of Carthage. The “eager men” they view at work have clear striations of labor: “some build the city walls or citadel” while others “select the place for a new dwelling, marking out its limits with a furrow”; others still “make laws, / establish judges in a sacred senate; some excavate a harbor; others lay the deep foundations for a theater.”1 A potent analogy invites itself: because the workers each have their own task and defining specialty that operates in perfect concert with the others, and because these differences complement each other perfectly to cohere into the identity of the city-state, they resemble a vibrant nest of wasps. Virgil’s famous epic simile, of course, compares the workers to bees, the noble insects that the poet turned to elsewhere—most notably in the Georgics—to commemorate a sense of order. Virgil loved the bees and the Renaissance loved Virgil, and the “commonwealth of the bees” (whose origins also include Aristotle, Pliny, Columella, and other classical sources) became a stubbornly useful topos across countless works of poetry, politics, and drama.2 Along with acting as a model of social order, the tidily organized bee society also evoked proper humanist

BotelhoV1-final.indb 126

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp

|

127

pedagogy. As Montaigne suggests, just as the bee synthesizes pollen into something new—honey—so too should the schoolchild “transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the end product is entirely his: namely, his judgement, the forming of which is the only aim of his toil, his study and his education.”3 This sentiment comprises a foundational tenet of the modern liberal arts education, and its formula rehearses within the self the mechanics of the polis: from the labor of disparate parts emerges the singular structure of identity.4 But why must the commonwealth be one of bees? Why does it feel wrong to have wasps or hornets exist in an orderly collective? One of the historically defining qualities of the wasp, after all, is that it could easily be mistaken for a bee. This impression arises in sources like Ovid, who in his Fasti has Bacchus discover bees and, with them, the sweet reward of honey, while his foolish companion, Silenus, finds hornets— which he had mistaken for bees—and instead of honey, he gets stung.5 In Piero di Cosimo’s sixteenth-century triptych The Misfortunes of Silenus, the lumpy, unhappy-looking Silenus sprawls in irritation as the insects sting him; the attendant satyrs apply mud to cool his wounds while barely suppressing their mirth. It is tempting to laugh with them but for the indeterminacy of the insects, absent from the image entirely. Would their inclusion in any way justify mocking Silenus? How could they look like anything but bees? We too would reach for the nest in hopeful imitation of our friend, and we too would fall in humiliation. Even if we could afford a close look, we might remain confused. Thomas Hill, author of A Profitable Instruction of the Perfect Ordering of Bees, warns prospective beekeepers that hornets “also have the like creast” as bees, but bees “greatly feare” them, “for that to the hornets the hony Bees are a speciall food.”6 Thomas Moffett, in The Theater of Insects, also frequently describes wasps and hornets in terms of their resemblance to bees. The wasp’s buzz is “also like the Bee,” only louder; they build hexagonally chambered nests “after the fashion of the Bees”; hornets, notes Moffett, are called by some “a yellow bee.”7 And Moffett insists that wasps, like bees, are “political”: “He is a political and flocking or gregal creature, subject to Monarchy, laborious, a lover of his young, and a lover of his neighbor, of a very quarrelsome disposition, and very prone to choler. It is a sign that their life is Political, because they live not solitary, but do build themselves a city eminent for structures, in which they are subject to their set lawes, and do yeeld to them

BotelhoV1-final.indb 127

11/9/22 1:36 PM

128

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

as wel in their external actions, as in affections.”8 Wasps, like Carthaginians, build cities. They are political in the sense that they exist collectively, with laws that dictate their actions and affections. But they are quarrelsome, a point that Moffett returns to repeatedly: wasps and hornets, bee-like though they may appear, exemplify wrath—hence, the hornet’s appearance in the Hebrew Bible, first in Deuteronomy and later in Joshua, as an abnegating agent of God’s anger: “Moreover the Lord will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed” (Deut. 7:20).9 Surely, though, fury alone cannot account for the epistemological barrier between bee and wasp. And yet when Moffett, echoing Hill, notes that the hornets eat “harmlesse Bees,” he is compelled to add that these hapless victims “do so well deserve of the Commonwealth of mankind.”10 The wasps are political and resemble bees, but they cannot stand in for humankind; they lack the representational capacity. In fact, they are often viewed not merely as not-bees but as anti-bees, the commonwealth’s undoing. Their fury, it seems, is a symptom of a deeper resistance to civil life more broadly, as in the perverted wedding masque that closes book 3 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, where the parade of pageantry features the twinned figures of Displeasure and Pleasance— the first, Silenus-like, “looking lumpish and full sullein sad / And hanging downe his heauy countenance”; the second “chearefull fresh and full of ioyance glad, / As if no sorrow she ne felt ne drad.” Each clutches a fitting talisman: Displeasure “An angry Waspe th’one in a vial had,” while Pleasance holds “in hers an hony-lady Bee.”11 Spenser’s verse, itself so capable of dissipating appearances, finds an apt visual metaphor in the dual insects; each seems different in textual description but visually would be more confusing. The two figures would appear to be holding the same thing were it not for the honey. Does the marker of difference, then, exist outside the insect itself, in the metonym of the bees’ sweet production? Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History, a source for Moffett, concedes wasps’ and hornets’ ability to build bee-like nests but warns readers that they are “a barbarous and savage kind of creatures” who are “contrarie to the manner of Bees” because they eat flesh, whereas bees “would not touch a dead carcasse.” Nor do wasps and hornets have “kings or swarms, after the manner of Bees: but yet they repaire their kind and maintaine their race by a new breed and generation.”12

BotelhoV1-final.indb 128

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp

|

129

(Moffett amends this slightly: they have kings but no swarms.) The difference between wasp and bee is distant enough to make them oppositional but proximal enough to cause aesthetic confusion. The issue at hand is the difference of those differences: wasps are similar to bees in appearance but radically dissimilar in character. The interplay of the wasp’s differences and similarities with bees helps us examine more carefully the mechanics of comparison that underpin the bees’ supposedly axiomatic similarity to humans. If the “commonwealth of bees” is a culturally reified ideal, it is one dependent on contradictory analogical impulses. On the one hand, the relations among the bees are enviably organized. On the other, because the bees are much smaller than humans, their model of harmonization is tinged with an acknowledgment of their inferiority. Joseph Campana suggests that this tension of scale creates an uneasy marriage of literary practices. “What is it, exactly,” asks Campana, in reading Samuel Butler’s apian treatise The Feminine Monarch, “to ‘Emulate’ an insect? Moreover, how do analogy, a comparative impulse, and emulation, a mirroring impulse, work in tandem or at cross purposes with human-apian encounters that occur across such scale variance?”13 The question has disciplinary implications. Bee comparisons stay the impulse, so prevalent in animal studies, to dismiss analogy as a method of keeping the actual animal at bay by erecting a lexical cage that maintains the illusion of human separation and dominion.14 Campana’s subtle critique of this line of thinking, made evident by the mingled distance and kinship of the bee, is that “there are things to be learned in the strange proximity between human and nonhuman forms of life especially when that felt proximity must bridge massive differences in size and scale, style and form of life.”15 The bees are like humans but do not resemble them; the wasps resemble bees but are nothing like them. At stake in evoking the wasp is the nature of what it means to be “like” something at all. The word condenses comparison’s dual, occasionally contradictory modes: to be “like” something is to imitate it, but also to acknowledge only a vague semblance, a shared sensation.16 The wasps bring this matter to the fore by inviting individual comparison while repelling attempts to become recruited as symbols of order. One could be wasp-waisted or, as with Shakespeare’s Katherina, angry as a wasp, but there could be no commonwealth of wasps—only the amorphous “nest,” signal of disorder

BotelhoV1-final.indb 129

11/9/22 1:36 PM

130

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

and biblical hint of the polis’s erasure.17 The Renaissance wasp invites analogy as a negation of meaning-making: being like wasps is being not like bees; it is to be outside the limits of relationality at all. Traces of this alterity remain today. In his famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” Thomas Nagel proposes a form of “objective phenomenology” that takes into account the existence of animal consciousness while admitting the impossibility of experiencing it. The bat provides a model case study because it is related to humans by dint of being a mammal, but it can echolocate, an ability that operates outside our comprehension. We can know generally what it’s like to run through the forest like a deer but not remotely what it’s like to use sonar. Nagel explains that he chose “bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all.”18 The “like” required by Nagel stops short when confronting the wasp: one cannot even think it possible to imagine that one was a wasp. The attempt fails out of the gate because the wasps’ otherness strips them of the “faith” needed to suggest experience in the first place. Humans cannot even bother to imagine wasp life, much less project consciousness onto it. This situation is put pithily and wearily by the contemporary entomologist Justin Schmidt: “Nobody cares about wasps.”19 This formula, I believe, would not quite work if Nagel rejected bees; they are too entangled, still, in model projections of human idealism to be discarded, even if their consciousness is, like wasps, radically alien. Everybody cares about bees. And yet, as Campana reminds us, we can’t know what it’s like to be them, even if we might want to be like them. The bees cannot be “like” humans in terms of shared experience, only “like” them in their relations: the laborers each have their appointed task, all working in concert. But those relations have no substance by definition. They are constructed only against each other—the drone isn’t the queen; one type of task differs from the others. Nagel’s failure to imagine what it is like to be a wasp—or even what it is like being like a wasp—suggests that speculation would stumble when faced with the prospect of the bee, even though the bee presents itself as human comparison extraordinaire. If the wasp exposes the fissures that lurk in traditional understandings of analogy, I would argue that it embodies profoundly a subtly different practice, one that acknowledges within its practice an oppositional

BotelhoV1-final.indb 130

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp

|

131

set of comparative modes: mimesis. Aristotle’s own notion of tragic mimesis as an “imitation of an action” gives us, like insect analogy, a process of signification without a clear material referent.20 The Aristotelian sense of action is not synonymous with kinesis but is instead an arrangement of ideas. So tragedy imitates a patterned sequence of ideas made flesh—Oedipus Rex imitates the story of Oedipus, not a stable thing that finds a surrogate or simple reflection on the stage. Furthermore, to think of mimesis as a paradox of (dis)identification is not a modern twist but a hallmark of its emergence on the scene of early modern theater. In Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, the term appears, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for the first time in English, and yet its precise meaning is already muddled: “Poesy is therefore an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight.”21 Sidney offers three definitions, uneasily situated alongside each other. Mimesis is a representation, a standing in for something, but it can also be a counterfeit, a devious fake, or it can be a “figuring forth”—a conjuration. This first set of possible meanings is appended by a hoary metaphor (itself a quasimimetic device, as Sidney seems to acknowledge) that attempts to smooth over the first disjointed attempts at definition: mimesis is a speaking picture, no different from an image except that it can talk. But Sidney also shows us in his attempt to define mimesis that words are themselves mimetic and that these attempts can represent, fake, and figure forth through metaphor or explanation or—as with the final clause of his definition—Horatian platitude. The Renaissance theater was, naturally, a critical testing ground of mimetic theory, a place where aesthetics, idolatry, imitatio, and emulation collided. The theater thus supplies an apt comparison—perhaps even imitation—of the wasp’s own simultaneous counterfeiting and obviating nature. With this in mind, I will trace the ways that the Renaissance wasp mirrors the theater’s representational ambivalence, first with a fanciful-seeming but ultimately, I believe, fruitful connection from one wasp to another, from the Renaissance bee-nemesis to the creature that appears in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In developing their notion of the “rhizome,” a rejection of models of clearly defined metaphysical knowledge, Deleuze and Guattari outline

BotelhoV1-final.indb 131

11/9/22 1:36 PM

132

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

one of its characteristics as the “principle of the asignifying rupture.” In prose that is characteristically both playful and portentous, Deleuze and Guattari expound on an image—one they never actually describe so much as assume as understood, as if they were hesitant, like Sidney, to indulge in the kind of representation they critique—of a wasp poised on an orchid, presumably attracted to its wasp-like shape and, so the reductionist thinking would go, duped into carrying out the orchid’s pollination. But the wasp does not resemble the orchid or vice versa. Instead, “something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.”22 The orchid does not imitate or “transform” into a wasp, and the two do not simply join together with Montaignian elegance to synthesize into something new. Rather, they exchange intensities and “code,” tracing the other within themselves, becoming a multiplicity.23 Later in the book, the idea of “becoming” again defines itself against mere playacting: “Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming an animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not ‘really’ become an animal any more than the animal ‘really’ becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself.”24 This sentiment has become a critical theory and animal studies shibboleth of sorts, but it bears repeating, especially in light of its implications for theatricality: to believe in becomings is to deny the capitalist-like “production” of a character by an actor and instead to have the becoming be its own end. Like the wasp-orchid, becomings try to do away with representation so as to alter, enfold, exchange intensities. The wasp, read this way, signifies asignification without turning into artifice. It is not a fake bee but its own virtual entity. In a startlingly prescient essay that predates A Thousand Plateaus but anticipates its attack on received notions of selfhood and production, Roger Caillois also meditates on the insect’s capacity to resemble other things—flowers, leaves, and, in the case of the Vespa crabo wasp, other insects. Caillois rejects the idea that camouflage aids with survival and instead suggests, gnomically, that the compulsion to resemble results from the “lure of space.”25 The goal of mimicry is to “become assimilated in the environment.”26 Space lures the wasp’s body to become

BotelhoV1-final.indb 132

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp

|

133

assimilated, to be drawn into it; Caillois, like Deleuze and Guattari, links this phenomenon to schizophrenia. The schizophrenic mind that feels outside itself contemplates space so as to attain similitude without diminishment into mere imitation: “For dispossessed minds such as these, space seems to constitute a will to devour. Space chases, entraps, and digests them in a huge process of phagocytosis. Then it ultimately takes their place. The body and mind thereupon become dissociated; the subject crosses the boundary of his own skin and stands outside his senses. He tries to see himself, from some point in space. He feels that he is turning into space himself—dark space into which things cannot be put. He is similar; not similar to anything in particular, but simply similar.”27 What begins as a simple question—Why do insects imitate other things?— leads to a consideration of how schizophrenics, like the imitating insect, feel pulled outside themselves. Caillois rejects a practice of mimesis in which a surrogate stands in for something. Instead, he thinks through the compulsion to imitate as it originates on the border of selfhood. The lure of space draws out the mind and offers the possibility of becoming something other than itself. What it ends up becoming is pure similarity: it is the act of seeming, like the wasp-orchid is becoming without becoming something. How, though, can you be a double of something that doesn’t exist? One possible answer arrives from Antonin Artaud, whose manifesto The Theater and Its Double proposes its titular double to be one without form. His theater is an imitation not of an action but of a force it cannot contain: “Every real effigy has a shadow which is its double; and art must falter and fail from the moment the sculptor believes he has liberated the kind of shadow whose very existence will destroy his repose.”28 A “real” effigy, it would appear, is one that is both stand-in and authentic, one whose double can never be known. Artaud’s theater, like Caillois’s camouflaged insect and Deleuze and Guattari’s wasp-orchid, doubles but does not surrogate; it imitates but breaks the capacity to represent.29 I have taken a detour through these decidedly non-Renaissance thinkers because I believe they give us both a way out of reducing the Renaissance wasp to the fake anti-bee and a language with which to explore the wasp’s complex dance of imitation and nonmeaning. Representations of wasps in the Renaissance allow for an analysis of how these complexities of likeness play out in practice. I believe, however, keeping in mind Campana’s reminder of the bees’ capacity to incite

BotelhoV1-final.indb 133

11/9/22 1:36 PM

134

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

kinship through analogy, that the wasps’ seeming fakeness can still carry an affective trace of connection rather than signal a failure to stand in properly for something else. An exemplary case of the wasp’s appearance, of sorts, on the Renaissance stage is the character of Wasp in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, which I consider very briefly by way of a conclusion. Jonson’s Wasp draws on New Comic and commedia traditions and, as such, emblematizes the associations of the wasp popular in the era— its wrath, yes, but also its confounding mimetic properties. It is admittedly tempting to conclude that an analysis of Wasp is simply a closed circuit of human-authored significations far removed from actual insects: Jonson represents anthropomorphized, allegorical versions of “wasp,” while wasps remain exiled from the textual garden. In Jacques Derrida’s influential formula, Wasp is more animot than animal, more named and contained construct than sentient being.30 But to level this charge is to ignore the capaciousness of comparison that the wasp suggests. Approximation of material form is not coextensive with likeness, and likeness produced through analogy can still engender connection, even kinship. Furthermore, imitation need not only be imitation of, but simply imitation, semblance itself, an exchange of desires to be outside the self. Jonson’s play is an especially apposite site because of the author’s own obsession with entangling the theater’s mimetic capacities—its ability to represent, fake, and figure forth; its aura of authenticity and nagging sense of being a reflection of something we cannot see. Being “like” a wasp, as Wasp is, might invite a more generous understanding of the play than thinking of the ways he cannot “be” a wasp. Bartholomew Fair is a play of noncorrespondences, and its induction, a delay of the proper beginning that fills time while a costume is supposedly fi xed, signals its lack of correspondence with itself. The play we are seeing pretends not to be the play, at least not yet. The beleaguered Scrivener warns the audience against finding meaning in what will follow: “It is finally agreed by the foresaid hearers and spectators that they neither in themselves conceal, nor suffer by them to be concealed, any state-decipherer or politic picklock of the scene so solemnly ridiculous as to search out who was meant by the gingerbread woman, who by the hobbyhorse man, who by the costermonger, nay, who by their wares.”31 The induction’s twofold purpose is to distance the stage’s representational capacity while authenticating the theatrical

BotelhoV1-final.indb 134

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp

|

135

experience. It cautions against the theater’s enchantments but depends on verisimilitude in representing the stage qua stage. This quintessentially Jonsonian ability to mobilize contradictory properties of the stage mirrors the Scrivener’s message: you need to believe in the reality that we fabricate without attempting to think of specific people who are represented by this reality. Like Sidney’s mimetic act, they both counterfeit and bring into being; they are not simply stand-ins for others. When characters in the play engage in the kind of behavior cautioned against by the Scrivener, they end up lampooned for it, as with the puritanical Busy, who creates a biblical blazon of the fair’s supposedly sinful wares. Thus, the drum is “the broken belly of the Beast,” and “thy bellows there are his lungs, and these pipes are his throat, those feathers are his tail, and thy rattles the gnashing of his teeth,” while the gingerbread is “the provender that pricks him up.” The basket of gingerbread, it follows, is “thy nest of images, and whole legend of gingerwork!” (3.6.68–74). It is no small irony that the play’s most antitheatrical character is adept at creating theater, lining up each element of his surroundings with its corresponding image like he was casting a masque. Others similarly play with comparison to flummoxing effect; Quarlous, faced with a furious Ursla, reads her increasingly fervent comparisons as an index to her energy: “I know she cannot last long; I find by her similes she wanes apace” (2.5.132–34). Closer to heeding the Scrivener’s warning is Overdo, who, when viewing Ursla for the first time, exclaims, “This is the very womb and bed of enormity! Gross as herself!” (2.2.109–10). Ursla can be compared only to herself, not another figure; she does not stand for something other than her own enormity. The hive of activity in the fair that these figures comprise is already an unsteady commonwealth, one lacking the beehive’s capacity to export its allegorical worth.32 The fair, like Ursla, stands only for itself, and Jonson threads this awareness of theatrical failure and fulfillment throughout. Wasp is right at home in this setting. He portrays his namesake’s characteristic fury but also its characteristic repudiation of analogy.33 When he spitefully wishes that Cokes were caught in the stocks so that Wasp could wait until “the wonder were off from you,” he betrays his desire to scrape away illusions (5.4.201). This is not simply antitheatricality by another name. His compulsive refusals stage a denial of comparison at all, and ironically, as a result of constant differences, he becomes

BotelhoV1-final.indb 135

11/9/22 1:36 PM

136

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

an agent of sameness as he blurs the gradations that allow for metaphor to operate. He is, as Eugene Waith notes, like Cokes, his foolish charge, “but for different reasons,” because “his mind is in such endless motion that there is never time to establish a fi xed center. Instead of embracing all the world he rejects it all, thereby showing no more discrimination than Cokes.”34 When Cokes is robbed, he is frustrated that he cannot determine who looks like a cutpurse. The only figure, Cokes suggests, who truly looks nefarious enough to do the deed is Wasp, who reacts to this news by sputtering that everyone can fill that role: “How? I? I look like a cutpurse? Death! Your sister’s a cutpurse! And your mother and father and all your kin were cutpurses! And here is a rogue is the bawd o’ the cutpurses, whom I will beat to begin with” (2.6.136–47). In an inversion of Busy’s recruitment of the tent’s parts into aspects of the Beast, Wasp makes everyone the same: all potential thieves. Wasp’s retort has the ring of a contemporary insult—Your mother’s a cutpurse!—yet within the theatrical texture of Jonson’s play, his words can be taken literally: anyone could be a cutpurse; anyone could be any role; they all exist in a middling state of being. Illusions could be anywhere, cloaking anyone. As Melinda Gough has noted, though, the play’s repeated cautions against illusion can itself counterintuitively “work a kind of enchantment.”35 Wasp’s turn of “vapours” with the fair’s criminals demonstrates this phenomenon acutely. The game, which consists of disagreeing with anything that came before it, perfectly suits itself to Wasp, who, as he has it, says “nay” to “anything, whatsoever it is, so long as I do not like it” (4.4.30–32). This constant negation leaves the ward without any rationality at all. “I have no reason,” he reports, “nor I will hear of no reason, nor I will look for no reason, and he is an ass that either know any or looks for ’t from me” (4.4.42–44). A loss of reason blurs into a loss of self, as he continues: “I am not i’ the right, nor never was i’ the right, nor never will be i’ the right, while I am in my right mind” (4.4.70–72). His wasp-like fury makes him prone to argument, but his wasp-like rejections prompt an affective mode of behavior that transcends a simple denial of artifice. The act of totalizing rejection, in the vapours game, becomes deeply seductive—and in Edgworth’s retelling, practically hallucinogenic. Wasp is so taken that “you may strip him of his clothes if you will. I’ll undertake to geld him for you, if you had but a surgeon ready to sear him” (4.3.116). The threat of nakedness and castration literalizes the constant elimination of difference

BotelhoV1-final.indb 136

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp

|

137

that Wasp promises, turning it inward to reduce him to the “halting neutral,” as Busy calls him as he escapes the stocks (4.6.111). Edgworth’s description also predicts the play’s most notorious instance of revealed sameness, at the puppet show, where the puppet Dionysus cures Busy of his pathological puritanism by lifting its skirt to reveal the nothingness underneath. The hermaphroditic nightmare Busy anticipated becomes reflected back to him as a Pauline ideal of bodily irrelevance.36 Dionysus exclaims that “we have neither male nor female amongst us. And that thou mayst see, if thou wilt, like a malicious purblind zeal as thou art!” (5.5.102–4). This revelation follows a brief reappearance of the vapours’ patterned speech, as puppet and Puritan repeat the childish retorts of “It is not profane” and “It is profane,” rehearsed at length so as, Wasp-like, to create a rhythmic buzzing bereft of clear content, thus conflating absolute difference with absolute sameness. The increasingly porous borders between representation, counterfeit, and figuring forth—Sidney’s tripartite diagnosis of mimesis—collapse at the play’s end in a scene that comprises the innermost concentric circle in the play’s tightening orbit from home to fair to tent to stage to skirt. Jonson taunts his audience with the possibility of comparison: stock figure stands in for person, disguise for disguised, temptation for sin, puppet for subject. But by scrambling these codes and having none quite line up to its supposed comparison—by denying a bee-like division of meaning that allows for pliable identification—he has not simply done away with analogy altogether. Instead, like a wasp and like Wasp, he has conjured the appearance of the bee (a structured set of semblances) in order to reveal the contradictions and complexities that undergird comparison itself. The puppets, like the bees, confront us with what allegorical idealism looks like when miniaturized: both tragically small and awe inspiring, somehow deeply inhuman and utterly humane, the pinnacle and failure of likeness. It is telling, then, that Wasp is a teacher. His name could plausibly conjure, for the play’s early modern audience, its spiritual opposite and material surrogate, the bee, Montaigne’s ideal gatherer of knowledge. But the education that Wasp effects is not one of making honey through the sublime alchemy of example and theory—a method perfected by Moffett, whose own apian work purported to stand in perfectly for the subjects it studied—but instead by denying synthesis at all. His instruction ultimately honors the mimetic stage, though, rather than offering

BotelhoV1-final.indb 137

11/9/22 1:36 PM

138

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

its total rejection. Or, rather, it reveals difference to already be at the root of similitude and sameness. The same angry insistence on difference that Wasp embodies is the same difference, as observed by Aeneas and Achates, that allows for comparative tropes like the commonwealth of bees to take place at all; the wasp materializes the labor of comparison elided by the commonwealth. What Jonson’s Wasp helps us understand, and what his namesake exemplifies, is how the theater mobilizes the complex filiations and disassociations of animal comparison by laying bare what lyrical description can artfully disguise. His stage models a process by which difference is performed not as a denial of enmeshment but as a constituent element of it. Notes 1. Virgil, Aeneid, 2.601–8. 2. Perhaps the most famous instance of the commonwealth of bees in Renaissance literature occurs in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, where the bishop of Canterbury attempts to justify England’s invasion of France (and conveniently delay or erase a decision on the Crown’s possession of church property) via an expertly deployed classical imitatio (1.2.187– 204). Other influential citations of the “commonwealth of bees” include Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governour, Thomas More’s Utopia, and John Milton’s dizzying description of the demons in Paradise Lost (1.768–76). 3. Montaigne, “On Educating Children,” 171. 4. This pedagogical imagery has been in the spotlight lately because of the theory proffered by George Koppelman and Daniel Wechsler, book collectors who believe they have discovered a version of John Baret’s Alvearie (1580) owned by Shakespeare. The Alvearie is a compilation of knowledge and definitions modeled after the perception of the bees’ collecting practices; Koppelman and Wechler’s project is titled, appropriately, Shakespeare’s

BotelhoV1-final.indb 138

5.

6. 7. 8. 9.

Beehive. For an even-handed academic response to their work, see Witmore and Wolfe, “Buzz or Honey?” For a pedagogical appropriation of the Renaissance bee’s “learning” that feels quite new and radical, see Stallybrass, “Against Thinking.” Ovid, Ovids Festivals, 67–68. Ovid suggests that Silenus’s fate is part of a cruel joke by Bacchus, who has sealed up the bees in an elm tree; their buzzing lures Silenus to the tree, but he reaches into a hollow containing the hornets. Hill, Profitable Instruction, 11. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 921, 922, 927. Ibid., 921. The Puritan preacher Henry Smith gives us an invocation of the Renaissance wasp’s fury as nonanalogy of divine justice: “God is not like a Wasp, which when she has stung cannot sting again; but there is a generation of crosses and a plurality of troubles” (“Trial of the Righteous,” 203). This is a difference of degree, not kind; God is more like a wasp than a bee because he can exact vengeance multiple times. (In fact, there seemed to be dispute about the number of times a wasp could sting; some sources suggest that

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

wasps can refresh their sting’s toxicity by stinging a snake.) Moffett, Theater of Insects, 925. Spenser, Faerie Queene, 12.18. Pliny, Historie of the World, 322. Campana, “Bee and the Sovereign,” 100. It would be impossible to list a comprehensive syllabus of readings in critical animal studies. For what may be considered paradigmatic overviews, see Wolfe, Zoontologies; Derrida, Animal That Therefore I Am; and Haraway, When Species Meet. Wolfe effectively epitomizes the strategy that Campana identifies (and that the figure of the bee challenges) when he notes, in his preface to Zoontologies, the mythology of the “tidy divisions between humans and nonhumans” (xi). For a recent extreme example of attempting to fi nd similarities and interconnectedness among animals and humans, see Foster, Being a Beast. Bee imagery, by contrast, revels in obvious difference as, paradoxically, a means of inviting comparison. Campana, “Bee and the Sovereign,” 107. In a curious instance of a Renaissance wasp itself being wasplike, Joris Hoefnagel’s illuminated illustration for the 1561 Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta by Bocskay includes a depiction (folio 11) of an insect that resembles a wasp in its shape but bears no resemblance to a known wasp species. For an analysis of the implications of this “wasplike” being, see Neri, Insect and the Image, 17–22. See Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.211–16, where Katherina amends the wasp metaphor from one of anger to the threat of stinging Petruchio. Nagel, “What Is It Like,” 438. For a reading of Nagel’s essay that places it within the field of object-oriented

BotelhoV1-final.indb 139

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

|

139

ontology, see Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 62–64. Quoted in Steinberg, “The King of Pain.” Aristotle, Poetics, 6.25. Sidney, “Defence of Poesy,” 217. There is, in fact, an earlier occurrence of mimesis in the Oxford English Dictionary, but with a slightly different meaning. In rhetoric, mimesis was an imitation “of another’s words, mannerisms, actions, etc.” as a means of persuasion; the first recorded instance is from Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes in 1550. But Sidney’s is the first instance on record that defines mimesis in terms of its artistic capacities. For a foundational study of the form, see Auerbach, Mimesis. For a feminist critique of mimesis as both oppressive by nature and capable, in its undoing, of becoming a feminist medium, see Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 10. For compelling critiques of this notion as reinscribing the very sense of sublime idealism it purports to critique, see Haraway, When Species Meet, 27–35; for an assessment of Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that the wasp and orchid remain separate, see Weinstone, Avatar Bodies, 79–82. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 238. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 99. Ibid., 98, italics in original. Ibid., 100. Artaud, Theater and Its Double, 12. In a recent provocative essay, Anthony Kubiak suggests that the Artaudian belief in doubling without formation, of embodiment that rejects clear imitation, is nearly transhistorical: it stretches back to the earliest known representations of humankind, the

11/9/22 1:36 PM

140

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

cave at Lascaux, and forward to contemporary string theory. Materiality itself, Kubiak muses, might be a projection of “holographic universes with two-dimensional boundaries that ‘project’ three-dimensional space (onto or into what is not clear). In such universes, what is seen is merely one form of what is or might be, a kind of polymorphous projection of the stuff of the real—not unlike theatre” (“Cave mentem,” 119). 30. Derrida describes the tension between the given names of animals and the potentially unknowable (through language) being of the animal in the beautiful précis of Walter Benjamin: animals are “born out of and by means of the wound without a name: that of having been given a name” (Animal That Therefore I Am, 19). 31. Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, “Induction,” 138–44. Subsequent references to Bartholomew Fair are cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. 32. The exact nature of the play’s structure is up for debate. Understandably, New Critical interpretations struggled more saliently with this question; see Levin, “Structure of Bartholomew Fair,” which suggests a beehive-like order in the character groupings. Thus, the Cokes and Littlewit ensembles mirror each other: “Both of them are really temporary households (for Cokes, Grace, and Wasp came up from

33.

34. 35.

36.

the country two days ago to stay at the Overdo home, and Busy has been boarding with Littlewit for three days), and their family relationships are so symmetrically arranged that every person in one group has his counterpart in the other” (173). For a reading of Wasp’s angry nature as an embodiment of Satire itself, and furthermore as a reflection of the poetomachia, or war of the theaters, among Jonson and his rivals, see Simons, “Stinging, Barking, Biting, Purging,” 23–24. Waith, introduction to Bartholomew Fair, 12. Gough, “Jonson’s Siren Stage,” 93. G. M. Pinciss, in his essay “Bartholomew Fair and Jonsonian Tolerance,” sees this quality of Wasp as manifesting “the dogmatism of the Renaissance Catholic hierarchy as it might have looked from the Anglican point of view: an administration that combined absolutism with illogicality and mixed matters of faith with irascibility” (349). Pinciss’s compelling reading draws additionally from the covertly Catholic references peppered throughout Cokes’s and Wasp’s speech. For more on the puppet show’s religious significance, see Shuger, “Hypocrites and Puppets”; McAdam, “Puritan Dialectic of Law.”

Bibliography Aristotle. The Poetics. Translated by Hippocrates G. Apostle, Elizabeth A. Dobbs, and Morris A. Parslow. Grinnell, IA: Peripatetic Press, 1990. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard R. Trask.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 140

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. Bocskay, Georg. Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta. Edited by Lee Hendrix and Thea Vignau-Wilberg. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Wasp Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” In The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, translated by Claudine Frank and Camille Naish. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Campana, Joseph. “The Bee and the Sovereign? Political Entomology and the Problem of Scale.” Shakespeare Studies 41 (2013): 94–113. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Diamond, Elin. Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. New York: Routledge, 1997. Foster, Charles. Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016. Gough, Melinda. “Jonson’s Siren Stage.” Studies in Philology 96, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 68–95. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hill, Thomas. A Profitable Instruction of the Perfect Ordering of Bees. London, 1608. Jonson, Ben. Bartholomew Fair. Edited by Suzanne Gossett. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. Koppelman, George, and Daniel Wechsler. Shakespeare’s Beehive. New York: Axletree Books, 2014. Kubiak, Anthony. “Cave mentem: Disease and the Performance of Mind.” TDR: The Drama Review 59, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 114–28. Levin, Richard. “The Structure of Bartholomew Fair.” PMLA 80, no. 3 (June 1965): 172–79.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 141

|

141

McAdam, Ian. “The Puritan Dialectic of Law and Grace in Bartholomew Fair.” SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900 46, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 415–33. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Montaigne, Michel de. “On Educating Children.” In The Complete Essays, translated by M. A. Screech. New York: Penguin, 2003. Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (October 1974): 435–50. Neri, Janice. The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Ovid. Ovids Festivals, or Romane Calendar. Translated by John Gower. Cambridge, 1640. Pinciss, G. M. “Bartholomew Fair and Jonsonian Tolerance.” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 35, no. 2 (1995): 345–59. Pliny, The Historie of the World, vol. 1. Translated by Philemon Holland. London, 1603. Shakespeare, William. 1 Henry IV. Edited by David Scott Kastan. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2002. ———. The Taming of the Shrew. Edited by Barbara Hodgdon. New York: Bloomsbury, 2010. Shuger, Debora. “Hypocrites and Puppets in Bartholomew Fair.” Modern Philology 82, no. 1 (August 1984): 70–73. Sidney, Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” In Sir Philip Sidney: The Major Works, edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Simons, Jay. “Stinging, Barking, Biting, Purging: Jonson’s Bartholomew

11/9/22 1:36 PM

142

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Fair and the Debate on Satire in the Poetomachia.” Ben Jonson Journal 20, no. 1 (2013): 20–37. Smith, Henry. “The Trial of the Righteous.” In The Sermons of Mr. Henry Smith. London, 1675. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by Thomas P. Roche Jr. New York: Penguin, 1978. Stallybrass, Peter. “Against Th inking.” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1580–87. Steinberg, Avi. “The King of Pain.” New York Times Magazine, August 21, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21 /magazine/the-connoisseur-of-pain .html. Virgil. The Aeneid of Virgil. Translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 142

Waith, Eugene. Introduction to Bartholomew Fair, by Ben Jonson. Edited by Eugene Waith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Weinstone, Ann. Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Witmore, Michael, and Heather Wolfe. “Buzz or Honey? Shakespeare’s Beehive Raises Questions.” In The Collation: A Gathering of Scholarship from the Folger Shakespeare Library, April 21, 2014, http:// collation.folger.edu/2014/04/buzz-or -honey-shakespeares-beehive-raises -questions/. Wolfe, Cary, ed. Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 9

BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS Volatile Creatures and Elaborate Work

Chris Barrett

If Thomas Moffett is to be believed, the butterfly has a ghastly history of violence. What seems like a delightful, fragile creature seems to have played an outsized role in a number of bloody events. Moffett pointedly notes that “an army of Butterflies flying in Troops in the air, in the year 1104 . . . hid the light of the Sun like a cloud,” and in 1553, “an infinite Army of Butterflies flew through great part of Germany, and did infect the grasse, herbs, trees, houses and garments of men with bloudy drops, as though it had rained bloud.”1 This all might be horrific enough, but Moffett’s collation of classical and traditional authorities on the topic of the butterfly suggests other unsettling qualities. His reflections in “Of the Use of Butterflies,” for example, list some medicinal uses of butterfly components, but then ominously warns that “they are not only for a remedy for us, but may do us much hurt, being inwardly taken in too great a quantity, as being poison.” Indeed, Moffett lists some antidotes for cases of butterfly poisoning, as well as techniques for keeping away the more troubling moths. Even Moffett’s celebration of the butterfly’s aesthetic marvelousness reads partly as a threat: “But yet O man if thou shouldest exceed all men, thou canst not equall a Butterfly. . . . God that is best and greatest of all, made the butterfly to pull down thy pride” (974).

BotelhoV1-final.indb 143

11/9/22 1:36 PM

144

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Readers might find this account of the butterfly unusually alarming, in ways not really offset by the chapter’s supple sumptuousness and gleeful copiousness. Moffett’s butterflies and moths seem somehow altered in their description and historical cameos, made bigger pests and more dangerous foes than one might expect. This revision of these creatures’ profile points to perhaps the most important quality of the butterfly and moth in early modern letters: the association of these familiar, often gorgeous gossamer-winged creatures with narrative innovation and experiment. Whether structuring an intricately patterned classificatory schema or palimpsestically compiling tales of these creatures from antiquity to the recent past, Moffett’s entry reminds readers that the work of storytelling has never been far from the metamorphosing bodies of butterfly and moth. Indeed, the butterfly and moth seem to require a kind of story-retelling, a mobilization against the perfection and thus stagnation of their description. Given that moths and butterflies tend to revise their bodies, from creeping caterpillar to winged creature, it might not be so surprising that Moffett’s butterflies and moths do quite a bit of rewriting. Moffett’s butterfly entry begins with a survey of the numerous, etymologically diverse, remarkably dissimilar names for moths and butterflies in different languages, before remarking, “The Butterfly is a volatile Insect” (957–75). The sense of “volatile” here is no doubt that of being capable of flight, the same sense with which Francis Bacon declared in Sylva Silvarum that “the Catterpiller toward the End of Summer waxeth Volatile, and turneth to a Butterflie, or perhaps some other Fly.” Even so, the volatility of this particular lesser creature might anticipate the sense the Oxford English Dictionary traces to the early 1660s: “Evanescent, transient; readily vanishing or disappearing; difficult to seize, retain, or fi x permanently.”2 The butterflies and moths jostling their rustling wings in the crowded pages of The Theater of Insects do indeed seem quite difficult to seize, retain, or fi x permanently, and not just because of the flutteringly discontinuous motion of their flight. Rather, these creatures resist even overtly taxonomic descriptive efforts, demanding revision, reimagination, and rewriting at every turn. The first page of their treatment in Moffett’s compilation demands, in fact, that Pliny’s accounts of the butterfly’s association with spring, along with Aristotle’s attribution of the butterfly’s color to its antecedent worm’s color, be adjusted. In providing the “Descriptions and Histories”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 144

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Butterflies and Moths

|

145

that will revise these authorities appropriately, Moffett’s text offers routine figures of rhetorical rewriting (958): the subjunctive comparison that rewrites the subject as what it counterfactually resembles (“the ridge of the back is drest up as it were with five black heads of Gilliflowers” reads the description of one rare butterfly’s appearance on p. 965); the representation of difference by way of substitution, which revises the subject by revising a specific element (describing one specimen with reference to the preceding, the text asks the reader to imagine “where you see the color white, there suppose it yellow” [968]); and the associative relocation of descriptive energy by way of the simile, by which the text rewrites the subject by appropriating other phenomena (as in the text’s treatment of one butterfly’s iridescence: “for in the uttermost part of the wings, as it were four Adamants glistering in a beazil of Hyacinth, do shew wonderful rich, yea almost dazle the Hyacinth and Adamant themselves; for they shine curiously like stars, and do cast about them sparks of the colour of the Rain-bow” [968]). In each case, apprehending the butterfly means accepting that it cannot be fully apprehended or seized. This energy is at once elusive and generative, assailing lepidopteran lore while unleashing a torrent of creatures in a wild taxonomy that begins binaristically (instead of moths and butterflies, Moffett divides the realm of butterflies into night-flying and day-flying kinds) but swift ly devolves into sets of numbered lists only lightly connected to frequent illustrations. Those illustrations themselves highlight the volatile unfi xity of these creatures: sometimes they supply an image only of the butterfly or moth with wings spread, sometimes they supply a matched set of spread-wing and under-wing images, and sometimes they introduce an image of the caterpillar whence the mature insect springs. Flitting away from capture, the butterflies nudge the blocks of Moffett’s text into increasingly chaotic shapes and sometimes overtake the whole of the page. Their irrepressible, unpredictable movements require a willingness to reimagine and revise their shape—and even a willingness to reimagine the disposition of the book. The tiptoeing and fluttering of the butterflies along the margins of the pages approximate the unpredictable flight of the insect and suggest that the image of the butterfly—even an enumerated and carefully described specimen— proves difficult to pin down. The illustrations involve a literal re-vision: here wings aloft, there grub in semicircle, now wings folded.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 145

11/9/22 1:36 PM

146

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

The need to re-see each butterfly to assemble its identity performs a re-visioning that comes to resemble revision. Amid this riot of butterflies whose seemingly epic catalog overtakes the chapter, Moffett makes clear that this creature exists only by rewriting. Mocking the ancient association of the butterfly with the soul, the text attributes it dismissively to “some silly people in old time [who] did fancy that the souls of the dead did fly about in the night seeking light.”3 Yet among those “silly people” must be Ovid, who in the fifteenth book of Metamorphoses adduces the resurrective quality of butterflies by way of licensing the other metamorphoses of the poem: “And grubs, as country folk / Observe, whose white cocoons are wrapped in leaves, / Emerge as butterflies that grace a grave.”4 And it is Ovid whose account of the butterfly gets unwritten by Edmund Spenser in the Renaissance’s most spectacular poem on the butterfly, the mock-epic “Muiopotmos.” Premised on the adequation of butterfly and soul, this sly poem attends to the revisory force of the butterfly, making it an emblem of elaboration. If the title page of the 1658 Theater of Insects describes the text as “a most Elaborate Work,” whose complex compilation might find its insectoid allegorical avatar in what it describes as the butterfl ies’ “elaborate composition of their futures and joynts and the imbroidered work here and there, of fine divers coloured twine silk set with studs and eyes of gold and silver,” the phrase “a most Elaborate Work” might just as aptly describe the labor of rewriting the butterfly. Spenser’s poem— published in 1591 in Complaints, just under twenty years after he graduated from Cambridge with school friend Moffett and eight years before Moffett’s publication of his lightly mock-heroic The Silkewormes, and Their Flies—celebrates the refusal of the butterfly to observe (in its own life cycle or in its literary invocation) a fixedness.5 Instead, the butterfly, a driver of urgent descriptive experimentation, flaps its wings like the bending hinge of generic and formal innovation. Flying into view at the sites of the poem’s most overt confrontations with linearity, intertextuality, and epic time, the butterfly of Spenser’s “Muiopotmos” champions the restless, relentless work of elaborating something new from something old. Moffett’s butterflies and moths, like Spenser’s lepidopteran hero Clarion, refuse to be anything but new always, as insistent on the priority of their reincarnation as Moffett’s posthumous Theater of Insects. Indeed, butterflies and moths tend to rewrite the texts in which they appear, leveraging their reduplicative, iterative quality to stage the labor of re-presentation itself.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 146

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Butterflies and Moths

|

147

Spenser’s 440-line poem “Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterfly,” from Complaints, follows the misadventurous flight of the butterfly Clarion into the webby gloaming of his arachnid foe Aragnoll.6 As slight-seeming as the gossamer threads of spider silk, the poem is often described as a beast fable, as a diverting Ovidian toy, as a genial epyllion, but this butterfly tale is widely understood to be a reinstantiation of an anterior text. Whether Clarion’s high-flying brilliance and untimely end allegorize the colorful life and premature death of Philip Sidney, or whether the butterfly’s adventures indistinctly but perceptibly echo the vicissitudes of fate and will in Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” Spenser’s poem always seems to be about something else, its central insectoid hero always already a redefinition of a predecessor.7 The poem meditates on an uncertain but imminent antecedent, frustrating the same decoding effort its elusive allusiveness invites.8 In the poem, Clarion darts in the various light, his wings beating in a propulsive ottava rima (the same meter of Moffett’s Silkwormes).9 If Moffett remarks the speed of some butterflies (of one, for example, he observes, “these kindes of Butterflies are wonderfull swift, and dare for flight to contend with the Eagle” [972]), Spenser similarly notes Clarion’s playful darting: . . . so swift and nimble was of flight, That from this lower tract he dar’d to stie Vp to the clowdes, and thence with pineons light, To mount aloft vnto the Christall skie, To vew the workmanship of heauens hight.10 And, alas, Clarion’s “violent swift Flight” carries him into Aragnoll’s web (line 422). Yet Clarion’s flight flits not just on the deictic breezes of the poem’s summer day but deep into literary time too. The chief set pieces of Spenser’s poem depend on Homeric and Ovidian intertexts— intertexts the poem strikingly rewrites. The description and fate of this butterfly hero depend on the revision of earlier butterflies. Consider the moment, early in the poem, when the intrepid Clarion prepares himself for a day spent tripping the sunlight fantastic in mountain, stream, and field. He puts on his armor in a passage as delightful as it is allusive. Affectionately rehearsing and deflating this conventional scene from epic, the poem compresses major works of classical antiquity into brief allusions and analogies, sometimes as short as a single line.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 147

11/9/22 1:36 PM

148

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

These citations appear breathlessly, one upon the other. His breastplate is compared to that of Achilles, as described in the Iliad (lines 57–64). His fur coat is like that of Hercules, whose labors are recalled in Hesiod’s Theogony (lines 65–72). His helmet, the poem explains, is of a material different from the Phoenician copper that formed Turnus’s helmet in the Aeneid (lines 73–78). Clarion literally and literarily is dressed—that is, transformed from armorless grub to fully attired gallant butterfly—by comparisons to, and thus hypothetical revisions of, anterior texts. His metamorphosis from caterpillar to winged creature is a direct product of the metamorphic rewriting of these analogue texts. The density of these closely packed references compresses classical reception into the tight, glittering mosaic of butterfly wings, of precisely the sort that conclude this appareling episode. The final elements Clarion dons in this compact episode of swift citations are his wings, the description of which presents the occasion for the story of Clarion’s forebearer, the nymph Astery, whose story Spenser invents for this interlude, richly elaborating (lines 89–144) on a single mention of Astery in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (more on this passage shortly). According to Spenser’s invention, Astery’s butterfly swiftness constituted both her most remarkable trait and the source of her tragic misfortune. Astery, “being nimbler ioynted than the rest, / And more industrious, gathered more” flowers faster than the other envious nymphs (lines 121–22). So fast is she that the stanza describing her speed itself rushes forward, fully half of its lines being enjambed despite the poem’s predilection for partial or full line stops. Astery’s jealous and apparently flowerobsessed fellow nymphs complain to Venus that Cupid must be helping her to acquire so many so speedily, and Venus, fearing Cupid has involved himself in another regrettable Psyche situation, turns Astery into a butterfly, who now carries in her wings the colors of the flowers she so ostentatiously collected in her nimble-jointed nymphic days (lines 124–44). Astery’s transformation, coming as the conclusion of Clarion’s own transformation from grub to butterfly, is itself as rapid and breathless as the pageant of intertextual reference that precedes her arrival in the poem. The tissue of allusion that gilds Clarion’s wings is made from Astery’s own reinventive rewriting. Curiously, Astery does not appear later in the text, in the poem’s second embedded narrative of lepidopteran transformation, reimagined as a process of strategic revision. If Spenser invents a genealogy for

BotelhoV1-final.indb 148

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Butterflies and Moths

|

149

Clarion, linking him to Astery, Spenser adapts Ovid’s story of Arachne, in book 6 of the Metamorphoses, to create a predecessor for Aragnoll, the spider who traps Clarion. The hero-foe dynamic between the butterfly and spider is an ancient and commonplace one, which other writers exploit. John Heywood’s 1556 The Spider and the Flie, for example, offers a satirical allegory that begins with a fly stuck in a web and remonstrating with the spider (who wishes to charge the fly with trespassing and theft) over the administration of justice in the case. The spider eventually engages the assistance of an ant, and the fly the assistance of a butterfly, in trying the case, which ultimately devolves into political factioning and civil war before the eventually hundreds of involved creatures are swept from the windowsill by a housemaid. The enmity of the arachnid and insect proves so familiar that it can serve as a foundation for Heywood’s flight of subversive silliness, but Spenser nonetheless seeks to reimagine the anterior metamorphoses that account for this enmity, rewriting even the most conventional expectations for these creatures’ behavior. Spenser’s treatment of Arachne’s weaving contest with Athena becomes an overtly literary one, in which “Muiopotmos” ruminates on the work of storytelling (indeed, the competition between Arachne and Athena is undertaken not just “with loome, with needle,” but “with quill” [line 272]) and on the way texts talk to and rewrite each other (“in stories it is written found,” notes the poem parenthetically at line 258, by way of introducing the Ovidian interlude). The poem describes first Arachne’s tapestry, which centers on Europa being borne by Jove over the sea, and then on Athena’s tapestry, which portrays her contest with Neptune for Athens. The success of Athena’s art in this contest is so stupendous that Arachne quickly self-transforms into a spider. The story is familiar from Ovid, but there are three notable differences between the classical source and Spenser’s rewriting of it important for thinking the revisionary work of the butterfly here. First, in Ovid’s version of this episode, Athena’s tapestry is revealed before Arachne’s tapestry; the order is reversed in “Muiopotmos,” with Arachne’s tapestry debuting before Athena’s. Second, in Ovid, Arachne’s is the better tapestry, and her triumph in the contest is what causes a wrathful Athena to transform Arachne into a spider. In “Muiopotmos,” Arachne’s tapestry is less impressive than Athena’s, in part because Athena’s tapestry features a butterfly of Spenser’s invention:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 149

11/9/22 1:36 PM

150

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Emongst those leaues she made a Butterflie, With excellent deuice and wondrous slight, Fluttring among the Oliues wantonly, That seem’d to liue, so like it was in sight. (lines 329–32) Losing the competition leads Spenser’s Arachne to transform herself into a spider. Finally, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Astery for whom Spenser invents a flower-gathering, butterfly-becoming history appears only in Ovid’s account of Arachne’s contest with Athena. For Ovid, Astery is one in a long list of women abused, assaulted, and attacked by the gods and represented in Arachne’s tapestry, but in Spenser’s version of the Arachne episode, Astery does not appear at all. Spenser moves Astery out of Ovid’s storyweb and into an invented intertext, leaving a hole in Arachne’s weaving. Instead of a butterfly that would compete with Athena’s, there is only the damning absence of Astery—the same Astery whose transformation into a butterfly is absent in Ovid. The two texts—Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Spenser’s “Muiopotmos”—thus trade absent butterflies: Ovid lacks Spenser’s Astery, the damsel-turned-fly, and Spenser’s Arachne lacks Ovid’s Astery, the prey of Jove. Spenser emphasizes this insectoid absence by making the invented (or perhaps displaced) butterfly of Athena’s tapestry the winning element of the contest and the agent of Arachne’s rapid transformation. Spenser’s Arachne becomes the spider that can catch this missing butterfly in the future—and will, by the end of “Muiopotmos.” The episode in Spenser, by dwelling in this haze of much-needed, tragically absent butterflies, suggests a kind of intertextual exchange that works both forward and backward in literary history. One could say that Spenser’s Arachne is insufficiently intertextual, failing to import enough of Ovid to make her citation viable. By suppressing Astery, Arachne’s weaving becomes an insufficient text, incomplete and superseded by the successful Athena’s, which offers a non-Ovidian butterfly of the sort Spenser makes of Astery earlier in the poem (thus the inversion of tapestry order). So while this episode might seem like a reworking of Metamorphoses as a source text, the butterfly intratextual reference within “Muiopotmos” thus imagines an Ovid who borrows from Spenser: the way to win this Ovidian contest between Arachne and Athena, “Muiopotmos” suggests, is to include Spenser’s butterfly

BotelhoV1-final.indb 150

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Butterflies and Moths

|

151

Astery in the weaving. In Spenser’s version of Ovid’s story, Arachne is punished for not including the Astery Spenser invented. The speedy butterfly flits between texts forward in time and backward, too. This perverse temporality, occasioned by the cheekiness of these intertextual revisions, points to the inveterately temporal quality of poetry itself—a quality made palpable in the beating of these butterflies’ wings: where there is a butterfly, two or more texts are gathered in its name. As intricate as these borrowings and absences are, what emerges from Spenser’s poem is a sense of the centrality of the butterfly to the work of literary revision. In “Muiopotmos,” Arachne loses the competition by failing to produce a butterfly; her failure to re-present her tapestry’s subject accompanies an absence of this lepidopteran subject. Spenser’s Athena, by contrast, knows that to triumph over her opponent in this rewritten Ovidian episode, she must incorporate the embodied emblem of successful revision: the butterfly, which exists only as the innovative iteration of another instantiation. This chapter has focused on the butterflies of Spenser’s poem because they appear in what might be the English Renaissance’s most extended literary treatment of the creature. Even so, the moths and butterflies irrepressibly flitting through Moffett’s chapter and Spenser’s poem flutter too in numerous other works—and in each instantiation, they maintain this subtle, intricate association with re-vision. In Shakespeare’s works, for example, the “gilded butterfly” appears in the rare case of a repeated line, surfacing in both King Lear and Coriolanus.11 For John Bunyan’s “Of the Boy and Butterfly” and “Of the Fly at the Candle,” two poems included in the Divine Emblems; or, Temporal Things Spiritualized, the reduplicative lepidopteran energy is sonic, structural, and conceptual.12 The poems unfold in rhyming couplets, iterating the final, familiar sound of line endings; each of the two poems splits into two parts, an initial description of its subject butterfly (as a source of fascination for a child) or moth (as fascinated by flame) and then a subsequent “Comparison” segment, and that “Comparison” segment decodes—effectively rewriting the significance of—the apparent allegory of the preceding lines. The last butterfly specimen of the English Renaissance, though, appears in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, winging its way into the narrative at the height of its own rewriting activity. As part of Book 7’s lavish

BotelhoV1-final.indb 151

11/9/22 1:36 PM

152

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

reimagination of the Creation story in Genesis in terms strategically distorted to be understandable to Adam and Eve, Raphael describes the advent of . . . whatever creeps the ground, Insect or Worme; those wav’d thir limber fans For wings, and smallest Lineaments exact In all the Liveries dect of Summers pride With spots of Gold and Purple, azure and green.13 Coming first among the legions of lesser creatures swarming the newly built earth, the butterfly retains both the rich colors of Moffett’s descriptions and Spenser’s description of the wings as fans: “Full manie a Ladie faire . . . wisht that two such fannes, so silken soft, / And golden faire, her Loue would her prouide” (lines 105, 107–8). Yet Milton’s butterflies—perhaps first in this litany of lesser creatures because they combine the representative “Insect or Worme” of these legions—shed their name. Contracting to a blur of marvelous color, these last butterflies of the Renaissance disappear from language at precisely the moment the poem seeks to rewrite the writing of the earth. If Spenser’s elaborate work of re-presentation in lepidoptera-dense “Muiopotmos” and Moffett’s “elaborate work” of re-presenting the tiny extraordinariness of the seemingly insignificant in Theater of Insects are analogues for the labor of Milton’s butterfly, it seems this winged creature’s final appearance— in the elaborate, accommodational rewriting of divine truth to mortal auditors—signals the insufficiency of the butterfly’s name to contain it, as it folds its codex wings and seeks even the revision of a world seething with minute minions of beauty. Notes 1. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 974–75. Subsequent references to Theater of Insects are cited parenthetically in the text by page number. 2. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v., “volatile, n. and adj.” 5a. See 2a for the attestation from Bacon. 3. It was not, of course, only “silly people in old time” who articulated this association. Pierre Danet’s Complete

BotelhoV1-final.indb 152

Dictionary describes a bas-relief in which there appeared “a young Man extended upon a Bed, and a Butterfly which flew away that seemed to come out of the Mouth of the Deceased.” 4. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.371–73. 5. For Moffett’s life, see Houliston, “Thomas Moffett.” 6. For a concise introduction to the poem, see Dundas, “Complaints.”

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Butterflies and Moths 7. For the long-standing reading of Clarion as Sidney, see Lemmi, “Allegorical Meaning of Spenser’s Muiopotmos.” Elizabeth Mazzola complicates this relationship in “Spenser, Sidney, and Second Thoughts” by considering the conditions of myth making and breaking in the poem. For more on the relationship of “Muiopotmos” to Chaucer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” see Anderson, “ ‘Nat worth a boterflye,’ ” in which she notes that “Spenser’s interest in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale lies somewhere between sustained allusion and accidental reminiscence, between deliberate reenactment and a casual echo: its precise nature is elusive, yet our sense of it persists” (89). For a treatment of the interpoetic echoes of The Faerie Queene in “Muiopotmos,” particularly as pertains to instabilities in the latter’s narrative as a result of the gendering of spaces and spiders, see Ramachandran, “Clarion in the Bower of Bliss.” 8. Critics have long struggled with finding a satisfactory allegorical reading of the poem. Don Cameron Allen, in Image and Meaning, offered one of the most influential readings, interpreting Clarion as the rational soul (see esp. 21–22), but many have found the poem resistant to interpretive closure. See Brinkley, “Spenser’s Muiopotmos,” for a discussion of how the metamorphic logic of the poem itself—its transformations of its subject from insect to hero to victim of fate—mimics

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

|

153

and parodies the logic of Elizabethan politics, even independent of individual identities allegorized as Clarion or Aragnoll. Andrew D. Weiner (“Spenser’s ‘Muiopotmos’ ”) similarly questions the viability of the poem’s allegorical interpretation, not on the grounds of mapping specific figures onto characters but in terms of the knots into which the poem’s alleged allegory ties itself: “To say that he [the narrator] turned a simple narrative into an allegory, while true, does not explain how he came to do such a bad job of it” (217). For more on the ways Moffett’s account of butterflies resonates in Spenser’s “Muiopotmos,” see Brown, “Allegory of Small Things.” Discussing Moffett’s account of the butterfly’s “uses,” Brown observes that in “Muiopotmos,” “Spenser will appropriate Moffett’s twofold function of the butterfly—to pull down pride and to draw attention to one’s final end—in the allegory of his butterfly, Clarion” (255). Spenser, “Muiopotmos,” lines 41–45. Subsequent references to “Muiopotmos” are cited parenthetically in the text by line number. For more on the reduplicative qualities of the butterfly in Shakespeare, see Barrett, “Shakespeare’s Butterfl ies.” Bunyan, “XXI. Of the Boy and Butter Fly” and “XXII. Of the Fly at the Candle,” in Book for Boys and Girls, 28–30. Milton, Paradise Lost, 7.475–79.

Bibliography Allen, Don Cameron. Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1960. Anderson, Judith H. “ ‘Nat worth a boterflye’: Muiopotmos and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1, no. 1 (1971): 89–106.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 153

Barrett, Chris. “Shakespeare’s Butterfl ies.” New Orleans Review 42 (2016): 286–310. Brinkley, Robert A. “Spenser’s Muiopotmos and the Politics of Metamorphosis.” ELH 48, no. 4 (Winter 1981): 668–76. Brown, Eric C. “The Allegory of Small Things: Insect Eschatology in

11/9/22 1:36 PM

154

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Spenser’s Muiopotmos.” Studies in Philology 99, no. 3 (2002): 247–67. Bunyan, John. A Book for Boys and Girls, or, Country Rhimes for Children. London, 1686. Danet, Pierre. A Complete Dictionary of the Greek and Roman Antiquities. London, 1700. Dundas, Judith. “Complaints: Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie.” In The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A. C. Hamilton, 186–87. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Houliston, Victor. “Thomas Moffett (1553– June 1604).” In Sixteenth- Century British Nondramatic Writers: Second Series, edited by David A. Richardson, 230–34. Detroit: Gale, 1994. Lemmi, C. W. “The Allegorical Meaning of Spenser’s Muiopotmos.” PMLA 45 (1930): 732–48. Mazzola, Elizabeth. “Spenser, Sidney, and Second Thoughts: Mythology and Misgiving in Muiopotmos.” Sidney Journal 18, no. 1 (2000): 57–81.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 154

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by David Scott Kastan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Ramachandran, Ayesha. “Clarion in the Bower of Bliss: Poetry and Politics in Spenser’s ‘Muiopotmos.’ ” Spenser Studies 20 (2005): 77–106. Spenser, Edmund. “Muiopotmos.” In Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, edited by Richard A. McCabe, 289– 304. London: Penguin Books, 1999. Weiner, Andrew D. “Spenser’s ‘Muiopotmos’ and the Fates of Butterflies and Men.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 84, no. 2 (April 1985): 203–20.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

C h a p t e r 10

GRASSHOPPER AND LOCUST Antimonarchal Locusts: Translating the Grasshopper in the Aftermath of the English Civil Wars

Kathryn Vomero Santos

In a 2009 Scientific American article, “When Grasshoppers Go Biblical,” Katherine Harmon explains that under certain conditions, some species of short-horned grasshoppers undergo a physiological transformation and become locusts that form massive swarms and lay waste to crops.1 The physical and behavioral differences between these two phases, known as the solitary state and the gregarious state, are so significant that entomologists assumed they were two distinct species until the early twentieth century. Scientists have since developed and tested several theories about what causes this morphological change, including hunger, overcrowding, and an increased presence of serotonin, in order to better understand how to prevent or reduce destructive swarming in areas of the globe that are particularly prone to it. The playful title of Harmon’s article, however, places these relatively new scientific discoveries within the long and well-known tradition of ancient stories about the Orthoptera order of insects, reminding us that some of the earliest recorded observations and attempts to understand the significance of their behavior can be found in the literary and historical narratives that have been passed down across centuries and languages and retain a powerful hold over the contemporary imagination. This chapter charts a particularly complex moment within the Western tradition of writing about the insect world, when the crisis of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 155

11/9/22 1:36 PM

156

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

governance during the English Civil Wars and their aftermath provoked many writers to turn to both grasshoppers and locusts for models that might help them to understand their rapidly changing nation. As seventeenth-century authors brought sacred, poetic, and philosophical texts about these insects from several languages into English, the physical transformation of grasshoppers into locusts that continues to intrigue scientists today began to happen on a lexical level, often in confusing and unpredictable ways. Practices of translation, in other words, caused radically different narratives about these insects to intersect and overlap, producing a strange but provocative confluence of meaning precisely at the moment when England, a nation previously ruled by the solitary grasshopper, had become overrun by swarms of “Antimonarchal Locust[s].”2 My title phrase, “antimonarchal locusts,” comes from the final line of John Ogilby’s 1668 poetic paraphrase of the famous fable of the ant and the grasshopper. One among a strikingly small number of Aesopian fables about insects, it tells the story of the prudent ant who works diligently to store food in preparation for the winter and the carefree grasshopper who finds himself hungry after wasting his time singing throughout the summer. At first glance, Ogilby’s use of the phrase “antimonarchal locust” seems to recall a fitting line from the book of Proverbs, which notes that there is something admirable about the fact that locusts (or grasshoppers in some translations) are able to “go forth all of them in bands” in pursuit of their common goal of consuming the fruits of others’ labor with “neither King nor Emperor,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas Moffett.3 Strikingly productive in their destruction, they appear to have what Samuel Purchas called a “conspiring agreement to do mischief” in his 1657 A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects.4 By the middle of the seventeenth century, the image of a destructive and innumerable swarm of hungry flying insects had taken on new layers of cultural, political, and social meaning as it was repeatedly invoked to illustrate various aspects of Britain’s increasingly volatile political climate. In his 1608 pamphlet Lanthorne and Candle-Light, which was reprinted several times in subsequent decades, Thomas Dekker drew on locusts’ biblical associations with Egypt, darkness, and the devastating consumption of crops as he called for “the most infamous & basest kinds of punishment” to “sweepe” the “swarms” of “Egiptian

BotelhoV1-final.indb 156

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust

|

157

Grashoppers,” or Gypsies, “that eate vp the fruites of the Earth, and destroy the poore corne” “out of this kingdome.”5 During the Commonwealth period, the anonymous author(s) of a 1659 petition to Parliament detailed the “oppressions, cruelties, and tyrannies” of those in power, which “(like Aegyptian Grasshoppers) overspread and devoure the Land.”6 And just one year prior to the publication of Ogilby’s 1668 Aesopics, John Milton called upon the image of a “pitchy cloud of locusts” darkening “all the land of Nile” to create an epic simile that described the “numberless” “bad Angels” hovering in Hell in the first book of Paradise Lost.7 The potential for the hungry grasshopper to become an “antimonarchal locust” in both word and deed was undoubtedly an appealing metaphor for a royalist like Ogilby, who had already seized on the political nature of animal fables to deliver a biting local commentary on the causes and effects of civil war in his first collection of Aesopian translations published in 1651. But Ogilby’s version of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper did far more than reflect the complexity of England’s struggles over sovereignty. As he drew on the literary, historical, and burgeoning scientific tradition that had grown up around the grasshopper during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he captured and exploited the complex history of English translation that had produced a terminological slippage whereby the word grasshopper could refer not just to the swarming locust but also to the singular singing cicada, a figure that, as we will see in what follows, became quite popular among royalist Cavalier poets during the Civil Wars.8 Although Thomas Browne attempted to correct the linguistic confusion around these rather different insects in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica in 1646, Ogilby seemed to recognize in this curious translational conflation the dangerous potential for a solitary being—and a single word—to become part of, or even replaced by, a gregarious swarm.9 As Jayne Elizabeth Lewis has aptly explained, such semiotic instability was a hallmark of his fable dilations, which “offered literary figures that acknowledged the factional, and fictional, nature of all meaningful signs.”10 What Ogilby produced, then, is not just a translation of a wellknown tale about insects with a predictable moral lesson but a version of the story that is deeply aware of how translation itself revealed the ambivalence, or multivalence, that these creatures could evoke during a time when English poets were struggling to redefine their place in the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 157

11/9/22 1:36 PM

158

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

cultural landscape of a nation that was, as Mark Loveridge puts it, “at war with itself.”11 By the time Ogilby published his second collection in 1668 after the restoration of the monarchy, the Greek tale of the cicada and the ant had been translated into English several times, and references to the tale in English Renaissance literary texts were both plentiful and diverse.12 Although William Caxton’s The Subtyl Historyes and Fables of Esope (1484), the earliest English translation to appear in print, follows its French source in translating the Latin “De formica et cicada” as “Of the Ant and of the sygalle,” most Renaissance English writers thereafter recount or refer to this story as that of the ant and the grasshopper.13 In the October eclogue of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), for instance, Cuddie laments the apparent fruitlessness of his poetry, comparing himself to the grasshopper in the famous fable: “Such pleasaunce makes the Grashopper so poore, / And ligge so layd, when Winter doth her straine.”14 The moral lessons derived from the tale are even repeated by King Lear’s fool, who suggests sending Kent “to school to an ant, to teach [him] there’s no labouring i’ th’ winter.”15 The fable would go on to take several visual and verbal forms in the seventeenth century, including Richard Watts’s extended dialogue, The Young Mans Looking Glasse, or a Summary Discourse Between the Ant and the Grasshopper (1641), which characterizes the grasshopper as an “idle Locust” and predictably concludes in the voice of the regretful stridulator that “Idleness” “leadeth on the way / To misery, to want, and to decay!”16 The singing cicada/grasshopper was not always portrayed in such a negative light, however. According to Moffett’s entry on the grasshopper (cicada in the Latin text), which engages in its own practices of translating and weaving together ancient narratives, its music is unparalleled, and the ancients “equalled it to the sound of the Harp.”17 When praising Plato’s eloquence, Timon Sillographus compared it to the song of the grasshoppers: “Plato sings sweetly, and as well as the Grashoppers.”18 Such beautiful music was not merely idle or purely for its own sake, though, as it also performed an important function that made other kinds of labor possible: They begin to sing in the heat of the day, even at what time the reapers would otherwise leave work, wherefore those laborious

BotelhoV1-final.indb 158

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust

|

159

chanters get them up into trees, and there fill the ears of the laborers and passenge[r]s with their melodious noise. For as musick is a kinde of refreshment and recreation to the fainting spirits and tired brain, so the unaffected notes and layes of the Grashoppers, and the earnestness of their contention in singing, doth serve as a spur to provoke men to endure labour, and doth not only invite the reapers to gather the fruits, but detains th[e]m in their work.19 Unlike the Aesopian tradition, which suggests that the grasshopper’s music is antithetical to the ant’s industrious labor, this strand of ancient thought places value on music and, by extension, poetry. The language of Moffett’s description presents their singing as a form of work itself as the “laborious chanters” actively “serve as a spur to provoke men to endure labour.” But these “laborious chanters” do more than merely “invite” the reapers to work or please them as they toil. Moffett explains that the cicadas’/grasshoppers’ singing “detains them in their work” during the hottest part of the day, suggesting that what has been characterized as idle recreation in fact plays an essential part in the work of harvesting food. Moffett goes on to recount a tale from Strabo’s Geography that solidified the insect’s association with music and circulated widely in the form of an emblem during the Renaissance (see figure 1.10.1). Two rival harpers, Eunomus and Aristo, are in the midst of a competition when Eunomus breaks a string. All of a sudden, a cicada/grasshopper lands on the harp, “supplying the place of his broken string.”20 Interpreted as a sign from the gods, the grasshopper/cicada became synonymous with music, and the ancients “painted the Grashopper sitting upon Eunomus Harp, as the known Hieroglyphick of the Muses,” a tradition that would continue with Renaissance emblems, which frequently featured the same image of a cicada on a harp accompanied by the tag Musicam diis curae esse, or “the gods care for music,” and a poem translated from the Anthologia Graeca that recounts the miraculous story and the resulting monument to the insect (see figure 1.10.1).21 Far from being idle, the cicada performed a kind of divine work that assisted in the production of human art. In response to the fable tradition that continued to question the value of such artistic labor, other Renaissance emblems praised the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 159

11/9/22 1:36 PM

160

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Figure 1.10.1. “Musicam diis curae esse,” in Andrea Alciato, Emblemata Libellus (Paris: Christian Wechel, 1540), H1v. Woodcut by Mercure Jollat (?). Call #: 173586q. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution– ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

cicada for its patience during the cold, foodless winter. The ninetysixth emblem in the third book of Joachim Camerarius’s Symbolorum & Emblematum ex Volatilibus et Insectis Desumtorum (1596–1597), for example, depicts two solitary cicadas among the flowers of springtime along with the tag Expecto Donec Veniat (I wait until [it] comes) above and the following motto below: Frigora fert patients, spe veris, parva cicada. / Sperat & infestis mens bona semper opem (In hopes of spring, the little cicada patiently endures the cold; / The good mind always hopes for help in adversity) (see figure 1.10.2).22 Beyond the context of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 160

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust

|

161

emblems, this image of the patient cicada enduring the winter and foretelling the spring would also become a powerful icon for the royalist Cavalier poets as they translated and transformed the ancient Anacreontic ode to the immortal cicada who sings like a king into a poem about an English grasshopper waiting out the winter of revolution.23 Having retreated from public life in London in the years after Charles I was vanquished, poets who had enjoyed the patronage of the court turned inward to their private circles for friendship, conviviality, and, of course, literary exchange. Collaborative translation became one of the primary modes of artistic engagement within these circles, and it is not difficult to see why the Anacreontic ode in praise of the

Figure 1.10.2. Emblem 96, Joachim Camerarius, Symbolorum & Emblematum ex Volatilibus et Insectis Desumtorum Centuria Tertia Collecta, engraving by Johann Siebmacher (Nuremberg, 1597), Aa4r. Image reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 161

11/9/22 1:36 PM

162

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

cicada would have been a popular choice among royalist poets contemplating the place of poetry in English society after the wars. In many ways a poem about poetry itself, the Greek lyric apostrophizes the singing cicada, praising it for inviting the love of both the Muses and Phoebus (Apollo) and for enjoying a kind of ageless, godlike immortality through its song.24 Thomas Stanley, the first to publish an English translation of the Anacreontics in 1651, renders the cicada as a grasshopper but retains the connection between the singing insect and agriculture: Grasshopper thrice-happy! who Sipping the cool morning dew, Queen-like chirpest all the day Seated on some verdant spray; Thine is all what ere earth brings, Or the howrs with laden wings; Thee, the Ploughman calls his Joy, ’Cause thou nothing dost destroy: Thou by all art honour’d; All Thee the Springs sweet Prophet call; By the Muses thou admir’d, By Apollo art inspir’d, Agelesse, ever singing, good, Without passion flesh or blood, Oh how near thy happy state Comes the Gods to imitate!25 Not only is the grasshopper a “sweet Prophet” of the spring, but it is also admired by the ploughman because it does not destroy anything, a reputation that stands in direct opposition to the other insect associated with the grasshopper in seventeenth-century English: the destructive locust.26 Although the decision to translate tettix as “grasshopper” rather than “cicada” is in keeping with other English translations of Greek texts about the insect, Karen L. Edwards reads a particular kind of royalist resistance in this choice: “When they celebrate the ‘grasshopper,’ Cavaliers apparently accept (and even revel in) the identity assigned to them by the victors—they are the locusts, wastrels, devourers of the public good, immersed in appetites of the present, incapable of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 162

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust

|

163

preparing for the future (either earthly or heavenly).”27 In other words, by choosing to transform the Greek cicada into the English grasshopper, the royalist poets may have been acknowledging the ways in which the word grasshopper could also be read as “locust,” bringing together two culturally opposite meanings in the same word. “But the very term which seems to condemn them,” Edwards continues, “promises them that their way of life will ultimately triumph: for in fact these ‘grasshoppers’ are cicadas, immortal, beloved of the gods.”28 Unlike the cicada translated into a grasshopper in the fable, the cicada in this poetic tradition survives on intoxicating dew and is freed from the effects of the changing seasons and the hunger that winter brings. Not all Cavalier poets celebrated the image of the triumphant grasshopper in their versions of the poem, though. In perhaps the most famous rendering, Richard Lovelace, a member of the Stanley circle, recalls the seasonal narrative of the Aesopian fable and calls the grasshopper a “poore verdant foole” for not realizing that his green perch would soon become covered with ice.29 Dedicated “To My Noble Friend, Mr. Charles Cotton,” Lovelace’s version acknowledges that the winter had already arrived for royalist poets, who similarly failed to recognize that their way of life could one day change, but in the style of a Horatian ode, he instead celebrates a turn inward to friendship, where they could “create / A Genuine Summer in each others breast.”30 As many scholars have observed, Lovelace identifies with the Anacreontic cicada but also recognizes that, in the absence of court culture and patronage in postwar England, the poetic voice that it had come to symbolize could thrive only in protected spaces.31 Given the number of royalist grasshopper imitations circulating in print in the 1640s and 1650s, it is hard to imagine that Ogilby would not have been familiar with this tradition when he set out to write his poetic paraphrase of the ant and the grasshopper soon after the monarchy had been restored. In a rather striking departure from his royalist predecessors, however, he does not cast the grasshopper in the role of the king. Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving, which appears opposite the first page of the fable (see figure 1.10.3), depicts the grasshopper crouching before a large ant wearing a crown and surrounded by several smaller ants, whom we later learn in the fable itself are King of Anthil and his Pismirian Lords. As in most earlier versions, the titular

BotelhoV1-final.indb 163

11/9/22 1:36 PM

164

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

grasshopper appears as a solitary insect, but the fact that he comes as an “Envoy from the Grashoperian states” suggests that he is a representative member of a polity. Fittingly, though, there is never a reference to a grasshopper king—only to the Grashoperian states, a collective without a monarch. When the incredulous ant asks how they could have possibly assumed that summer would last forever, the grasshopper explains: Sir, we were over-reach’d, By one to us New-fangled Doctrine teach’d, Holding forth, Phœbus our Protector would Translate us from all Hunger, Thirst, and Cold To Ægypt, and the fruitful banks of Nile, To endless Feastings without Care or Toyl. So him we treated, and in Sunshine sung, Living as Merry as the day was long, Expecting when a Western wind would rise, Should bear us to our promis’d Paradise.32 Ogilby’s use of the verb translate hardly seems like a coincidence here in the midst of his translation. Although he is bound by the narrative, he also possesses the dangerous power in his capacity as translator to make things mean otherwise. The promised “endless Feastings” conjure another kind of translation as well: a transformation from grasshoppers into a swarm of locusts who will ruthlessly devour the fruits of other creatures’ labor. It makes sense that the singing grasshoppers would place their faith in Phoebus, the god of poetry, but, in an ironic gesture that disregards his own poetic profession, Ogilby suggests that the unsuspecting grasshoppers were tricked into believing a “Newfangled Doctrine” about the virtues of poetry by a misleading teacher, not unlike the leaders of various religious sects who engaged in controversies of doctrine and attempted to build a following based on the promise of a better future during a time of tumult and uncertainty. By invoking the proliferation of sectarian ideas during this period, Ogilby echoes a sentiment expressed by Andrew Marvell in his 1653 poem The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness, The Lord Protector:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 164

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Figure 1.10.3. Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving for “Of the Ant and Grasshopper.” In John Ogilby, Aesopics (London: Thomas Roycroft for John Ogilby, 1668). Call #: 158-863f. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 165

11/9/22 1:36 PM

166

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Accursed Locusts, whom your King dos spit Out of the Center of th’unbottom’d Pit; Wand’rers, Adult’rers, Lyers, Munser’s rest, Sorcerers, Atheists, Jesuites, Possest; You who the Scriptures and the Laws deface With the same liberty as Points and Lace.33 The accusatory, accumulative rhythm of Marvell’s catalog works to enact the proliferation of these sects, pausing at the end to address the swarm as a collective “You” that is guilty of defacing both scripture and law. As David Lowenstein explains, “Anti-sectarians were equating the multiplying sects and heresies in the age with the terrifying locusts emerging from the bottomless pit in Revelation 9:2–3, 11, a new onslaught from the forces of destruction spreading over the nation.”34 We see Ogilby’s own reaction to the threat of multiplying sectarian “phanatick” ideas as the “Anthillian Soveraign” sends the “starv’d Envoy” away: Begon, who to Phanaticks credit give, Fifth-Monarchie People I shall ne’r relieve; Besides, You term your Self a State Distrest, Antimonarchal Locust, I detest.35 The phrase “Fifth-Monarchie People” refers directly to one such sect, a group of radical Puritans known as the Fift h Monarchists or Fift hMonarchy Men, who believed, based on their interpretation of the book of Daniel, that the fift h monarchy was not only imminent but also that they should actively bring about its arrival by revolting and supporting the overthrow of the fourth. Although they originally supported the Parliamentarians and the execution of Charles I, the Fift h Monarchists eventually revolted (unsuccessfully) against Cromwell in 1657 and, under the leadership of Thomas Venner, attacked Saint Paul’s Cathedral and made further plans to burn the triumphal arches constructed for the coronation of Charles II in 1661. For Ogilby, who had been commissioned to write the entertainment for the coronation and published a description that same year, the grasshopper was no longer aligned with the king, as it had been for the earlier Cavalier poets.36 It had undergone a transformation and became more closely aligned with

BotelhoV1-final.indb 166

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust

|

167

the swarm of “Antimonarchal Locust[s]” that continually threatened all forms of political authority.37 Despite the transformation of the kingly grasshopper celebrated by the Cavaliers during the interregnum into the kingless swarm of locusts, the topical references toward the end of the fable make Ogilby’s royalist politics abundantly clear. How, then, do we reconcile the fact that these critiques come from the voice of the Puritan ant, who seems less like a king and more like the leader of a commonwealth? Moffett’s entry on pismires is instructive here, as it explains that ants are, according to Aristotle, “without any King, and under a popular government.”38 Moffett goes on to explain the place of labor in their “Common wealth”: “Grashoppers and Dormice they hate exceedingly, those because they spend the Summer time in singing, these because they lose the Winter in sleeping, for a Common wealth well regulated doth punish idle persons as well as those that are wicked, and the Spartans were wont to cast forth those that would not labour.”39 Led by Cromwell, the Parliamentarians were motivated in part by a vision of a nation governed for the common good and built on Puritan morals, which required “the suppressing of vice and encouragement of virtue.”40 However, in the very same breath that his ant expresses disdain for the grasshopper for failing to act accordingly, Ogilby presents a picture of the “Common wealth well regulated” that highlights the incredible—and possibly undesirable—costs of achieving such a goal: We know no Manufacture, use no Trade; In Spring we Sowe not, nor in Winter Reap, Yet stuff ’d our Granges are, our Markets cheap; Rather than we would Prince implore, or State, Or hang poor Clients at an Emperor’s Gate, I, and my swarthy Legions should not spare, Alcinous Fruit, but Camps revictual there, Hort-years o’r-run, our bowells never yearn At havock made, minding our own Concern, Choice Plants and Flowers destroy, we ne’r make halt, Unless we Scalding water feel, or Salt.41 The ants certainly work diligently to add to their “peculiar Hoards,” but they do so with a form of labor that is destructive and exploitative.42

BotelhoV1-final.indb 167

11/9/22 1:36 PM

168

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Quoting a simile from his own translation of the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid in a printed marginal annotation, Ogilby presents the “cheerful ants” as “swarthy Legions” “plundering a heap of Wheat” and beating each other into labor rather than as those who do any planting or manufacturing themselves.43 However successful they may be in their work, they make “havock,” destroying things of natural beauty such as “Choice Plants and Flowers” and never stopping until humans intervene by pouring scalding water or salt on them.44 Although the moral of Ogilby’s translation advises readers to make arrangements while they are still in the summertime of their lives to avoid being pissed on by the dogs when they are old and hungry, the fable itself suggests that the extreme version of such profit-driven labor is equally unattractive. This sentiment is echoed in the engraving that depicts the “swarthy Legions” carrying their spoils into a dark pit in a tree trunk that stands in contrast to the lighter right-hand side of the engraving, the side from which the grasshopper came as an envoy seeking their help. The poetic, solitary grasshopper may have become the “Antimonarchal Locust,” but the only swarm depicted here is a swarm of “swarthy” ants whose lives have been reduced to labor without refreshment, entertainment, or art. Although Ogilby may not have had the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade in mind here, it is difficult not to see the language of racial binaries at work in this sharp commentary on forced labor. Read in the context of his fraught political moment and within a larger tradition of textual translation, Ogilby’s version of this famous insect tale is strikingly ambivalent or, perhaps more appropriate, multivalent. As the “starv’d Envoy” continuously transforms from cicada to grasshopper to locust right before our eyes, Ogilby’s retelling becomes a remarkable example of what Mark Loveridge has described as his main achievement: “to find, in the natural discontinuities of fable as he apprehended them, a suitable artistic form for the deeply felt discontinuities of contemporary English history.”45 In the case of this particular tale, the act of translating the grasshopper allowed him to see how the discontinuities of his time were also reflected in language itself. By putting one of the best-known Aesopian fables in conversation with a wide range of insect texts that had passed through many times and tongues, Ogilby used his position as translator, a figure whose own labor continues to be undervalued, to show that solitary words are always gregarious and constantly forming swarms of meaning.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 168

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust

|

169

Notes 1. Harmon, “When Grasshoppers Go Biblical.” Harmon’s article is based on the findings published in Anstey, Rogers, Ott, Burrows, and Simpson, “Serotonin Mediates Behavioral Gregarization.” 2. Ogilby, Aesopics, sig. G1r. 3. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 987. This famous line from Proverbs 30:27 makes for an interesting case study in Renaissance biblical translation. While the Vulgate’s regem lucusta non habet et egreditur universa per turmas is translated as “The grasshopper hath no king, yet goe they foorth all by bands” in the 1599 Geneva Bible, the translators of the 1611 King James Version render it as “The locustes haue no king, yet goe they forth all of them by bands.” 4. Purchas, Theatre of Politicall FlyingInsects, 197. 5. Dekker, Lanthorne and Candle-Light, sig. G4r. On the linguistic and legal identification of Romani people as “Egyptians” or “Gypsies” in early modern England, see Cressy, Gypsies. For a fuller analysis of the language of infestation and the processes of racemaking in early modern English representations of Gypsies, see Wagner, “Outlandish People.” 6. High & Honourable, sig. A1r. 7. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.304–45. 8. We need not look any further than S. Rowland’s English translation of Moffett’s Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum, where he renders the entry for “De Cicadis & Gryllis” as “Of Grashoppers and Krickets.” This entry is preceded by that for “De Locustis,” or “Of the Locusts,” which immediately explains that the English term for this insect is also “Grashopper, from leaping upon the grass” (989). In the “Of Grashoppers and Krickets” entry, Moffett admits that

BotelhoV1-final.indb 169

“sometimes the names Krickets and Grashoppers, are promiscuously used” (Aliquando cum Gryllo confunditur Cicada) but clarifies that this “cannot be, unless you will say that the Kricket is a Grashopper without wings” (989). 9. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Noting that “the tearme of Grashopper [is] not appliable unto the Cicada,” Browne explains that “the Locust or our Grashopper hath teeth, the Cicada none at all, nor any mouth according unto Aristotle, the Cicada is most upon trees; and lastly, the note or fritiniancy thereof is far more shrill then that of the Locust, and its life so short in Summer, that for provision it needs not have recourse unto the providence of the Pismire in Winter” (sig. Gg2v–3r). On Browne’s natural history and its indirect engagement with the political discourse of the 1640s, see Edwards, “Days of the Locust,” 234–52. 10. Lewis, English Fable, 22. Ogilby’s translation of Aesopian fables is not typically included in the royalist literary canon, but several scholars have highlighted the political importance of this work. In her landmark study, Fables of Power, Annabel Patterson explains that Ogilby “significantly altered the status of the fable” itself by drawing out the structural relation between the Aesopian tradition of ancient tales about animals and local, contemporary matters and realizing the full potential of fables to do “advanced work in the arena of political definition” (82–86). Mark Loveridge has argued even more explicitly that Ogilby’s 1651 collection should perhaps be “considered as the defi ning literary work of the English interregnum” (History of Augustan Fable, 102). See also Kishlansky, “Turning Frogs into Princes.”

11/9/22 1:36 PM

170

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

11. Loveridge’s claim is worth quoting in full: “Ogilby invented a way of writing that reflected a nation at war with itself, and which was new not just in England but in Europe” (History of Augustan Fable, 102). In his work on bees, Joseph Campana has explained that “invocations of the swarm tap into anxieties not merely about human masses but rather about hovering, leaderless collectivities whose appetites and impulses pose a threat to the idea that sovereignty was, whether by monarch or by the people, necessary” (“Bee and the Sovereign,” 60). 12. Robert Mayhew notes that this second collection actually intensifies its attacks on the parliamentarian position (Enlightenment Geography, 79–82). 13. Versions of this fable were also attributed to Babrius and Avianus. 14. Spenser, “October,” 2.11–12. 15. Shakespeare, King Lear, 2.2.257–58. 16. Watts, Younge Mans Looking Glasse, sig. A6r, B7r. 17. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 991. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 991–92. 20. Ibid., 992. 21. Ibid. 22. Camerarius, Symbolorum & Emblematum, sig. Aa4r. Translation mine. The verso of this emblem reads much more like a work of natural history, as it gathers relevant quotations from ancient writers to elucidate the lesson of the recto. Although the title page bears the date 1596, the colophon indicates that it was published in 1597. The image was engraved by Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher. 23. In another instance of conflating locusts and cicadas, Moffett explains that certain rare types of locusts who “have wings as long or longer than their bodies” are called “Mantes,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 170

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

foretellers, either because by their coming (for they first of all appear) they do shew the Spring to be at hand, so Anacreon the Poet sang” (Theater of Insects, 982). Campbell, Greek Lyric II, 204–7. Stanley, Poems, sig. B5r–v. In 1656, Abraham Cowley published his Poems, which included a section titled “Anacreontiques: or, Some Copies of Verses Translated Paraphrastically out of Anacreon.” In his version of the ode to the cicada, he exaggerates this relationship even further, recalling Moffett’s claims that the cicada detains farmers in their work: “Man for thee does sow / Farmer he, and landlord thou!” (sig. F3r). Edwards, “Days of the Locust,” 244. Ibid. Lovelace, “Grasse-hopper.” On Stanley’s circle, see Revard, “Thomas Stanley”; and Scodel, Excess and the Mean. Lovelace, “Grasse-hopper.” Lovelace’s critique of the Puritan position remains sharp in his posthumously published poem titled “The Ant,” which describes its titular character as a “miserable,” “austere” “cynick” and shames him for driving his plow on sacred festivals “whilst [his] unpay’d Musicians, Crickets, sing.” It is worth noting that in this instance, Lovelace refers to the insect in opposition to the ant as the cricket. The body of scholarship on Lovelace and his “Grasse-hopper” is robust. See, among others, Allen, “Explication of Lovelace’s ‘The Grasse-hopper’ ”; Marcus, Politics of Mirth; Anselment, Loyalist Resolve; and McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance. Ogilby, Aesopics, sig. F5v. Marvell, First Anniversary, sig. C2r. After being published anonymously in 1655, this poem was republished posthumously in Marvell’s Miscellaneous

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

Poems in 1681 and retitled The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C. Lowenstein, Representing Revolution, 154. Ogilby, Aesopics, sig. G1r. On Ogilby’s involvement in the coronation, see Connell, Secular Chains, 72. The writings of one particularly outspoken Fift h Monarchist, John Rogers, reveal that grasshoppers and locusts were equally useful for their purposes. In his Sagrir, or Doomesday Drawing Nigh (1653), Rogers complains that the country was suffering from two plagues, lawyers and priests, both of whom, he argued, could be compared to the locusts referenced in the book of Revelation on several different accounts. Noting that locusts are “many times translated Grashoppers,” he explains they are “unclean Creatures” who arose out of the “Antichristian darkness.” They are “of earthly dispositions, greedy devourers, insatiable for covetousness; always desiring, but never delighting to work, sow, labor, nor plough but to eat up the fruits of other mens labors; and to fall on, cease upon, and take possession of the best Meadows, Valleys, and pleasant places of the Land; now the Lawyers (as well as Priests) are such a plague of Locusts” (sig. D2r–3v). Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1079. Ibid., 1078.

|

171

40. This phrase comes from one of Cromwell’s public speeches in 1656. Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, 112. 41. Ogilby, Aesopics, sig. G1r. 42. Ibid., sig. F6r. 43. Virgil, Works. Ogilby first published a translation of Virgil in 1649 and would go on to revise it several times in subsequent decades. 44. Moffett’s entry on pismires criticizes such human impulses as those of “sluggard[s]”: “But you will say, they are most hurtful creatures to Vines, to Dittany, to young shoots, and to many tender plants, and Pliny cals them the plague of trees. But Gellius cals them more properly the revengers and judges of idle people; for they by their labour call us out of our lurking holes, and drinking houses, to till our grounds, and take care of our Orchards more diligently, and to exercise our wits, and to be more industrious in our business, and to do what is just and equall. Go forth then idle companions, and powre on a little hot water wherein lime hath been infused, and believe me not, but you shall drive all Pismires away, and shall infuse more life and spirit into all thy plants. . . . Yet in truth, thou sluggard, thou hast more need to nourish up this creature and set up for it a statue of gold” (Theater of Insects, 1079). 45. Loveridge, History of Augustan Fable, 107.

Bibliography Alciato, Andrea. Emblemata Libellus. Paris: Christian Wechel, 1540. Allen, Don Cameron. “An Explication of Lovelace’s ‘The Grasse-hopper.’ ” Modern Language Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1957): 35–43. Anselment, Raymond A. Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil

BotelhoV1-final.indb 171

War. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988. Anstey, Michael L., Stephen M. Rogers, Swidbert R. Ott, Malcolm Burrows, and Stephen J. Simpson. “Serotonin Mediates Behavioral Gregarization Underlying Swarm Formation in Desert Locusts.” Science 323, no. 5914

11/9/22 1:36 PM

172

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

(2009): 627–630. doi:10.1126/science .1165939. Browne, Thomas. Pseudodoxia Epidemica or, Enquiries into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths. London: Edward Dod, 1646. Camerarius, Joachim. Symbolorum & Emblematum ex Volatilibus et Insectis Desumtorum Centuria Tertia Collecta. Nuremberg, 1597. Campana, Joseph. “The Bee and the Sovereign (II): Segments, Swarms, and the Shakespearean Multitude.” In The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, edited by Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds, 2:59–78. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Campbell, David A., ed. and trans. Greek Lyric II: Anacreon, Anacreontea, Choral Lyric from Olympus to Alcman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Connell, Philip. Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Cowley, Abraham. Poems. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1656. Cressy, David. Gypsies: An English History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Cromwell, Oliver. The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, vol. 4. Edited by Wilbur Cortez Abbot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Dekker, Thomas. Lanthorne and CandleLight. Or The Bell-Mans Second Nights Walke. London: John Busbie, 1608. Edwards, Karen L. “Days of the Locust: Natural History, Politics, and the English Bible.” In The Word and the World: Biblical Exegesis and Early Modern Science, edited by Kevin Killeen and Peter J. Forshaw, 234–52. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2007. Harmon, Katherine. “When Grasshoppers Go Biblical: Serotonin Causes Locusts to Swarm.” Scientific American, January 30, 2009. https://www

BotelhoV1-final.indb 172

.scientificamerican.com/article/when -grasshoppers-go-bibl/. Kishlansky, Mark. “Turning Frogs into Princes: Aesop’s Fables and the Political Culture of Early Modern England.” In Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern Europe: Essays Presented to David Underdown, edited by Susan D. Amussen and Kishlansky, 338–60. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth. The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651–1740. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lovelace, Richard. “The Ant.” In Lucasta: Posthume Poems of Richard Lovelace Esq., 13–14. London: William Godbid, 1659. ———. “The Grasse-hopper.” In Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs, &c., sig. D2r. London: Thomas Harper, 1649. Loveridge, Mark. A History of Augustan Fable. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lowenstein, David. Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Marcus, Leah. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Mayhew, Robert. Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, 1650–1850. New York: Palgrave, 2000. McDowell, Nicholas. Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Grasshopper and Locust Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Ogilby, John. Aesopics, or a Second Collection of Fables, Paraphras’d in Verse. London: Thomas Roycroft, 1668. Patterson, Annabel. Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Purchas, Samuel. A Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects. London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1657. Revard, Stella P. “Thomas Stanley and ‘A Register of Friends.’ ” In Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, 148–73. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Rogers, John. Sagrir, or Doomes-day Drawing Nigh, with Thunder and Lightening to Lawyers. London: Giles Calvert, 1653. Scodel, Joshua. Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 173

|

173

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by R. A. Foakes. London: Bloomsbury, 1997. Spenser, Edmund. “October.” In The Shorter Poems, edited by Richard A. McCabe, 129. London: Penguin, 1999. Stanley, Thomas. Poems. London: Roger Norton, 1651. To the High & Honourable the Legal Earthly Supreame Power of England, the Representative Body Thereof, the Commons Elective in Parliament Assembled with Authority only for the Weale, but not for the Woe of the People. London, 1659. Virgil. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro, 2nd ed. Translated by John Ogilby. London: Thomas Roycroft, 1668. Wagner, Sydnee. “Outlandish People: Gypsies, Race, and Fantasies of National Identity in Early Modern England.” PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2020. Watts, Richard. The Younge Mans Looking Glasse, or a Summary Discourse Between the Ant and the Grasshopper. London: Edward Blackmore, 1641.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 11

BEETLE Sycorax’s Beetles: Legacies of Science, the Occult, and Blackness

Roya Biggie

In The Tempest, even before Caliban’s appearance onstage, Prospero reminds Ariel of the “mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible” of “this damn’d witch Sycorax.”1 Ariel succumbs to the memory of the deceased witch’s tortures, promising to do Prospero’s bidding for two days more; however, Sycorax’s illusory magic continues to haunt the stage. As Prospero demands that his “poisonous slave” “come forth,” Caliban conjures his mother’s magic: “All the charms / Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!”2 While it is tempting to dismiss this spell as simply part of the play’s (if not the period’s) macabre poetics, to presume that this menagerie simply elicits fear naturalizes the affective experience and occludes the creatures’ rich and evolving literary and natural histories. For the purposes of this book, I single out the beetle, a creature with a past rooted in literature, medicine, and natural histories from Aristotle and Pliny to Thomas Moffett and Edward Topsell. The eleven beetles in Shakespeare’s plays reflect their ambivalent position in the early modern imaginary. As scholars have observed, Shakespeare draws on the Aesopic tradition as well as natural history, noting and occasionally deriding the beetle’s shards, its home in dung.3 At times, idiomatic expressions suggest similarities between a beetle’s appearance and a person’s unbecoming features: Petruchio insults

BotelhoV1-final.indb 174

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

175

a “beetle-headed” “knave,” and Mercutio quips that “beetlebrows” will “blush for [him].”4 When beetles collide with the supernatural in Shakespeare, they are always linked, at least peripherally, to women; one of Titania’s fairies sings, “Beetles black, approach not near,” and Macbeth swears that . . . ere to black Hecate’s summons The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums Hath rung night’s peal, there shall be done a deed of dreadful note.5 In the case of The Tempest, the beetle is specifically associated with Sycorax, a “damn’d witch” from “Argier.”6 The presence of beetles in these moments is not coincidental, and they are not evoked merely because the uncanny nature of their exoskeletons elicit fear. Rather, by tracing the insect from Aesop to Moffett, we see how discourses of race, gender, religion, and science converge in the figure of the beetle. Such texts reflect anxieties about women’s occult powers and at times refer to the beetle in an effort to naturalize emergent notions of racial otherness. While scholars have attended to the influence of the Aesopic tradition, examining divergent discourses on the beetle demonstrates how the insect contributed to ideas regarding women’s access to the supernatural and what Ania Loomba refers to as “vocabularies of race,” terms used to describe ontological, religious, national, and ethnic differences.7 That anxieties surrounding the occult and the exotic are transposed onto a seemingly insignificant insect exposes just how insidiously white supremacy and male hegemony operate in both discourse and on the early modern stage.

Fabulist Beginnings Aesop’s “The Eagle and the Dung Beetle” explains the impetus for the rivalry between the two creatures, shedding light on the beetle’s tenacity as well as the eagle’s susceptibility to danger. According to the fable, a beetle attempted to protect a frightened hare who sought refuge from the eagle’s talons. The eagle, merciless, ignored the beetle’s pleas and proceeded to feast on its prey. Vowing vengeance, the beetle repeatedly

BotelhoV1-final.indb 175

11/9/22 1:36 PM

176

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

attacked the eagle’s nest, destroying its eggs, despite the eagle’s attempts to place its nest higher above ground. After two years, the eagle could think of no other recourse but to solicit help from Zeus. Although the god of thunder attempted to protect the eagle’s eggs, carefully placing them on his lap, the beetle still was not dissuaded. The beetle gathered small balls of dung to throw in Zeus’s direction, causing the god to rise and the eagle’s eggs to shatter on the ground. In learning of the creatures’ years-long rivalry, Zeus blamed the eagle for its indiscretion but urged the beetle to relent. Unable to sway the beetle and concerned about the eagle’s undoing, Zeus altered the avian beast’s breeding period to a season marked by a scarcity of its rival.8 In the 1515 edition of his collection of Latin proverbs, Adages, Erasmus devotes considerable attention to this tale. Reprinted several times throughout his life, the Adages explore particular maxims or proverbs with varying degrees of detail. Erasmus offers readers a sentence or two of explication and occasionally dedicates several paragraphs or even fully developed essays to others. His essay on the adage Scarabeus Aquilam Quaerit (“The Beetle Searches for the Eagle”) relates not just the tale but the qualities of each creature. In elucidating these characteristics, Erasmus meditates on the dangers of monarchical greed and tyranny and the at once laudable and dangerous qualities of the weak. His irresolute portrait of the beetle reflects his study of Plutarch, Pliny, and Aristophanes, among others, and vacillates from criticism to praise, ultimately concluding with a condemnation of beetle-like men. Erasmus begins by decrying the beetle as “horrid to look at, horrider to smell, and horridest of all by its buzzing noise,” noting that the insect is born and lives in excrement and spends its days rolling balls of dung.9 While some have a “greenish-black shine,” Erasmus describes others as “rough, horribly black.”10 Despite noting what he deems as the insect’s unbecoming characteristics, Erasmus proposes that given careful consideration, “anyone .  .  . would rather be a beetle than an eagle.”11 He proceeds to praise the beetle for its ability to regenerate, to “[slough] off old age and immediately [renew] [its] youth” and remarks that the proverb, “ ‘wiser than a beetle’ . . . must refer to some special and unique wisdom,” simultaneously criticizing the tendency to judge the appearance and behavior of the insect by human standards.12 Erasmus even goes so far as to reassess its use of dung, noting that doctors, alchemists, and farmers have used excrement for their own means. The

BotelhoV1-final.indb 176

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

177

beetle, Erasmus explains, is comparable to an “eminent and invincible military leader”; not only does its exoskeleton shine like a coat of arms, but its “warlike onset” is akin to the pomp of military music. Moreover, the beetle’s patient labor, its Sisyphean task of continually rolling balls of dirt, resembles the required fortitude of soldiers who must endure challenging conditions while at war.13 Erasmus also argues that we must revere the beetle, if not for these qualities, then for its medicinal value. Yet the remedies he describes suggest the insect’s occult powers. He explains: “A certain particular beetle, carved on an emerald; for, as the proverb says, you can’t carve a Mercury out of any kind of wood, and the beetle does not regard every gem as worth of him, but if he is carved of an emerald, the brightest of gems, as I said, and hung round the neck (on apes’ hair, remember, or swallows’ feathers), he will prove an immediate cure for poisons of all kinds.”14 Erasmus also recommends that a similar gem, though in the form of a ring, be worn by those attempting to petition the king “for some fat benefice,” and for those who wish to avoid headaches, a curative he notes is particularly useful for “heavy drinkers.”15 The remedies he describes are not unlike sympathetic magic, a magical act that “impacts a subject across a distance on the basis of shared qualities or characteristics.”16 As Lynn Maxwell explains, “sympathetic magic encompasses a wide range of practices, from the seventeenth-century use of sympathy powders to cure wounds by treating the responsible weapons, to various kinds of image magic that use visual images to manipulate a subject.”17 Although perhaps more indirect than most instances of sympathetic magic, these charms act on a person from a distance, the beetle proving helpful only when viewing its likeness etched in precious stone. Although Erasmus expands but does not deviate significantly from Aesop’s fable, his conclusion undercuts his appraisal of the insect and returns to his earlier admonition concerning its appearance and behavior. Erasmus writes: The story teaches us that no enemy is to be despised, however humble he may be. For there are some tiny men, of a very low sort but extremely pernicious, no less black than beetles and no less evil-smelling and contemptible, and yet by the persistent cunning of their hearts (although they can do no good to any moral creature) they can often bring trouble even to great men.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 177

11/9/22 1:36 PM

178

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Their blackness is terrifying, their noise drowns everything, their stench a nuisance, they fly round and round. . . . It is far preferable to compete with great men sometimes than to irritate these beetles.  .  .  . It is impossible to struggle with them without coming away defiled.18 In response to the essay’s curious turn, its surprising condemnation of the insect, Yves Cambefort surmises, “One can think that here lies Erasmus’s true and profound feeling, and that this conclusion put the beetle back in its place and in his world.”19 The beetle becomes here a figure for a particular kind of untrustworthy man, those willing to undercut or deceive their superiors. Structurally, the passage’s shifts—from “tiny men” to beetles and back again to men—further conflates the insect and the human. It is not immediately clear that Erasmus is speaking of beetles when he writes “Their blackness is terrifying,” until he specifies that they “fly round and round.” While we might first assume that the beetle’s blackness, according to Erasmus, reflects the sins of a “very low sort,” the hyperfocus on blackness as well as the structural incoherence of the passage does not foreclose the possibility of a rhetoric that relies on racial and human/nonhuman difference to convey the dangers of not just black beetles but black skin. As Kim F. Hall has shown, such tropes emerged during a period of colonial and mercantile expansion and repurposed traditional Christian iconography that associates blackness with “death and mourning, sin and evil.”20 Hall explains: “Traditional terms of aesthetic discrimination and Christian dogma become infused with ideas of Africa and African servitude, making it impossible to separate ‘racial’ signifiers of blackness from traditional iconography.”21 While Erasmus relies on the figure of the inhuman to communicate the moral depravity of certain men, his insistence on the blackness of men and beetles alike develops a racially charged rhetoric that associates ontological blackness with the inhuman, fear, and disgust. Although Aesop’s fable and Erasmus’s essay on the adage were not translated into English during Shakespeare’s lifetime, elements of both works became familiar English topoi through the emblem tradition and English grammar school curriculum.22 While scholars have documented how the emblem tradition adapted the tale, tracing elements of Aesop’s and Erasmus’s renditions through a wider range of discourses

BotelhoV1-final.indb 178

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

179

reveals how the beetle may have become a figure through which early moderns negotiated ideas about femininity, witchcraft, and racial and cultural difference, and, more precisely, why Shakespeare may have associated the insect with three supernatural women.

Natural History’s Black and Fair Beetles In 1601, Philemon Holland’s English translation of Pliny’s Natural History was published. While Pliny was not entirely new to English readers—English writers often referenced the historian’s work, and a condensed English version by “I. A.” was printed in 1565—Holland’s translation likely extended Pliny’s influence. Pliny does not explicitly refer to the fable, though he comments that some beetles “roll [dung] into great round balls with their feet; & therin do make nests for to bestow their little grubs (which are their young)” and notes that the beetle’s “husk or cod ouer their wings” provides a kind of “safegard and defence.”23 Pliny’s influence on Erasmus and English perceptions of the beetle (by way of either Holland’s translation or Erasmus’s essay) is evident in discussions of the insect’s medicinal and occult properties. While Erasmus recommends hanging an image of a beetle, carved in emerald, from one’s neck, Pliny specifies that beetles “with two long hornes” hung “about the neck of young babes” can treat “many maladies.”24 Green beetles can “quicken” eyesight, a treatment lapidaries rely on in their work cutting and engraving precious stones.25 Other treatments include “earth-beetles” for “Kings evil” (the swelling of the lymph glands) and “such like swelling” as well as “gout in the feet.”26 Pliny’s other uses for the insect more explicitly involve the supernatural. For example, he expands on his suggestion that infants and young children wear certain beetles around their necks, proposing, “If there be any suspition of sorcerie, witchcraft, or inchantment practiced for to hurt young babes, the great horns of beetles, such specifically as be knagged as it were with small teeth, are as good as a countercharm and preservative, if they be hanged about their necks.”27 While this treatment resembles the former, Pliny directly compares beetles to a “countercharm,” thus linking the insect to the occult as he proposes that they may ward off the harmful effects of “sorcerie, witchcraft, or inchantment.” Beetles’ ties to magic are even more evident in other

BotelhoV1-final.indb 179

11/9/22 1:36 PM

180

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

passages. As Pliny explains, “Magitians would seem to tell vs by way of prophesie and reuelation, many things for to allay tempests and storms: but especially the stone of this kinde which hath golden drops and spots in it, if together with a flie called a beetle it be cast into a pan of seething water, it will auert tempests that approch.”28 The momentous impact of the beetle—its ability to ward off tempests and storms—is reminiscent of Erasmus’s conclusion. Here too the beetle is remarkable for its unlikely force. Though he attributes the spell to the prophecies and revelations of magicians, Pliny does not question the efficacy of this concoction. Similar to its use as a countercharm, the beetle in this instance is used to avert catastrophe. Pliny characterizes the insect as potentially curative despite its occult associations. In his passages on the magical, mysterious uses of beetles, Pliny does not gender witchcraft; however, his description of the antipathetic relationship between women’s bodies and various insects, including the beetle, implies, to use Katherine Park’s phrase, that the “secrets of women” are inherently associated with the occult.29 In a long discussion of the “monstrous nature” of menstruating women, Pliny explains, “whensoeuer they are in their fleurs, it skills not in what quarter of the Moone, if they goe about any field of corn with their nakednesse vncouered, yee shall see the canker wormes, caterpillars, beetles, and all such wormes and hurtfull vermine, to fall from the corn as they passe along.”30 The magnetism between women’s menstruating bodies and these insects rids fields of potential vermin. Though this affinity protects crops, Pliny implicitly links beetles and other insects to female monstrosity. Like beetles, women also avert the threat of strong storms: “If a woman whiles her monthly sicknesse is vpon her, bee set into the wind abroad with her belly naked, she will scar away hailestorms, whirlewindes, and lightenings .  .  . any violence of the weather whatsoeuer.”31 The elusive force of menstruating women and beetles in part sheds light on their ambivalent treatment; just as menstruating women offer protection but are “apt to breed diseases incureable,” beetles defend against witchcraft but are still, in Erasmus’s eyes, “contemptible.”32 As I will show, the occult powers of both women and beetles come into sharper focus during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though Pliny does not attribute these magical properties to the insect’s divine history, he acknowledges that “the greater part of Aegypt honour all beetles, and adore them as gods, or at least hauing some

BotelhoV1-final.indb 180

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

181

diuine power in them” because they identify “some resemblance between the operations and works of the Sun, and this flie.”33 That Pliny addresses the Egyptians’ “cerimoniall devotion” of the insect speaks not just to the breadth of his project but to the beetle’s early associations with both the divine and the foreign. Though Pliny and other naturalists recognize the beetle as a fairly common insect, Egyptian reverence for the insect is supplemented with language that depicts beetles in relation to that which is considered foreign, asocial, or strange. After Holland’s translation of Pliny, the most extensive treatment of the insect in seventeenth-century England appears in Moffett’s Theater of Insects, first published in 1634 and later in Topsell’s 1658 Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents.34 Though Moffett often revises or expands upon the claims of his predecessors, his familiarity with both Pliny and Erasmus is evident throughout, and his treatment of the insect is equally perplexed. At times, Moffett desperately attempts to redeem the beetle, “the basest of the insects,” arguing that although the insect is “nothing but a crust,” this very fact should “teach us modesty, temperance, labour, magnanimity, justice, and prudence.”35 In recounting the war between the beetle and the eagle, Moffett cites and often quotes Erasmus, drawing attention to the insect’s “courage” and “boldness” while arguing, like the author of his source text, that “if any man . . . view this contemptible creature nearer . . . he will desire to be a Beetle rather than an Eagle.”36 Aware that his readers might scoff at the thought of a house made of dung, Moffett commends the beetle for its “wit and ingenuity” and notes that physicians use on occasion “the bloud, the flesh, the urine . . . and dung of living creatures.”37 For Moffett too, the beetle resembles the “Commander in an Army” because of its “warlike march with a horrid and terrible humming.”38 Citing Pliny, Moffett also argues that the beetle’s medicinal qualities should shift readers’ perception of the insect. According to “Magicians and Physitians,” beetles, when worn around the neck, prevent “childrens diseases”; men carry beetles in purses; and beetles, engraved in stone and worn as a ring, are particularly valuable when seeking advancement from a king at court.39 Moffett also mentions that beetles are used to treat a number of other ailments, including agues, hemorrhoids, convulsion, ear and heart pain, epidemical headaches, and dropsy.40 While Moffett does not propose that beetles and women share similar occult powers, he notes that dung beetles are used to “help the pains

BotelhoV1-final.indb 181

11/9/22 1:36 PM

182

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

of the womb . . . provoke urine and monethly termes . . . [and] procure Abortion.”41 The candor with which Moffett speaks of abortion is surprising, particularly in comparison to the more veiled phrases found in contemporaneous herbals that purport to assist women instead with “purg[ing] . . . after their deliverance . . . expell[ing] the secondines, the dead childe, and vnnatural birth.”42 Abortion was banned in England in the thirteenth century and was tried as murder in English ecclesiastical courts.43 However, phrases such as “unnatural birth” and “dead child” do not specify whether the fetus was dead before or after the use of abortifacients.44 Although beetles aid in treating a number of ailments, their use as an abortifacient associates them with illicit female knowledge and behavior. In his narration of the Aesopic fable, Erasmus also characterizes the beetle as an abortive figure, explaining that eagles require a “precious stone” called aetite (the Greek word for eagle) in their nests in order to lay and hatch their eggs. Erasmus writes, “This [stone] was the great treasure which the beetle threw out of the nest, so as to destroy all hope of future parenthood. . . . [The eagle] saw the loss of the precious jewel; she wailed, she cried, she howled, she shrieked, she lamented, she called on the gods.”45 Erasmus slightly complicates Aesop’s tale, emphasizing to a much greater extent the enormity of the eagle’s loss and, by extension, the beetle’s act as one of sheer cruelty rather than justified revenge. Although Moffett does not condemn abortion (as is the case with some naturalists and physicians), Erasmus’s account of the beetle’s violence speaks perhaps more directly to early modern attitudes surrounding abortifacients and contraceptives. That the dung beetle is used as an abortifacient is particularly interesting, given its mysterious capacity to regenerate and the common perception of the insect as exclusively male. Moffett explains that dung beetles “have no females, but have their generation from the Sun; they make great balls with their hinder feet, and drive them the contrary way, like the Sun it observes a circuit of 28 daies.”46 Pliny too comments that “Asses carrion turne to be Beetle flies, by a certain metamorphosis which Nature maketh,” and in a marginal note, Holland writes, “All these beetles be counted of the male sex, & none of them female: for in those little roundles of earth there breed grubs, which turne to be in the end beetles.”47 In his discussion of the insect’s militaristic qualities, Erasmus specifies that “there are no females in the beetle kind, but

BotelhoV1-final.indb 182

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

183

are male.”48 Cambefort observes that the beetle’s self-begotteness led to Christian interpretations of the insect as “an equivalent for Christ.”49 While early modern theological discourses regard the insect as both surprisingly divine and uncomfortably profane, the beetle’s strange form of generation is not, I would argue, unrelated to its perceived efficacy as an abortifacient. In offering a model of generation that is exclusively male and one that in some accounts relies on the cyclical rhythm of the cosmos, the beetle perverts Aristotelian and Galenic-Hippocratic theories of reproduction by emphasizing the irrelevance of the female body.50 Its use as an abortifacient demonstrates another form of reproductive perversion: the female body is not exactly unnecessary here but becomes, in conjunction with the beetle, aberrant by controlling the course of the pregnancy, an act deemed punishable by law. As such, the beetle’s associations with reproduction not only allude to its own mysterious generation in dung but also underscore the agential and highly suspect power of women when bonded with beetles. Unlike Erasmus, Moffett does not end his chapter by explicitly disparaging beetles, but instead comments on the hue of their shells, ultimately establishing a strange color-based hierarchy. The dung beetle, for example, has a “darkish bright blew colour, with a notable shining.”51 The rarer “greenish or Emerald” tree-beetle “is so delightsome and beneficial to the eyes, that [one] can never be weary of it; for the longer you look upon it, the more you would be in love with it.”52 Another beetle, known as “Equus Lunae” or “Moons Horse,” is “beautified with a half Moon.”53 While Moffett does not immediately compare the shades of various beetles, he follows these descriptions with a verse that he attributes to the late fifteenth–early sixteenth-century German humanist Philesius: Which, rolling bals of dung this potter frames, Some black, like the scorcht Moor are seen, The nobler sort are deckt with green: [The] back hath (to compare great things with small) A mark, you may the half Moon call. The English call’t the Moons horse, so renown’d, But had there e’re so fair been found, Many a Semiramis would love us then, And Centaures had out numbred men.54

BotelhoV1-final.indb 183

11/9/22 1:36 PM

184

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Moffett’s comparison between the dung beetle’s black shell and “the scorcht Moor” draws on a common early modern racial trope that attributes black skin to the heat of the sun. Hall argues that although this climatic theory was largely discounted by the expansion of trade, “speculating on the sources of complexion (which is always written as a search for the origins of blackness) becomes an important mode for sorting out Western conceptions of humanity.55 At the same time that Moffett sorts out beetles, he dehumanizes dark-skinned Moors. Distinguishing black beetles (and, by extension, Moors) from beetles and peoples of other, “nobler” hues, Moffett establishes a human and nonhuman racial hierarchy that explicitly equates skin color with moral virtue. In the case of Moffett’s poem, the value the speaker places on non-“scorcht” hues does not merely communicate ideas about aesthetic beauty but supports white supremacist thought as it emphasizes the ignobleness of blackness. In the poem’s remaining lines, Moffett more directly underscores the value of whiteness by turning to the exotic and the mythological to insinuate the impossibility of a fair beetle. Hall explains that more often than not, early modern texts figure blackness in opposition to fairness rather than whiteness, commonly relying on such signifiers to indicate the appearance or moral states of women.56 Moffett’s “fair beetle,” what he deems as a biological impossibility, is desirable to Semiramis and centaurs alike because of its “fair” temperament and complexion; it is presumably more noble than even the green moonkissed beetle of the poem’s first few lines. In early modern literature, centaurs typically represented lust, illogical aggression, and the synthesis of human and bestial qualities.57 Although the period’s literature often commended the Babylonian queen for her politic rule and valor, Semiramis was also known as a “woman crazed with lust, whose passions allegedly extended even to bulls and horses.”58 The poem positions these two (and I should include here “many a Semiramis” as well) as complementary figures, whose unbridled passions led them to desire even a “fair” beetle, so much so that they would extend “love” to their implied enemies or pursue war, “outnumb[ering] men.” While the speaker ridicules such affections, implicitly comparing the minuteness of the insect to the extremes of love and war, what remains under the surface of these lines is the fetishization of white skin. According to the poem, had such fairness been in reach of the not quite human centaur

BotelhoV1-final.indb 184

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

185

and the Babylonian woman (she too a Moor by most early modern estimations), the world of Moffett’s readers would have taken a very different shape. The end of Moffett’s chapter on the insect is as much a catalog of various beetles as it is a meditation on the aesthetic and moral inferiority of blackness. Moffett proceeds with the poem by again reiterating that while “most of the Beetles are . . . black,” “others are a more pleasant green.”59 He then describes black beetles as “all over black, or russet rather, as if it were clad in mourning. . . . It seldom flies, but goes for the most part, and murmurs while it is going, as lewd servants use to do.”60 Moffett ascribes to the creaturely behavior of the insect the habits of “lewd servants,” their remarks seemingly comparable to the beetle’s hum. Yet Moffett’s class commentary is not inseparable from his repeated focus on the beetle’s dark hue. In disparaging the beetle’s blackness and even its semblance of mourning—an affective expression appropriate only, as Claudius and Gertrude remind Hamlet, for particular lengths of time—Moffett connects images of servitude, lewdness, and excessive melancholy to black insects and blackness more broadly. The “scorcht Moor” in the preceding poem comes to stand for the “lewd servant” Moffett decries just moments later.

“Accursedly blinde”: Religion and Witchcraft Early modern religious discourses echo the unease Pliny, Erasmus, and Moffett express toward the insect; the beetle becomes, in spiritual texts, a common symbol of corruption and moral blindness, an association that may have come into being because of the belief that beetles die by being blinded by the sun.61 In The Sinners Safetie, Richard Bernard, for example, writes, “Accursedly blinde, therefore, as beetles are our Antichristian aduersaries, who hauing so many ends of good workes prescribed plainely by the Word, yet cannot see them, but haue added one of their owne, against all truth, against the honour of Christ, yea and a mans owne saluation.”62 Bernard conceives of non-Christians in terms that emphasize their inhumanity and physical difference, their inability to see or conceive of good works. The somatic difference of non-Christians is only implicit here in their comparison to beetles; however, as Loomba argues, religious difference in early modern discourse

BotelhoV1-final.indb 185

11/9/22 1:36 PM

186

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

presumed “to confer certain moral as well as physical traits.”63 The beetle’s supposed blindness thus becomes a way in which Bernard can emphasize not only the moral ineptitude of his “Antichristian aduersaries,” but also their physical difference from Christians, who more readily perceive good deeds. Like Bernard, John Yates, in Gods Arraignment of Hypocrites, negotiates religious, physical, and moral difference through the supposed depravity of the beetle, taking Bernard’s condemnation of beetle-like men a step further: “The Sunne doth harden the durt, and melt the waxe; so the wicked being the filth of the world, cannot be stamped with the beames of Gods wisdome, but are hardened: Fire maketh the gold to shine, and the straw to smother; perfumes refresh the doues, but kill the beetles: so the fire of Gods word smothereth in the wicked, and the verie sweetnesse of it kills them.”64 Yates exploits the beetle’s creatureliness, its home in dung, to damn “the wicked,” the beetle becoming here synonymous with moral corruption and, like the fly in Perry Guevara’s chapter in this book on Titus Andronicus, a “figure of killability.” Though Yates does not term such men non-Christians, he emphasizes the impossibility of their conversion, that they cannot be “stamped” with “Gods wisdome.” A somatic marker of morality, God’s wisdom physically differentiates the wicked from the good, thus making the world’s beetles, their filth, visible; God’s word is, in fact, so repellent that its “sweetnesse . . . kills them.” The bodily difference and vulnerability Yates imagines demonstrate the intersection of religion and race (as somatic difference), typical of the period, while shedding light on how attempts at human categorization relied on the world’s invertebrate to differentiate the corrupt from the moral, the foreign from the familiar. Religious discourse, like Bernard’s and Yates’s, existed alongside and likely informed accounts of witchcraft that implicate beetles. John Cotta, in his treatise on witchcraft, explains that witches use “the ministery of liuing creatures, or of Diuels and Spirits in their likeness . . . for the promoting of their Diuelish deuices.”65 As evidence, Cotta cites a witch in France who confessed to offering “vnto his Divell or Spirit a Beetle.”66 The beetle serves as a bartering tool, a creature the witch offers the devil or spirit in exchange for “bring[ing] [his] cursed Sorcery vnto their wished end.”67 Like the “fair” beetle in Moffett’s verse, the beetle becomes an object of monstrous or aberrant desires, worthy of devilish devices, or in the case of the centaurs and Semiramis, a creature that could have altered the shape of the world.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 186

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

187

The beetle plays a more prominent role in William Stansby’s Witches Apprehended, Examined, and Executed, an account of a legal case involving Mother Sutton and her daughter, Mary Sutton, both of whom were executed in Bedfordshire for practicing witchcraft. The Sutton case follows a fairly familiar pattern in that it involved a widowed, postmenopausal woman, a trial by water, and suckling. As Ken MacMillan explains, “Witches forsook God and consorted with the Devil, who entered into a covenant written in their own blood.  .  .  . Suckling was typically done by the familiar on a ‘third nipple.’ ”68 Stansby explains that Mother Sutton lived free of suspicion among the townspeople for many years, providing her with the opportunity to make her daughter into “a scholler to the Diuell himselfe” and “as perfect [as her] in her diuellish charmes.”69 The night provided these women with the necessary cloak of protection, allowing them to “contriue their wicked purposes.” In stressing that Mother Sutton carried on these activities despite repeated livestock deaths and illnesses, Stansby frames witches as an insidious threat—the dangerous within the domestic—the monster that, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes, is “an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within.”70 Stansby relates several somewhat convoluted incidents, incited by a conflict between Mary Sutton’s son and the well-respected servant of a neighbor. One of these incidents involves the slight but pernicious touch of a beetle: The same old seruant of Master Engers within few daies after going to plough, fell into talke of Mother Sutton, and of Mary Sutton her daughter, of what pranckes hee had heard they had plaide thereabouts in the Countrey, as also what accidents had befallen him and his fellow, as they had passed to and from Bedford. In discoursing of which a Beetle came, and stroke the same fellow on the breast: and hee presently fell into a trance as he was guiding the Plough, the extremitie whereof was such, as his senses altogether distract, and his bodie and minde vtterly distempered. This beetle, as readers are led to assume, is a familiar of Mother and Mary Sutton and leaves the old man critically ill. According to Stansby’s account, Mary Sutton visits him at night and tells him that “if hee

BotelhoV1-final.indb 187

11/9/22 1:36 PM

188

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

would consent she should come to bedde to him, [and] hee should be restored to his former health and prosperitie.” Through “diuine assistance,” the servant recovers his strength and is able to repel the young woman’s advances and “giue repulse to her assault, and deniall to her filthie and detested motion: and to vpbraide her of her abhominable life and behauiour, hauing before had three bastards and neuer married.” As Stansby emphasizes, the inappropriateness of the women’s behavior takes many forms; not only have they raised ill-mannered children, but as the servant’s rebuke makes clear, they are also suspect figures because of Mary’s Sutton’s illicit sexual behavior. The emphasis on her aberrant sexuality sensualizes the beetle’s curious “stroke” upon the servant’s breast. As her familiar, the beetle is inextricably linked to her body, in part pursuing what Mary Sutton proposes, and in a later scene, as it comes, in the form of a spirit, to give suck. The beetle, like the women in this account, poses a seemingly slight but ultimately immeasurable threat. Just as Mother and Mary Sutton lurk about the town at night, it moves unnoticed, the extent of its power undiscovered, able to creep onto a servant’s chest as it enacts these women’s desires. In becoming a conduit of medical and sexual havoc, the beetle in the Sutton case is again a figure that encapsulates early modern anxieties surrounding the occult and female sexuality.

Sycorax’s Beetles I return finally to Sycorax’s beetles. As I proposed at the start of this chapter, the various discourses surrounding the beetle complicate the assumption that Caliban threatens Prospero with their presence simply because they elicit universal feelings of fear. Perhaps audiences may have wondered whether Caliban calls on his mother’s beetles to conjure calm seas and gentle winds, potentially altering the course of Prospero’s plans. And perhaps here, the affinity between beetles and women—their shared ability to alter the elements—may have reminded audiences of their use as abortifacients and amulets. It is also possible that audiences may have recalled here Sycorax’s geographical roots (a detail Prospero insists Ariel note just moments earlier) in part because of her access to the occult, but also due to the myriad texts that associate the blackness of beetles with ontological darkness and human sin.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 188

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle

|

189

And if so, audiences may have also considered, in this moment, the various religious discourses that equate beetles to “antichristian aduersaries” and “the filth of the world,” thus noting that in Prospero’s eyes, Sycorax is a woman “damn’d.” It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what audiences thought about beetles as they watched Shakespeare’s play. The many diverse, though often overlapping, discourses surrounding the insect suggest that audiences likely understood the beetle as an insect at once familiar and foreign, of England and of the old and new worlds, of the Earth and of the occult. More specifically, that Shakespeare associates beetles with Sycorax, a North African witch known in the play by her supposed cruelty, sheds light on how anxieties surrounding femininity, blackness, and the occult were explored on the early modern stage. As writers from Pliny to Moffett demonstrate, beetles and, I would argue, insects more generally fascinate because of their strange creatureliness, their insistent though often unwanted presence providing natural historians figures through which to scrutinize human difference. The Aesopic legacy of the beetle, the impulse to allegorize the nonhuman, appears not only in natural histories such as Pliny’s and Moffett’s, but also in religious discourses that even more explicitly construe insects as examples of human and specifically non-Christian sin. The beetle’s presence in the period’s spiritual texts, as well as its medicinal and occult uses, likely leads to its uneasy associations with witchcraft. What is apparent in these different discourses is the inclination to categorize and chronicle moral depravity along axes of embodied difference. For these writers, the beetle offers an opportunity to condemn ontological blackness, religious difference, aberrant female sexuality, and the mysteries of women’s bodies. Studying even the “lowest species of insect” (to use Erasmus’s words) reveals the currents of anxiety that made their way to the early modern stage as well as the pervasive impulse to further white supremacist ideologies during a period of global expansion and trade.71 Notes 1. Shakespeare, Tempest, 1.2.264, 263. 2. Ibid., 1.2.339–40. 3. Shakespeare’s use of shard has been, historically, for editors, a textual crux. Some argue that shard refers to the quality of the beetle’s wing, while

BotelhoV1-final.indb 189

others maintain that it refers to dung. Some propose that shard’s meaning depends on the context of the passage. Billings’s study of the word in Shakespeare supports the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of shard as

11/9/22 1:36 PM

190

4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

dung (“Squashing the ‘Shard-Borne Beetle’ Crux”). Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew, 2.2.32. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2.2.22; Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.2.42–44. Shakespeare, Tempest, 1.2.261. Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 22. Aesop, Aesop’s Fables, 79–80. Erasmus, Erasmus on His Times, 61. Ibid. Ibid., 62. Ibid. Ibid., 64–65. Ibid., 65. Ibid. Maxwell, “Wax Magic,” 32. Ibid. Erasmus, Erasmus on His Times, 74. Cambefort, “Sacred Insect,” 207. Hall, Things of Darkness, 4. Ibid. In addition to examples from Shakespeare’s plays, Billings, “Squashing the ‘Shard-Borne Beetle’ Crux,” notes that Edmund Spenser relates a version of the fable in the fourth sonnet of “Visions of the Worlds Vanitie” and that Geff rey Whitney describes the beetle’s “fi lthie, vile, and base” “delites” in his highly circulated Choice of Emblemes. Pliny, Natural History, 326. Ibid. Ibid., 369. Erasmus’s suggestion that readers wear emerald images of beetles seems to conflate the form and use of these two treatments. Pliny, Natural History, 379. Ibid., 398. Ibid., 325–26. Park, Secrets of Women. Pliny, Natural History, 308. Ibid. Erasmus, Erasmus on His Times, 74. Pliny, Natural History, 390.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 190

34. Topsell inherited the project in 1588 from Thomas Penny, an English physician who began work on the project in the 1570s. Topsell attempted but failed to publish the manuscript during his lifetime. 35. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1010. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 1010–11. 38. Ibid., 1011. 39. Ibid., 1012. 40. Ibid., 1006, 1012, 1017. 41. Ibid., 1012. 42. Gerard, Herball, 547. 43. Gradwohl, “Herbal Abortifacients,” 48–49. 44. Ibid., 54. 45. Erasmus, Erasmus on His Times, 69. 46. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 488. 47. Pliny, Natural History, 322, 390. 48. Erasmus, Erasmus on His Times, 64. 49. Cambefort, “Sacred Insect,” 203. 50. According to the Aristotelian model, only men contributed seed in the production of the fetus; however, women’s menstrual blood nourished the fetus in the womb. In the GalenicHippocratic model, both men and women contributed seed. See Toulalan, “If slendernesse,” 177. 51. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1013. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 1014. 54. Ibid. 55. Hall, Things of Darkness, 95. Other theories attributed blackness to the curse of Ham, the fall of Phaeton, and the erroneous use of cosmetics. See also Iyengar, Shades of Difference, and Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race. 56. Hall, Things of Darkness, 9. 57. Raber, Animal Bodies, 69. 58. Hopkins, Cultural Uses of the Caesars, 137. In Titus Andronicus, both Aaron and Lavinia refer to Tamora as “Semiramis.” 59. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1014.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Beetle 60. Ibid. 61. Moffett writes, “Some say they die being blinded by the Sun; but the most think they are choked by lice” (ibid., 1010). 62. Bernard, Sinners Safetie, 33–34. 63. Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism, 25.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

|

191

Yates, Gods Arraignment of Hypocrites. Cotta, Triall of Witch- Craft, 91. Ibid. Ibid. MacMillan, Stories of True Crime, 84. Stansby, Witches Apprehended. Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 7. Erasmus, Erasmus on His Times, 61.

Bibliography Aesop. Aesop’s Fables. Translated by Laura Gibbs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Bernard, Richard. The Sinners Safetie. London, 1609. Billings, Thomas. “Squashing the ‘ShardBorne Beetle’ Crux: A Hard Case with a Few Pat Readings.” Shakespeare Quarterly 56, no. 4 (2005): 434–47. Cambefort, Yves. “A Sacred Insect.” In Insect Poetics, edited by Eric C. Brown. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Cohen, Jeff rey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeff rey Cohen. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Cotta, John. The Triall of Witch- Craft. London, 1616. Erasmus, Desiderius. Erasmus on His Times. Translated by Margaret Mann Phillip. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967. Floyd-Wilson, Mary. English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003. Gerard, John. The Herball of Generall Historie of Plantes. London, 1597. Gradwohl, Alex. “Herbal Abortifacients and Their Classical Heritage in Tudor England.” Penn History Review 20, no. 1 (2013): 44–71. Hall, Kim F. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 191

Hopkins, Lisa. The Cultural Uses of the Caesars on the English Renaissance Stage. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Iyengar, Sujata. Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Loomba, Ania. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. MacMillan, Ken. Stories of True Crime in Tudor and Stuart England. New York: Routledge, 2005. Maxwell, Lynn. “Wax Magic and The Duchess of Malfi.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2014): 31–54. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Park, Katherine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Women, and the Origins of Human Dissection. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2006. Pliny. Natural History. Translated by Philemon Holland. London, 1601. Raber, Karen. Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016. ———. Macbeth. Edited by Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2015.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

192

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

———. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017. ———. Romeo and Juliet. Edited by René Weis. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2012. ———. The Taming of the Shrew. Edited by Barbara Hodgdon. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2010. ———. The Tempest. Edited by Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2011.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 192

Stansby, William. Witches Apprehended, Examined, and Executed. London, 1613. Toulalan, Sarah. “ ‘If slendernesse be the cause of unfruitfulnesse; you must nourish and fatten the body’: Thin Bodies and Infertility in Early Modern England.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History, edited by Gayle Davis and Tracey Loughran. London: Palgrave, 2017. Yates, John. Gods Arraignment of Hypocrites. London, 1615.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 12

SPIDER The Renaissance of Spiders: Ambivalence, Beauty, Terror, Art

Mary Baine Campbell

Sweet Poetry’s A flower where men, like Bees and Spiders, may Bear poison, or else sweets and Wax away. —Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Four Playes

Not anie damsezell, which her vaunteth most In skilfull knitting of soft silken twine; Nor anie weaver, which his worke doth boast In dieper, in damaske, or in lyne; Nor anie skil’d in workmanship embost; Nor anie skil’d in loupes of fingering fine, Might in their divers cunning ever dare, With this so curious networke to compare. —Edmund Spenser, “Muiopotmos”

But yet this is the most strange, deseruing the greatest admiration of all, that all those persons vvhich are bytten or wounded by any Tarantula, they wil daunce so wel, with such good grace & measure, and sing so sweetly, and

BotelhoV1-final.indb 193

11/9/22 1:36 PM

194

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

withall descant it so finely and tunably, as though they had spent all their life-time in some dauncing and singing-schoole. —Thomas Moffett, Theater of Insects

Probably no other insect provokes a more immediate visceral response than the spider (admittedly not an insect, but classed as one by most early modern observers). Those who have had to deal with lice wince at the recollection, scorpions are scary but rare, and butterflies lovely but one can ignore them. What other tiny cold-blooded creature has generated its very own phobia? What other is so dually gendered in the imagination? Is represented as the Maker of the World in several societies, or at least as a goddess? What other tiny cold-blooded creature is so useful to human societies yet so frightening to human beings?1 The immense affective terrain of the spider is attested to and invoked in early modern literature, both poetic and “scientific” or philosophical. It may have lost some of its complexity for the contemporary middle class (though Spider-Man’s appeal to the marginal and abject is stronger than ever, and Spider-Woman, still not star of her own Marvel film, thrives in tattoos and homemade YouTube videos): phobias develop best in isolation from their objects. We have fewer spiders in our homes; most people live in cities, with fewer gardens, fewer reasons to thank the spider for its curatorial work or take pleasure in the new web at dawn. The too-light touch of a spider’s feet on our sleeping skin may now invoke horror. It did not always and everywhere, but there was always fear possible, as well as admiration, respect, and even affection, and the creature seems to have had both a male and a female identity— often at once. The calmer story of the bee is one of a gradual shift from the idea of the “king bee” to the idea and fact of the queen bee, largely motivated by the work of natural historians. The spider’s story is a tangled web. Even in her 400-page book on the spider as symbol, Sylvia BallestraPuesch gives an account of only part of its European history. Its trace goes back further than she takes it, if we include the story of Arachne in the history of the spider, to an oil flask of about 600 BCE.2 Its trace as a biological being goes back 300 million years or so, to the time of the dinosaurs, and spiders are depicted in the bellies of fish in the ancient cave paintings of Australia’s Arnhem Land, drawn by people who were

BotelhoV1-final.indb 194

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

195

Figure 1.12.1. Thomas Moffett, The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures, in Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts (London, 1658). Courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library.

not yet gardeners. It is not surprising in a creature so ancient, whose representational traces are so ancient, that a surfeit of meaning would have built up in and around it and an abundance of human feeling and propensity projected into it, stored there, often out of sight—as in the caves of Arnhem Land, the corners of unused rooms, the watermark of the page.3 This chapter explores a few particularities of the spider as Renaissance image, idea, and creature or, rather, the image and idea of the creature during the ascendancy of natural history as a discipline, genre, and form of sociability, before the consolidation of modern zoology and

BotelhoV1-final.indb 195

11/9/22 1:36 PM

196

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

entomology.4 The poetic and natural-historical spider are close in a time and place where attention to empirical detail crossed generic boundaries: poetry, prose fiction, natural history, mirabilia—all blossomed with detail, and the minute observation and realism of texture in the visual arts is celebrated, especially in art from northern Europe. The affect of exuberance encompassed what we now read—though Moffett did not quite—as separate cognitive realms, separate regimes of knowledge. Exemplary texts include the Elizabethan playwright John Heywood’s allegorical epic, The Spider and the Flie: The Parable of the Spider and the Flie (1556); Edmund Spenser’s exquisite epyllion, “Muiopotmos” (1590); Thomas Cooper’s antipapist diatribe, The Romish Spider (1606); Johannes Goedaert’s Metamorphem et Historum Naturalem Insectorum Libri Tres (1662–1669, translated into English in 1682); his translator Lister’s own De Araneis (1678); and of course Thomas Moffett’s Theater of Insects. The later letters of John Ray and Lister first claim the status of “flying-insects” for spiders, Ray giving Lister pride of place: “The flying or sailing of spiders though the air is, for aught I know, your discovery; from you I had the first intimation and knowledge of it. Dr. Hulse acquainted me with no more than the shooting out their threads.”5 But something else exemplary will occupy our attention for a moment: the absence of spiders. The first thing that strikes a curious investigator into the spider’s Renaissance is, besides the emotional variability of contemporary associations, the relative paucity of treatments. Europe’s first great entomologist, Marcello Malpighi, displays no interest in spiders (despite his fascination with reproduction and eggs, which spiders do a complex and dramatic job with), nor does Jan Swammerdam’s 1669 work on insects, Historia Insectorum Generalis, contain any mention of spiders (not yet separately categorized as “arachnids”).6 Nor does his magisterial continuation and update, known in the 1670s but published only posthumously (by Hermann Boerhaave in 1737 and 1738) as Der Bybel der Natuure in Dutch and then Latin. A collection of French allegorical poems on insects of 1643, probably by Pierre Parrin (Malpighi and Swammerdam’s contemporary, France’s first librettist), similarly eschews the spider, as do the so-called metaphysical poets. Proverbs are not plentiful either: the spider does not appear in Charles G. Smith’s Spenser’s Proverb Lore (despite the “Muiopotmos”!) or in a pamphlet in the British Library titled “Scottish proverbs” (a date of 1645 is penciled on the flyleaf), and it is attested in only one

BotelhoV1-final.indb 196

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

197

proverb in the “General Index” of Morris Palmer Tilley’s Elizabethan Proverb Lore: “Where the bee makes honey, the spider sucks poison.”7 Yet enthusiasm among naturalists existed, as attested by Martin Lister’s English Spiders (De Araneis) and his letters about spider flight with Ray (February–March 1671, New Style), and as seen, of course, in the earlier mosaic that forms the common text of this collection, Moffett’s Theater of Insects.8 This is not inexplicable: spiders had long had a place in the European imaginary, not to mention in gardens, which were having a resurgence in the period, and illustrated Renaissance editions of Ovid’s Metamorphosis brought Arachne back into the active file of icons (see figure 1.12.3). But it is notable that interest among naturalists seems rare, though Moffett would devote five chapters to the wingless spider in his sixteenth-century compilation of “insects.”9 It appears that the spider was to be avoided. Ray, for instance, writes very little about them, leaving them to his brilliant young protégé, Francis Willoughby, because, as he admits to Lister, “partim quoniam ob veneni suspicionem vix tractabiles sint hae bestiolae, mihi praesertim, qui ab ineunte aetate vulgari praejudicio abreptus, ab iis nonnihil etiamnum abhorream” (partly because these little creatures are hard to deal with for fear of the venom, especially for me, who, seized from an early age by the common prejudice, even now shudder at them somewhat).10 Nehemiah Grew would not write about them either. I sympathize, having been terrified as a child by English drain spiders in the tub, in the days before British tubs featured traps in their drains. Not that indoor plumbing was common in Ray’s or Grew’s day, but they will have seen those spiders too. One is featured on the page displaying varieties of spiders in the translation of Moffett published with Topsell.11 Spiders had a bad reputation in collections of antidotes, where they drop malignantly into the bishop’s chalice at the consecration of the Mass or are otherwise swallowed to ill effect. Shakespeare psychologizes this tradition in A Winter’s Tale in an early gesture toward the concept of the phobic: There may be in the cup A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge Is not infected: but if one present The abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known

BotelhoV1-final.indb 197

11/9/22 1:36 PM

198

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (2.1.39–45) The lack of a commercial use for spiders or spider silk was another reason that an insect whose representation boasts such antiquity and poetic power could not always make it as a subject of natural history. But this too explains less than it might. The mayfly was even less commercial—not even useful in the garden—but nonetheless an object of considerable interest in entomological compilations such as Moffett’s, Swammerdam’s Ephemeri Vita, and Jan Jonston’s Historiae Naturalis de Insectiis.12 And by 1710 François-Xavier Bon Saint Hilaire, a member of several scientific societies and prominent citizen of Montpellier, had composed what seems to have been his inaugural lecture as president of Montpellier’s Royal Academy of Sciences, on the subject of medical uses of spider silk that he calls “Gouttes de Montpellier.”13 Given his expression of pride in their superiority to the “Gouttes d’Angleterre,” it appears the English had been at work on these as well, but Moffett, in book 2, chapter 15, “Of the Generation, Copulation, and Use of Spiders,” mentions spider medicines only from classical sources: Dioscorides, Galen, and others. The first medical use Bon mentions is a tonic for the blood: “Alexterites pour purifier la masse du sang, pour animer et lui donner de la fluidité” (Alexterites for purifying the matter in the blood, to enliven it and make it more fluid). “Hipteriques,” mixed with Genevre and Rhuë or castor, are good to “appaiser les vapeurs qui viennent de la Matrice” (temper vapors from the womb) and the third, “Anadones” with laudanum and “l’Esence de Castor[,] font un merveilleux effet dans les maladies de douleur” (have a wonderful effect on illnesses associated with sorrow) such as colic, biliousness, and la nefretique (Bright’s disease).14 The elegantly scary image in figure 1.12.2 displays a seventeenthcentury French spider helmet (the legs also retreat), whose relation to the Roman god of battle, Minerva, is obvious but ambiguous, given her terrible punishment of Arachne for the sin of lively representation. Its usefulness seems more psychological than strictly protective—like the boar’s head helmets of Anglo-Saxon thegns centuries earlier but eerier. The image of a head gripped by the legs and presumably under the belly of a spider may have been no less unnerving to the mind of the cavalier within it than to those without. It beautifully expresses what strikes an investigator as the spider’s early modern affective terrain: its elegance,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 198

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

199

Figure 1.12.2. Cavalry Spider Helmet, France, 1600s. Iron with black paint. Overall: 30.2 × 21.3 × 17.7 cm. Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Severance 1921. 1258.

beauty, frightfulness, and useful beneficence, especially its power to protect—also highlighted in the story tradition of culture heroes on the run, saved by spiders who wove webs across the entrances to their hiding places. Somewhat less distressing, spiders can also be found as watermarks in the new technology of paper and books, a surreptitious kind of representation; the mediating link between spider and paper is clearly the textile.15 In general, they have a subordinate place in early modern European decorative arts to bees or butterflies. On the other hand, spiders have been millennially popular in Africa, Australia, and the indigenous societies of the New World, where many mythologies imagined (imagine) the spider as the weaver of the universe, a personification of God as “Maker”—just what enraged divine Minerva about Arachne’s presumption. These include the trickster Anansi in Ghana and now the Caribbean, inventing storytelling; the Hopi Spider Woman inventing the first animals, including first humans; and the Cherokee Grandmother Spider bringing light and the sun to the world as she travels along her web from east to west. Christianity usually represses zoomorphic representation of divine essences (“Nor is Osiris seen / In Memphian Grove, or Green, / Trampling the unshowr’d Grasse with lowings loud”); the ghostly watermark spiders are perhaps an elusive survival.16 The cobweb paintings of the Tyrol, which emerged in the sixteenth

BotelhoV1-final.indb 199

11/9/22 1:36 PM

200

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Figure 1.12.3. Arachne (Aragnes) hangs herself, becoming the spider behind her. From an earlier incunabulum: Giovanni Boccaccio, De Mulieribus Claris, trans. Steinhöwel, Ulm: Johannes Zainer (ca. 1474), xxiv verso. Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

century, seem related to the impulse to create a spider watermark: in both media, the image makes us see and feel the paper or painting surface as textile and thus as web.17 Ovid happily saved a place for spiders in story and image, and thus in early modern printed books, where both crude woodcuts and fine engravings proffer iconic scenes of Arachne-making images and being transformed into a spider. In figure 1.12.3, an image borrowed from Ovid by Boccaccio and illustrated in a 1593 German translation of De Mulieribus, Arachne’s suicide is foregrounded next to the messy, blood-red fabric hanging on her loom, while in the background, her immortality is ensured in the flat, black-and-white, geometric cosmos of an orb web filling available sky space, centered on a circular (and sixlegged!) spider-creator.18 This rich image summarizes the traditional ambivalence of European spider thought. Ovid influentially pinned his tragic tale of the human creator’s (the poet’s) fate to Arachne, the consummate artist transformed into a poisonous but ingenious spider by the envy of the weaver god Minerva—herself both creator as weaver and destroyer as battle god. Meanwhile, gardeners loved spiders, on which they depended and still depend, and poets such as La Fontaine recalled folk wisdom in the morality tale of “La Goutte et l’Araignée,” the story of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 200

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

201

two “daughters of Hell” equally “dreaded by the human race,” who must leave home and choose between life in a hut or a mansion.19 Gout goes to a poor man’s hut where he feeds on his meager toe, hungry and forced to keep busy as treatment for the pain, and the Spider to a mansion where a maid (descended from Arachne and parallel, as we’ll see, to Haywood’s spider-crushing maid in The Spider and the Flie) is always whisking her web away with a broom. Exhausted, the two agree to exchange homes, and all is well—the Gout well fed and idling about, the industrious Spider free to spin her webs and catch her dinner. They may both be daughters of Hell, but one is a role model and the other a disease of the lazy. Spenser’s 1590 mock epyllion, “Muiopotmos,” can be read as a jumbled enactment of the fatal scene of Arachne’s comparison of herself to the god Minerva, which it also embeds, with genders reversed or inverted (the antagonists both male, though one is a female-to-male transsexual butterfly and the other a spider identified as Arachne’s son). The punishment falls comically on an imagined, fictional spider—thus sparing its weaver, in this case Spenser.20 It is a peculiarly implicit, or better, implicate ekphrasis, the tapestries it depicts being both substance and subject.21 After the arming of the hero, the butterfly Clarion (a transgendered and transformed nymph of Venus, who was jealous of her skill at gathering flowers), we hear the story of Venus’s revenge, a picturesque version of the more toxic tale of Arachne’s metamorphosis: Eftsoons that Damsel by her heavenly Might, She turn’d into a winged Butterfly, In the wide Air to make her wandring Flight; And all those Flowres, with which so plenteously Her lap she filled had, that bred her Spight, She placed in her Wings, for memory Of her pretended Crime, though Crime none were: Since which that Fly them in her Wings doth bear.22 Clarion, girded now for battle in his ekphrastic outfit, soon encounters the spider Aragnoll, son of Arachne, and for her bitter sake a foe of beauty, or of representation itself. It was, after all, a tapestry like that decorating the wings of Clarion that wrecked Arachne’s life (and apparently Aragnoll’s personality), including among its woven images:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 201

11/9/22 1:36 PM

202

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

. . . a Butterflie, With excellent deuice and wondrous slight, Fluttering among the Olives wantonly That seem’d to liue. . . . (lines 329–32) Aragnoll avenges his weaver/spider mother by trapping Clarion in a purpose-woven cobweb compared to that woven by Vulcan to entrap the adulterous Venus in a tryst with Mars. And yet, Not anie damzell, which her vaunteth most In skillful knitting of soft silken twine; Nor anie weauer . . . . . . Might in their diuers cunning ever dare, With this so curious networke to compare. (lines 361–68) In the mazily infolded working of this poem, the ambiguous gender of the spider and hir toxified skill and patience are elaborated to the point of implosion, ending—mid-wound like the Aeneid—in a phallic murder that splits body from soul but does not quite exterminate either. The metamorphic career of the caterpillar/pupa/butterfly was known (and misunderstood) in Spenser’s time, though naturalists such as Conrad Gesner and Ulisse Aldrovandi, and even Topsell and Moffett later, trying to classify their insects (or as Brian Ogilvie suspects, their collections), were loath to put caterpillar and butterfly in the same category.23 But clearly the poem takes ammunition from the fact of natural metamorphosis, as it was termed, to manufacture a labyrinth in which identities might lose themselves. Just as clearly, this latency in the materia of the spider is awake again in our era of the Net. The earlier, longer spider poem of the sixteenth century, The Spider and the Flie (1556), by Mary Tudor’s tutor, John Heywood, is a different kettle of bugs: a political allegory, framed as a dream vision in the season of the Canterbury Tales (“In season what time euery growing thing / That ripeth by roote, hath liuely taken hart”) and the alliterative fair field of Piers Ploughman (“Grasse, leafe and flowre in field so flourishing”), and like them running to hundreds of pages, to which I cannot do justice in the space of this chapter.24 Judith Rice Henderson plausibly explains its peculiar composition—left unfinished in 1537,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 202

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

203

Figure 1.12.4. Maid crushing spider in Heywood, Spider and the Flie (London: Thomas Powell, 1556), Qq2v. Call #: STC 13308. Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

published nineteen years later during Mary Tudor’s reign—by categorizing it as a moral advice book for Heywood’s student, Princess Mary, suspended when it seemed she would never reign, finished and published when the tables turned just before her marriage to Philip II.25 Henderson turns away from attempts to find precise historical allegories in the fable, quoting David R. Hauser’s account of it as produced in the midst of political schism and crisis, “ ‘a dramatic presentation of social conditions and the lessons to be learned from history.’ Heywood portrays ‘the failures of the law courts, the economic grievances of agricultural workers, and the lack of any real temporal or spiritual authority.’ ”26 The pressing concerns of a nation undergoing a transition as profound as the Reformation and the relentless emergence of a rentier class are represented by the struggle between an aristocratic spider and a

BotelhoV1-final.indb 203

11/9/22 1:36 PM

204

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

common “flesh fly,” who sues the spider for encroaching on his customary right of access to a window by making his web in the middle instead of an upper corner. When the law case grows contentious, the struggle continues by other means: armed battle between a small, welldisciplined army of spiders and a large, disorderly one of rebel flies of all kinds—including butterflies and bees, though led by the “flesh fly.” Henderson links the protest of the fly to the issue More had raised in 1516, with Utopia’s focus on the enclosure of common land by an idle, parasitic class of baronial landlords.27 In the end, the spider army wins, despite its small numbers—yet its leader, the original defendant, loses, crushed by a housemaid who sides indignantly with the traditional rights insisted on by the fly. The humor of the diplomatic poem in shrinking the scale of what were fundamental social and political problems permits at once the faulting of Mary’s class and the reinforcement of the monarchy’s ancient role as defender of the people against the barons. Here the little spider, if ambivalent as a symbol, is clearly male, like his antagonist, and though our sympathies and the narrator’s tend to lie with the fly, the spider is not demonized. He will be male again, demonically so this time, “Romish” and swollen, in Cooper’s A Brand Taken Out of the Fire. The Romish Spider, with His Web of Treason. Woven and Broken, dedicated in 1606 to the Princess Elizabeth, a child living in Coventry when he was a minister there and for whom he was likely a tutor.28 Like Heywood’s poem, it could be seen as a tutor’s work of advice for a future queen: Concerning the Title, my purpose is therein to discouer the nature of our aduérsaries, who would haue done vs so great euill [i.e., the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, whose object was to assassinate James and set up Elizabeth, aged 9, as Catholic Queen of Britain]. A very cursed generation, and full of deadly poyson, extreamly cruell where they can preuaile: and yet by the Iustice of God, breeding their owne bane, when their sinne is full, euen bursting a sunder with the poyson thereof, and iustly confounded with their owne malice. So is the Spider, Yea as the Spiders Webbe is cunningly Wouen, and quickly broken, so are and shal be the deuises of our aduersaries: they shall not be established by their iniquitie: but their owne cunning hath and shall be their confusion.29

BotelhoV1-final.indb 204

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

205

An unambiguously Satanic spider perhaps, but not an unambiguous dedication. The spider was thus a challenge to seventeenth-century naturalists as writers, tending now toward natural philosophy rather than natural history. Its symbolic convenience as a sometimes venomous, generally secretive, gender-ambiguous, too-many-legged creature to some degree dampened interest in it (e.g., the reluctance of Willoughby and Grew to pay close attention, or Swammerdam and Malpighi’s negligence), and helped make it relatively unpopular as a topic.30 Ovid’s artist-Arachne had been largely moralized into subservience to piety and humility, her fate a degradation rather than the apotheosis the Hopi or Cherokee might have seen in it. One can read Lister’s English Spiders or his translations of the artist and naturalist Goedaert’s affectionate observations as flights from this saturated realm of judgment and polemic, or even from the anthropocentric kingdom of the earlier naturalists, Moffett and the others, where the spider’s mixed good and evil qualities seem anchored in its contrary uses as toxin and medicine but are still expressed as moral qualities.31 Lister’s work on Goedaert’s mess of observations, as he Englished them, is a pattern for the seventeenth-century metamorphosis of representation of the nonhuman world—a cultural phenomenon becoming important as such. A kind of proto-posthumanism followed the anthologies of “travels” and ethnographic information, the atlases, the idea of geography as locating commercial resources: fur, fish, gold, arable land, guaiacum. (This turn in the direction of Ding an Sich may explain Swammerdam’s volume on the commercially useless, nonsocial “MayFlie” and its fellow ephemeri: 420 pages in Dutch, the English abridgment published in quarto.) Development in the biological and spatial areas of natural inquiry seemed to pull away from a human center, even investigating the possibility of an artificial, deculturated, mathematized language for describing, organizing, and storing data about the unhuman, in the “real character” and universal language schemes of natural philosophers such as John Wilkins, Francis Lodowyck, and George Dalgarno. Many were thinking about it who did not themselves publish a universal language scheme, including giants such as Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, and John Locke. Goedaert’s deeply attentive observations of living things are a pleasure to read, but their uncategoried profusion annoyed Lister, who

BotelhoV1-final.indb 205

11/9/22 1:36 PM

206

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

tried to bring them to order in his English translation, later publishing his own seriously taxonomized work on spiders as part 1 of Historiae Animalium Angliae (1678).32 His introduction to Goedaert’s papers begins thus: “I am not satisfied, that he ever intended to publish these Papers: or that He aimed at any thing more, then to please and gratifie his Fancy, and the excellent skill he had in Limning. And this appeares from the almost totall neglect of descriptions, which he had sufficient opportunity [sic], to have well performed, and Goedartius .  .  . above all, the little advancement he seemes to have made .  .  . in the nature of Insects, after 40. Yeares . . . daily conversing with them: so that he seemes rather, to have diverted with them, then to have given himselfe the trouble of well understanding them.”33 As a delicious quotation from Goedaert reveals, “conversing” and “diverting” himself with them are precise characterizations, but from our point of view, in an era possessed of lively posthumanist animal studies, his understanding of spiders may rather seem keen: On the Day time these Spiders are wont to rest . . . but in the Night time they play together; for then they are often seen to take hold of one anothers feet, and so to fall upon the ground, and when they play thus together, they do not hurt themselves; for when they fall upon the ground their long feet being streched out, they fall on them like Cats: As soon as they fall they presently rise again, and straddling with their Thighs, they ascend the Wall with a Stilt-like motion: They often also Fight so, that they kill one another; for they are very tender, and are easily killed; and this is well seen in them as an instinct of nature; therefore with their legs contracted and affi xed to both sides they sit, and defend themselves; for then their bodies being defended on every side with their Feet, as Tents with Pales, they sit safe, prevailing against the Spiders, that assault them, with their own strength; in this posture one of them cannot kill another at one assault; what do they then will you say? The more strong entangle the Feet of the more weak with a wonderful dexterity, and hold them so bound, like the small tendrells you see on vines, which wreath about and encircle the branches, and embrace them; and then they hold their Feet so ensnared with theirs, and break them one after another; nor do they cease, till they have pulled off foure or five of them,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 206

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

207

this being done, they leap upon them, and bite them, and suck the wounds, and leave nothing, but an Exsanguious skin, suckt dry, and the rest of the Feet. This is some way from the moralized and gendered discourse of the previous century (Goedaert’s spiders are usually neither female nor male), its allegories and creepy spider helmets, or the nervous negligence of so many naturalists of the seventeenth century. Given the affective potency of the spider idea, it is striking in its lack of judgment, revealing the relief that the abandonment, however temporary, of moralizing nature must have been for those who achieved it in Goedaert’s time.34 But its objectivity is not joyless: the observer’s experience of pleasure here is clear. The gusto and discernment of the following quotation is even stronger (the particular, thus gendered, spider honored in this passage died eventually of overeating): “One of this kind of Spiders I kept long, with Water of Saltpeeter and Lime mixt; he was very fierce, he always overcame all the Spiders I offered him, although he found some amongst them, which took him up much time, and gave him some danger of recovering his health, which he cou’d not overcome, but with much difficulty; at length he remained Victor of all, viz. Thirty in number, which I gave him one after another.”35 Goedaert, artist of flowers and butterflies, was not bloodthirsty: it is hard to imagine him bonding with the “Victor” after observing, say, the dismemberment of a gazelle by a lion. It is the miniaturized scale that permits this distance and thus a quasicomic enjoyment.36 I suggest that miniaturization, whether through microscopy or the focus on insects, played an important part in the transition to unmoralized representation of life in the seventeenth century: it rendered that life, which easily threatens us with empathy (often by evolutionary design), aesthetic.37 Nothing could feel more different than Lister’s own approach in De Araneis, which Paula Findlen terms a “Baconian history” but which seems more than that.38 Working in sympathy with Wilkins’s “real character” and universal language scheme, he wants to understand spiders (and other lesser living creatures) by means of taxonomic principles that describe reality rather than human convenience and can generate tables richer in information than the images Moffett, Aldrovandi, and Goedaert arranged by arbitrary features such as size. His arrangements by web structure, hunting behaviors, or number of eyes are not modern but dig deeper into spider “nature” than does body size:

BotelhoV1-final.indb 207

11/9/22 1:36 PM

208

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

“I have observed the [Cyclosa conica] spinning webs at sunrise; and on occasion I counted . . . more than forty rows of meshes. . . . One finds the spider itself in the middle of the web, constantly on the watch as if in an ambush, and arranged above it and below it in a straight line, its prey entangled one fly to each thread between the individual knots of the meshes.”39 He was as close an observer as Goedaert, in his way, and advanced both the knowledge of spiders and the sophistication of data organization, though by publishing in Latin he kept himself relatively obscure in much of Europe (De Araneis was translated posthumously into German).40 He used a compound microscope to assist in his observations. William Lodge illustrated the Historia Animalium, of which De Araneis was part 1, under his close supervision: his goal was clarity.41 Meanwhile, off in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a transplanted poet was closely observing spiders too, his eye primed by the contemporary yen for detail and for a miniaturized morality. Edward Taylor’s poems were mainly published posthumously, so they are undated, but sometime in the 1680s, shortly after the publication of both Goedaert’s Insects and Lister’s Spiders, he produced an allegorical “Spider and the Flie” that demonstrates both the keen eye of his time and an unreconstructed sense of the spider as toxic, aggressive, fatal, and gender dimorphic: Thou sorrow, venom Elfe: Is this thy play, To spin a web out of thyselfe To Catch a Fly? For Why? I saw a pettish wasp Fall foule therein: Whom yet thy Whorle pins did not clasp Lest he should fling His sting. But as affraid, remote Didst stand hereat, And with thy little fingers stroke And gently tap His back.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 208

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

|

209

Figure 1.12.5. Ramist table from Martin Lister, De Araneis in Genere, part 3 of Lister, Historiae Animalium Angliae (London: John Martyn, 1678), 19: “Table of the Spiders of England.” Courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library.

But Taylor proceeds to compare the Spider’s tentative, delicate approach to the wasp with his violent attack on the Fly, whom “thou by the Throate tookst hastily / And ’hind the head / Bite dead.” We remember Heywood’s lordly spider: here, after the Restoration, he seems a craven courtier, forgetting the rules of honor that dictate an even match. But what is notable is the poet’s close-up gaze, the result of fi xated observation. He knows that the cautious predator will stand at a distance and “tap” his potential victim’s back with his “little fingers”—fingers that do exist, if we replace the word with palp for the spider’s single-fingered foot—but at an awkward distance from the normal range of vision and the usual scale of attention. The moral of the story is hard to determine; the pleasure of the poem is in its gaze. It may seem strange that I have attended little to the metaphor of the spider as weaver of tales. That is because, beyond Ovid’s tale and Bocaccio’s retelling, I have not encountered it in a year’s intermittent

BotelhoV1-final.indb 209

11/9/22 1:36 PM

210

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

reading of European Renaissance spider texts.42 I have only otherwise encountered a hint of it, in the seventh-century encylopedist Isidor of Seville. His Etymologiae not only imagined the roots of Latin words but consequently provided the Middle Ages with encyclopedic knowledge of a different kind, about the natures of the things those words, trailing their fictional etymologies, might designate. “Spiders (aranea) are vermin of the air (aer), named from the air which is their nourishment. They spin out a long thread from their little body and, constantly attentive to their webs, never leave off working on them, maintaining a perpetual suspension in their own piece of craftsmanship.” The industrious spiders, so similar to early modern naturalists, are “vermin,” etymologically, not because we don’t like them (though see articles such as “How to Get Rid of Spiders in Your Apartment” or “How to Get Rid of Spiders in Your House”), but because they turn, bend, make knots, as in Lister’s description, as a sailor does to make a net, as a weaver does to make (look it up!) a “plot.”43 A Romish plot, a gunpowder plot, the plot of a romance.44 Our data are now vast and codified, but as Taylor’s gnomic verses promise, the Spider survived Lister’s clarity and modern entomology itself. Even spider phobia has survived them. Boy spider and girl spider and trans spider are still at their work, for example, in an Urban Dictionary definition of “Spiderwoman”: “My boyfriend spiderman’d me last night so I spiderwoman’d him back. He’ll think twice before doing that again.”45 Notes 1. See Chaplin, “How to Get Rid of Spiders.” Here I should make reference to a considerable work on negative affect, especially disgust, including Sedgwick and Frank, Shame and Her Sisters; Miller, Anatomy of Disgust; and Tortorici, “Visceral Archives of the Body.” I am interested in the array of cognitive and aesthetic emptions provoked by spiders, not only that one, which I suspect is postindustrial in its current phobic form. 2. Thanks to Deborah Lyon and William Price for directing me to a terracotta oil flask painting of Arachne

BotelhoV1-final.indb 210

and Athene, attributed to the Amasis Painter, ca. 550–530 BCE, currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. https://www.met museum.org /art/collection/search /253348. 3. The “X-ray style” of depicting living things, often identifiable as to species, with their internal organs showing, goes back at least nine thousand years and is particular to Arnhem Land. See Layton, Australian Rock Art; Tacon and Chippindale, “Changing Places.” I have seen at least one image of a spider in the belly of a fish.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider 4. Brian Ogilvie borrows the Swiss naturalist Charles Bonnet’s unsuccessful coinage “insectology” for the pursuits of the early modern naturalists attempting to organize their knowledge before the emergence of entomology proper. See Ogilvie, “Order of Insects.” 5. Ray, Correspondence, 85. On the damaging confl ict over priority between the two friends and on Lister generally, see Roos, Web of Nature. 6. To be fair, the Italian Francesco Redi (a fine poet, who according to some introduced the idea of the experimental “control”) discussed the reproduction of spiders in Esperienze Intorno, which classic text Lister will later quote on spiderwebs. 7. Smith, Spenser’s Proverb Lore; Tilley, Elizabethan Proverb Lore, 24. Tilley cites only one proverb (quoted here as epigraph) in Elizabethan Proverb Lore, but in his expanded edition, Dictionary of Proverbs, the spider is also indexed at M152: “The Noble-man the Spider; and the country-man the Flie” (the proverb that generates Heywood’s long allegory, The Spider and the Flie, on which see below). 8. Lister, Araneis. For the letters with Ray about spider flight see, by dates, Lister, Correspondence, vol. 1. Moffett’s Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum (a compendium based in part on unpublished work of Konrad Gesner, Edward Wotton, and his school friend Thomas Penny) was translated into English by John Rowland and published as The Theater of Insects with Edward Topsell’s more derivative Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (1658). 9. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1058–72. Chapters 11–15 of book 2 are “Of the Name of Spiders, and their Differences,” “Of Spiders that are Hurtful, or Phalangia,” “Of the tame or house

BotelhoV1-final.indb 211

10.

11. 12.

13.

|

211

Spider,” “Of certain kindes of Spiders observed by Authors,” and “Of the generation, copulation, and use of Spiders.” On leaving spiders to Willoughby (October 31, 1668), see Ray, Correspondence, 29–30. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1071. Swammerdam, Ephemeri Vita. The text of the English version, translated by Edward Tyson, runs to 44 pages and five plates; the original Dutch (1675) runs to 420 pages! Says Tyson: “What made it so large, was his frequent, Pious Meditations, and Poetry upon the various accidents of the Life, and extraordinary Mechanism of this Creature, so natural a guide such Philosophy is to Divinity. . . . But the Contemplations, for some Reasons, are omitted in this Translation” (Swammerdam, sig. A2r–v). A prime example of the aesthetic and ethical shift of natural inquiry away from humanistic and anthropocentric focus, toward (aspirationally) value-free systematization. Bon de Saint Hilaire, Dissertation. The work was first published in Paris in 1710 and later significantly revised; the bilingual French-Latin 1748 edition contains a 1710 letter to Bon from Louis XIV’s chief physician, Fagon, praising the recipes and mixtures Bon had sent him: “Les experiences qui ont été executes [sic; here and elsewhere use of the accent ague is random] sous mes yeux de vos Gouttes de Montpellier ont toutes fort bien reussi” (93). Bon describes three medicines: the Alexitères, volatile spirits of spider silk (and apparently the spider’s body) “concocted with cinnamon and cloves, wonderful for purifying the matter of the blood, to invigorate it and help it flow” (we still use cinnamon against cholesterol and glucose in the blood) “and for treating

11/9/22 1:36 PM

212

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

fever, rabies, apoplexy and paralysis” (64); the Hipteriques, mixed with juniper and rue or castor oil, for menstrual pain and epilepsy, and the Anodines, mixed with laudanum and castor oil, which operate in a homeopathic or Paracelsian, manner: “elles appaisent les doleurs par le moyen de Souff re anodins & balsamiques qu’elles contiennent, & emportent souvent la cause de la maladie, en adoucissant l’acrimonie du sel d’où elle depend” (70). Current medical uses under development include sutures, nerve and bone repair, artificial skin, and support for weak arteries; the venom treats muscular dystrophy and chronic pain; and the Hannover Veterinary Medicine University is using spider silk to attach transplanted nerve cells to the brains of people with epilepsy (Volkswagen, “Medical Use of Spider Silk”). Bon Saint Hilaire, Dissertation, 16. For forty-three spider watermarks in sixteenth-century German and central European books, see Bernstein, Memory of Paper. Milton, “Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” 11. See M. H. S., “Painting on Cobwebs.” The phenomenon of six-legged spiders can sometimes be found in illustrations of early modern natural histories. It could be habit—the vast modern branch of the animal family known as bugs is defined by sixleggedness. Or it could be a sense that eight is too many. Fontaine, “Goutte et l’Araignée.” The remarkable twentieth-century poet Ruth Pitter turned this screw one more time with her “Maternal Love Triumphant, or, Song of the Virtuous Female Spider”: But most I do delight to kill Those pretty silly things

BotelhoV1-final.indb 212

That do themselves with nectar fi ll And wag their painted wings. (21) 21. As its 1908 editor, R. E. Neil Dodge, puts it in his preface to “Muiopotmos”: “Myths, invented or real, that seem to form themselves spontaneously into pictures, the landscape of the gardens, fantastic armor, the figured scenes of tapestry richly bordered, these are of a poetry akin to the plastic arts” (116). Note Spenser’s dedication to Elizabeth Carey, herself both patron of the arts and frequent character in the work of poets she patronized. 22. Spenser, “Muiopotmos.” Subsequent references to “Muiopotmos” appear parenthetically in the text by line number. The confusion of subject and object in the verse sentence seems part of the poem’s border-crossing and identity-fusing ways (so unlike The Faerie Queene). 23. Ogilvie, “Order of Insects.” 24. Heywood, Spider and the Flie, sig. A3r. For extended analysis of the allegory, see Hunt, “Marian Political Allegory.” 25. A. W. Reed presented evidence in Early Tudor Drama that Heywood was collaborating on plays with the authors of the genre’s locus classicus in English, A Mirror for Magistrates, during the composition of the Mirror as well. See Henderson, “John Heywood’s The Spider,” 254n41. 26. Henderson, 246. Henderson quotes from Hauser, “Date.” 27. See More, Utopia, part 1. 28. Cooper, Brand. Cooper was an Anglican minister known for his 1617 Mystery of Witch- Craft, a phenomenon in which he firmly believed (unfortunately for older women and people with moles). 29. Ibid., sig. A3v–4r. 30. For natural inquiry, that is. Musicians went mad for the tarantula in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance,

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

inventing the still-popular tarantella, a wild, fl irtatious couple dance supposed also to cure “tantrism,” a usually female hysteria brought on by the bite of a wolf spider. The wolf spider was called “tarantula” perhaps from Taranto, in the region where the ailment then flourished. The tarantella is traditionally danced at weddings. It is tempting to trace it back to Sanskrit scriptures related to the female energies of Shiva; their part divisions are called “tantra” from the Sanskrit for weave, web, weaving, loom, thus perhaps text; in some branches of the tradition, they are associated with sexual rituals (e.g., “tantric” yoga). On this dichotomy in early modern medicine, see Rankin, “Gender, Poison, and Antidote.” Goedaert, Of Insects; Lister, English Spiders. Goedaert, Of Insects, sig. A3. See Daston and Vidal, Moral Authority of Nature, for a sense of the eternal return of this impulse, which reared its head again in a post-Stonewall backlash of homophobic appeals to the supposedly instinctive heterosexuality of the animal kingdom. Goedaert, Of Insects, 138–39. Lister, on the (eight-eyed) Nuctenea umbratical: “The huge, occasionally flat, abdomen is nearly the width of a middle-finger nail” (English Spiders, 94). For a brilliant account of the ontology and psychology of “seeing well” and “all-at-onceness” in scientific observation, see Daston, “On Scientific Observation.”

|

213

38. See Findlen, review, 801. 39. Lister, Araneis, 2.2.82. 40. “Lister is unquestionably the inventor of system,” according to the naturalist William Swainson in Preliminary Discourse. Maybe. 41. See Roos, “The Art of Science.” 42. Louise Labé invokes Ovid’s story as an intertext in Le Débat de Folie et d’Amour, according to François Rigolet, plausibly but covertly, in relation precisely to the etymology of the word subtil in her phrase “mes ouvrages subtil” (sub-tela, sous-toile) (“sutils ouvrages”). 43. See Chaplin, “How to Get Rid of Spiders.” Angie’s List this morning, as I was trying to fi nish this chapter, sent a helpful article on “How to Get Rid of Spiders in Your House” (Garvin). 44. The Oxford English Dictionary is a hard place to fi nd the broadly significant origin of the word plot, coming closest in its associated definitions of plat, many of which overlap with “plot” (and persist, both as “plait” of hair [American “braid”] and in the near-obsolete “plate” as in “silver plate”). It was a term in weaving for a place in the cloth where an error in spinning or weaving led to a thickened, irregular spot—“the plot thickens.” I suspect this is closely linked to later meanings: “garden plot” or “gunpowder plot,” thus map, graph, and narrative “plot.” 45. Urban Dictionary, “Spiderwoman,” http://www.urbandictionary.com /define.php?term=Spiderwoman.

Bibliography Ballestra-Puesch, Sylvia. Metamorphoses d’Arachne: L’Artiste en Araignee dans la Literature Occidentale. Paris: Librairie Droz S.A., 2006.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 213

Beaumont, Francis, and John Fletcher. Four Playes, or Moral Representations in One. Comedies and Tragedies. London, 1647.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

214

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Bernstein Consortium. The Memory of Paper, coordinated by Emanuel Wenger. Austrian Academy of Sciences. Accessed May 13, 2020, https:// memoryofpaper.eu. Bon de Saint Hilaire, François-Xavier. Dissertation sur l’Utilité de la Soye des Araignées. Avignon: F. Girard, 1748. Chaplin, Justin. “How to Get Rid of Spiders in Your Apartment.” Apartment List. October 8, 2019. https://www .apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/how -to-get-rid-of-spiders/. Cooper, Thomas. A Brand Taken Out of the Fire. The Romish Spider, with His Web of Treason. Woven and Broken. London: G. Eld, 1606. Daston, Lorraine. “On Scientific Observation.” ISIS 99 (2008): 97–11. Daston, Lorraine, and Fernando Vidal, eds. The Moral Authority of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Dodge, R. E. Neil. Preface to “Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie.” In The Complete Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, by Edmund Spenser, edited by R. E. Dodge, 115–16. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1908. Findlen, Paula. Review of Martin Lister’s English Spiders. ISIS 84, no. 4 (December 1993): 801. Fontaine, Jean de la. “La Goutte et l’Araignée.” In Fables Choisies, book 3, fable 8. Paris: Denys Thierry, 1668. Garvin, Kelly. “How to Get Rid of Spiders in Your House.” Angie’s List. August 6, 2015. https://www.angieslist .com/articles/how-get-rid-spiders -your-house.htm. Goedaert, Johannes. Of Insects. Translated and edited by Martin Lister. York, 1682. ———. Metamorphem et Historum Naturalem Insectorum Libri Tres. London, 1669. Hauser, David R. “The Date of John Heywood’s The Spider and the Flie.”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 214

Modern Language Notes 70 (1955): 15–18. Henderson, Judith Rice. “John Heywood’s The Spider and the Flie: Educating Queen and Country.” Studies in Philology 96, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 241–74. Heywood, John. The Spider and the Flie: A Parable of the Spider and the Flie. London: Tho. Powell, 1556. Hunt, Alice. “Marian Political Allegory: John Heywood’s The Spider and the Fly.” In The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603, edited by Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shranke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Layton, Robert. Australian Rock Art: A New Synthesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lister, Martin. The Correspondence of Martin Lister (1639–1712). Leiden: Brill, 2015. ———. De Araneis. Part 3 of Historiae Animalium Angliae Tres Tractatus. London: John Martyn, 1678. ———. English Spiders. Translated by Malcolm Davies and Basil Harley. Edited by John Parker and Basil Harley. Colchester, UK: Harley Books, 1992. M. H. S. “Painting on Cobwebs.” Art Amateur 21, no. 6 (November 1889): 136. Miller, William Ian. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Milton, John. “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” In Poems of Mr. John Milton both English and Latin, 1–12. London: Ruth Raworth, 1645. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. More, Thomas. Utopia. Translated by Ralph Robinson. London, 1551. Ogilvie, Brian W. “Order of Insects: Insect Species and Metamorphosis Between Renaissance and Enlightenment.” In

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Spider The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Ohad Nachtomy and Justin E. H. Smith, 222–45. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pitter, Ruth. “Maternal Love Triumphant, or, Song of the Virtuous Female Spider.” In Collected Poems. London: Enitharmon Press, 1996. Rankin, Alicia. “Gender, Poison, and Antidote in Early Modern Europe.” In Medicines and Poisons in European History, edited by Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Ole Peter Grell. New York: Routledge, 2017. Ray, John. The Correspondence of John Ray. Edited by Edward Lankester. London, 1848. Redi, Francesco. Esperienze Intorno alla Generazione degl’Insetti. Florence, 1668. Rigolet, François. “Les ‘sutils ouvrages’ de Louise Labé, ou Quand Pallas Deviant Arachné.” Etudes Littéraires 20, no. 2 (1987): 43–60. Roos, Anna Maria. “The Art of Science: A ‘Rediscovery’ of the Lister Copperplates.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 66, no. 1 (March 20, 2012): 19–40. ———. Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639–1712), the First Arachnologist. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, eds. Shame and Her Sisters: A Sylvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Smith, Charles. Spenser’s Proverb Lore. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Spenser, Edmund. “Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie.” In Complaints: Containing Sundrie Small Poemes of the World’s Vanitie. London: Wm Ponsonbie, 1591.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 215

|

215

Swainson, William. A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History. London, 1834. Swammerdam, Jan. Ephemeri Vita, or, the Natural History of the Ephemeron, a Fly That Lives but Five Hours. Translated by Edward Tyson. London: Henry Faithorne and John Kersey, 1681. Tacon, Paul, and Christopher Chippindale. “Changing Places: 10,000 Years of North Australian Rock Art Transformation.” In Time and Change: Archeological and Anthropological Perspectives on the Long Term in HunterGatherer Societies, edited by Dimitra Papagianni, Robert Layton, and Herbert Maschner. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2008. Taylor, Edward. “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly.” In The Poems of Edward Taylor, edited by Donald E. Standord. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960. Tilley, Morris Palmer. A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950. ———. Elizabethan Proverb Lore in Lyly’s “Euphues” and in Pettie’s “Petite Pallace”: With Parallels from Shakespeare. New York: Macmillan, 1926. Tortorici, Zeb. “Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (2014): 407–37. Volkswagen Foundation. “The Medical Use of Spider Silk.” Initiative Wissenschaft Hannover. Accessed February 27, 2020, https://wissen.hannover.de/en /Institutions/Volkswagen-Foundation /The-Medical-Use-of-Spider-Silk.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

C h a p t e r 13

WATER BUGS Bugs Aquatic: Water Striders from Moffett to Marine Science

Dan Brayton

For early modern naturalist historians, size mattered. Creatures dwelling near the limits of perception presented a major challenge to human powers of observation, description, and understanding. Discerning the particularities of small-scale life required access to new technologies of visibility and legibility that were scarce and costly. The development of the optical microscope in the early seventeenth century and its refinement over the course of the century made previously inaccessible phenomena suddenly visible for the few with access to them. Between Cornelis Drebbel and Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek, Galileo, Giovanni Battista Odierna, and Robert Hooke, among others, made key discoveries about tiny creatures. In 1676 Van Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganisms. Until then very little was known about life-forms dwelling beyond the reaches of human habitation (deserts, high latitudes and altitudes, oceans) or perception (micro-organisms, small-scale insects). Yet even before technological developments in the realm of optics made hitherto-hidden lives newly visible, some natural historians, including Thomas Moffett, were already engaged in transforming knowledge of lesser living things using only the quill and the naked eye. In an era when empirical data and specimens, from samples to simples and anatomy theaters, remained elusive, unreliable, and overshadowed by the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 216

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Water Bugs

|

217

opinions of traditional authorities, perceptual limitations determined cognitive limits. How was one to study a creature too remote to see in its native habitat, too small to see except in unusual circumstances, and about which little or nothing was written? In the two centuries before the iterative publication of Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735–1768) finally eclipsed the wonders of Aristotelian zoology (and of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis) the discourse of natural history became increasingly precise and differentiated from natural theology. The observations and opinions of major authorities, such as Aristotle and Pliny, and of countless minor ones, derived from scarce or nonexistent data, continued to hold enormous sway, while religious doctrine framed the parameters of inquiry for those with limited access to or limited interest in empirical description. Early accounts by natural historians thus stand as pioneering acts of interpretation and description struggling with traditional textual sources. As intellectual historian Brian Ogilvie has argued, their singular achievement was to develop a complex of empirical and hermeneutic practices that gradually led to the triumph of observation over tradition as the basis for the study of living things, a conceptual apparatus that Ogilvie terms the “science of describing.”1 Precise, detailed description of evidence was a conceptual achievement based on a shifting hermeneutic by which intellectuals increasingly separated description from the ceaseless echoing of doctrine and tradition. For Conrad Gesner and Thomas Moffett, two great protobiologists separated by geography but linked by a shared passion for the multiform players in the theater of life, reading the fine print of the book of nature was an epistemological struggle constrained by the material inaccessibility and unreliability of evidence combined with a conceptual framework largely derived from textual authorities, which limited their ability to process data. A complex thread of print, translation, and empirical and descriptive practices connects these two early naturalists. Gesner, the great Swiss author of the four-volume Historia Animalium, contributed enormously to the historical transformation of natural history into biology, as did Moffett, whose Theater of Insects rounded out Edward Topsell’s translation of volume 1 of Gesner’s magnum opus (translated by Edward Topsell as the Historie of Four-Footed Beastes).2 Gesner’s exhaustive and painstaking catalog of terrestrial and aquatic life-forms (real and imagined) exemplifies the gradual shift from almost

BotelhoV1-final.indb 217

11/9/22 1:36 PM

218

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

purely textual commentary on creaturely life to one based primarily on sampling and observation. So too do Moffett’s writings about insects, in which we can trace the emergence of what Ogilvie terms “the early modern European cult of the fact.”3 Whereas Gesner’s work vacillates between the factual and the fanciful, cataloging life-forms that seemed to confirm legends about unicorns, ship-eating polypi, and humanbeast hybrids alongside accurate and detailed descriptions of previously inaccessible organisms, Moffett took his commitment to empiricism a step further. One cannot but be struck by the precision and detail of Moffett’s work on arthropods (all of which, including crustaceans and arachnids, he terms “insects”), which exhibit his willingness to depart from tradition and textual authority at key moments in preference for a remarkably precise descriptive empiricism. Nowhere in Moffett’s work is his commitment to the science of describing more in evidence than in his accounts of water bugs. The challenge of describing tiny lives aquatic led the doughty entomologist to pen some of his finest work as a natural historian. In his descriptive account of aquatic insects, Moffett was largely on his own, which makes his passages on aquatic insects an unusually empirical set of writings. In them we witness the workings of an intellect of remarkable accuracy and precision, as well as a striking verbal dexterity. Lacking the systematic conceptual scaffolding of ecology, the study of the interactions between organisms, their biophysical circumstances, and each other; of ethology, the study of organisms in their native habitats; and of anatomy, physiology, evolution, genetics, or biochemistry, Moffett nevertheless penned pioneering descriptions of a group of insects that would not become widely understood until more than two centuries after his death. In this chapter, I offer an overview of Moffett’s work on aquatic insects alongside a biographical sketch of Halobates, the family of water striders that inspired some of Moffett’s most memorable descriptive passages. I submit this presentist foray into the intellectual genealogy of marine entomology as a sort of post hoc control to early modern Moffett’s accounts of small-scale aquatic life. How far, and how clearly, did he see beyond the authorities he so frequently acknowledged on the pages of his great treatise? What empirical headway did he make when it came to aquatic micro-organisms, about which his predecessors could offer very little insight? What, if anything, did he get right (from the perspective of the modern life sciences), and what can we

BotelhoV1-final.indb 218

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Water Bugs

|

219

learn about the early modern science of describing from what he got wrong, or perhaps as right as he could at the time? My interest in Moffett’s work on aquatic insects is to continue a line of inquiry into the literary history of the marine environment to which I have contributed elsewhere.4 The early marine environment amplified the challenges of discerning the particularities of life on a very large and a very small scale, especially those lives that challenged the explanatory power of traditional narratives.

I. A Watery Stage The evident delight with which Moffett observed his specimens is empirical in nature. The excitement of discovery led him to pen some remarkable insights about a variety of insects that would remain perplexing and fascinating to entomologists for the next several centuries. In chapter 26 of the Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures, the third volume of the Topsell/Gesner Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects, Moffett describes aquatic insects of several varieties with his characteristic gusto. Describing what he calls “the WaterBeetle,” his prose waxes nearly euphoric as it moves from descriptive anatomy to speculative ethology: They have every one six feet, the hinder feet exceeding the others in length and bigness, which they use as it were for oars when they swim; under their sheathy wings which are very black, lye hid their membranous wings of a silver hew, with which by night, having left the water, they nimbly fly through the air, which by day they very seldome (or never) use. But the least of all are those, which with a restless motion run about in a multitude this way and that way upon the surface of the water without order, and play as it were together, and when the water is troubled, either they dive down to the bottome, or hide themselves in holes of the banks: but afterward, as soon as the waves are still and calm, they leap about it again for joy. (1017–18) Deploying an almost Shakespearean propensity for adjectives (e.g., “sheathy” and “membranous” wings), Moffett sees his joyous water bugs playing hide-and-seek, diving and cavorting like young mammalians.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 219

11/9/22 1:36 PM

220

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

If we find the anthropomorphism of joyous leaping aquatic insecta amusing, perhaps we can forgive Moffett for getting carried away as he broke new intellectual ground, for his descriptions clearly derive from personal observation and the excitement of eyewitness discovery. Moffett’s excitement for aquatic insects is similarly palpable in his account of another surface-dwelling life-form that he calls the “WaterSpider,” as opposed to the “Water-Beetle.” He describes the former as “a little creature of exceeding nimbleness, whose History Authors have so slightly handled, that we can hardly pick out any thing of weight or moment towards the illustration of this History: we shall yet perform what we can” (1021). Here the emphasis on empirical observation over inadequate textual authority amplifies Moffett’s zest for detailed description, the gesture to history’s silence now cause for bravura passages. He disputes some possible classical antecedents, dismisses them, and turns again to the task of precise description: “There are two sorts of Water-spiders, the greater and the less. They differ in bigness only, or perhaps in age: the greater are more common in coldest waters, the less are somewhat more blackish and of a more compact body. The greater more inclines to an ash-colour, being of a larger body” (1021–22). Building his entomological dilations on careful observation, the forebear of all entomologists gestures to what we might call environmental factors in comparative anatomy, entertaining the possibility of a causal link among temperature, size, and hue. Moffett’s precise and prescient observations of water striders owe much to the lack of textual authority on the subject. His knowledge derives from direct observation, which we can only speculate involved considerable time spent in the field, in this case investigating English ponds, puddles, and waterways, as his repeated insistence on a dearth of literature on the subject suggests. Yet his descriptions never stray far from the secure toehold of textual precedent. In the detailed and rather prescient description of the water spider’s appearance and movement that follows, Moffett makes room for the work of colleagues, but the precision of his own descriptions outshines them: The Water-spider is a little creature, in shape very like a Spider, of a body somewhat long and slender: it hath four feet fast to its breast, and two little armes stretched out before near its mouth, perhaps in stead of horns; which if you reckon with its

BotelhoV1-final.indb 220

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Water Bugs

|

221

feet, it will have six feet: which yet (so far as we could observe) it useth not when it runneth: they are as short again as the rest of its feet, neither have they any knots or joynts like the other feet. Therefore Albertus and others allow but four feet to the Waterspider: but Festus six, reckoning these little armes together with its feet. (1022) After making these detailed observations Moffett goes on to note that the insect in question prefers not to be submerged. “It goeth not under water,” he claims, “but when it is driven thither by force: its body is never wet.” This is in fact the case, and it is a remarkable observation, for insects, lacking gills, cannot survive under water, instead processing oxygen through tubes known as tracheae that only function in air.5 Once it is accidentally submerged—say, by a sudden downpour, a wave, or the wash of a large predator’s tail—an insect must groom itself, shedding water droplets in any way that it can to remain buoyant. Otherwise it will drown. Water striders use surface tension to stay above the liquid element. The accuracy of this account contrasts, oddly, with his earlier description of “water beetles’ ” (surely fanciful) habit of diving beneath the surface. Before moving on to considerations of the water spider’s medicinal value and terminological history in classical and early modern texts, Moffett offers a similarly precise account of the habitat these creatures prefer. “They are found,” he correctly notes, “all the Summer time in standing waters and ponds which are free from the winds, and quiet: sometimes also they are met with in rivers, especially close by the banks of great rivers, and for the most part under the shades of trees (as of the willow, or any other tree, (which is not over tall): most commonly multitudes of them are together in companies. They are seen sometimes to couple leaping on one anothers backs, but they make an end of engendering very quickly. One shall hardly finde any one of them in Winter.” Theater of insects indeed. In this highly theatrical account of insect behavior, Moffett’s exuberant water striders have their exits and their entrances, as well as passions and preferences, from amorously “leaping on one anothers backs” to aggregating on shady river banks like massing armies. This scene painting relies on rhetorical energeia, a vividness of description that aspires to the pictorial. The term multitudes could equally

BotelhoV1-final.indb 221

11/9/22 1:36 PM

222

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

describe groups of human beings or groups of insects (or other animals), while the word companies has military overtones. At the same time, the energy of these massing armies of bugs derives from their access to shady riverbanks that are “free from the winds, and quiet,” evoking a locus amoenus where water striders can pursue their amorous adventures with a gusto that smacks of the pastoral. More than a hint of anthropomorphism runs through this and similar descriptions of insect behavior in Moffett. Their precision and detail render the Theater of Insects a perfect example of Ogilvie’s “science of describing.” By drawing attention to water striders Moffett introduces his readers to diminutive organisms native to a medium that made them particularly elusive. Aquatic organisms are intrinsically challenging for terrestrial bipeds to observe, yet far from being desultory remarks based on imperfect observation cobbled together with the received wisdom of textual authorities, Moffett’s descriptions point to crucial considerations about the anatomy, physiology, and ethology of a group of surface-dwelling creatures that would receive sustained attention by systematic entomology only several centuries later. Even in these impressive descriptions of surface-dwelling organisms, it is apparent that Moffett, like most of his contemporaries (both natural historians and poets), knew far more about terrestrial and freshwater organisms than he did about marine life, to which he devotes scant but not insignificant attention. When it comes to marine life, Moffett modulates from the empirical to the textual, slipping back into a ready and easy discourse of authority and lumping water spiders into the same camp as shrimp and lobsters, like Rondeletius and Gesner before him, and Pliny and Aristotle before them. In chapter 27, he offers a brief overview, “Of Water Insects without feet, and first of the Shrimp or Squilla,” a chapter that occupies less than one page and ventures into a new realm (1124). “Wee said before,” writes Moffett, “that all water Insects were with feet or without feet.” So far, so good: even today marine scientists betray a sort of foot fetishism in their categorization of pteropods, gastropods, heteropods, and the like. Yet at this point, Moffett departs from his comfort zone, mistakenly lumping all kinds of marine crustaceans in the category of “Water Insects”—or perhaps he simply takes the etymology of insecta too literally. “Some of those that have feet,” he claims, “swim with six feet, as the Lobster, the Shrimp, the lake Scorpion, the Evet [?], and the Sea-Lowse; others with four feet, some with more” (1124). Following

BotelhoV1-final.indb 222

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Water Bugs

|

223

classical sources, Moffett makes no distinction between larval crustaceans, mollusks, and gastropods, on the one hand, and the true aquatic insects, on the other, and with good reason, for there is little discernible difference between a larval lobster and, say, a pupal dragonfly. Any natural historian before Linnaean taxonomy and with little or no access to sampling in the marine environment, as well as no conceptually rigorous and consistent system with which to differentiate species and other groupings, could only speculate about the significance of morphological similarities and differences.

II. The (Tiny) Life Aquatic We must not ignore the fact that Moffett described a group of insects native to an element that had only recently been discovered to make up the majority of the Earth’s surface. The marine environment was for early moderns a scarcely accessible realm teeming with life-forms characterized by generations of natural historians in terms of their radical alterity. Maritime historian J. H. Parry has labeled the early modern period “The Discovery of the Sea,” challenging the idea of an age of exploration defined by the claiming and colonizing of new lands, for it was the vastness of the global ocean, as much as the existence of new terrestrial realms, that transformed Europeans’ understanding of the Earth.6 With the increasing data stream on marine life reaching Europeans after 1492 (however redacted and unreliable), traditional perceptions of what constituted the Creation were put into question by accounts of the immense abundance of fish in the New World as much as by the logbooks of mariners conversant with new worlds. The variety and abundance of sea creatures underscored questions of ontology. As Tara Pedersen has recently argued, figurations of marine life fueled early modern cultural debates about the forms and categories of nature, life, and the self, challenging the idées reçues derived ultimately from classical observation and speculation.7 The multiplicity and sheer strangeness of aquatic organisms, especially sea creatures, challenged traditional ontologies, raising questions—often quite radical ones— about the relationships among life, matter, and spirit. When it came to describing unfamiliar creatures, seventeenthcentury natural historians had little to go on. Small-scale organisms shared with aquatic life a perceptual and conceptual elusiveness that

BotelhoV1-final.indb 223

11/9/22 1:36 PM

224

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

would only gradually be overcome by new technologies—not only the microscope and the laboratory but the sailing ship and the lead line— as well as new kinds of fieldwork, including, eventually, the sea voyage as sampling expedition. In the sixteenth century, aquatic life-forms were like Martians to Europeans, whose lives were increasingly shaped by the discovery of a global ocean that vastly extended the imaginative possibilities for what constituted the Creation. Since Aristotle’s descriptions of dogfish and octopuses, marine organisms held a particular fascination for naturalists dwelling near the sea (or not very, in the Swiss Gesner’s case), a fascination fueled by the vast expansion of northeast Atlantic fisheries after about the twelft h century. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, transoceanic voyages afforded new information and samples to natural historians. Yet most of the samples available to protomarine scientists such as Rondeletius and Gesner derived from relatively local sources; creatures native to distant climes were available only through written and visual sources (such as the works of the Swedish bishop Olaus Magnus). Marine life was often difficult to reconcile with biblical cosmogony, and Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology complicated empirical study: a phenomenon such as a whale stranding raised soteriological and national-political questions about the Creation that classical natural philosophy could not answer. This knowledge deficit was especially acute when it came to life aquatic, knowledge of which remained scant or even, for all intents and purposes, nonexistent until well into the nineteenth century, when James Fitzroy, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and the scientists of the Challenger expedition, among others, began compiling and processing large data sets about the marine environment.8 Until these pioneering voyages, knowledge of marine biota was largely determined by the burgeoning fisheries and fish markets that were reshaping the diets and social geography of western Europe.

III. Enter Halobates, at Sea As Moffett pointed out in reference to water striders, insects prefer to stay dry; indeed, they have no choice. If they do not, they will drown; hence, they must stay at or near the surface at all times. Insects have to extract oxygen molecules from the air; unlike fish, which possess gills,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 224

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Water Bugs

|

225

insects cannot “breathe” underwater. The insects known as sea skaters must therefore dwell at or on the surface, making them easy prey for all kinds of predatory organisms. Whereas plankton, copepods, and larval fish perform a process known as vertical migration, feeding at the surface (generally during daylight) and then sinking to greater depths for safety at night, insects have no such safety mechanism. This surfacedwelling necessity renders water bugs vulnerable to all sorts of hazards in the marine environment. While there are many species of water bug that live in various kinds of aquatic environment (ponds, lakes, streams, rivers, estuaries, salt marshes), only one group, belonging to the suborder Halobates, contains species that live on the open ocean. Many species of water strider can be found in a variety of freshwater ecosystems, but what makes Halobates truly remarkable is the handful of species that inhabit the open ocean in a latitudinal band defined by the relatively warm temperatures of the tropical and subtropical zones circling the globe.9 Among marine scientists, Halobates is something of a celebrity, in part because of its remarkable lifestyle but also because of its uniqueness in the marine environment, jostling for space in an ecosystem replete with species from competing taxa, such as crustaceans. Dwelling as it does in overwhelmingly difficult circumstances, constrained by its physiology to skate across an ever-changing surface subject to constant disturbance and ubiquitous predation and doomed to long periods of starvation, Halobates is a surface dweller that lives an apparently tenuous existence. A handful of species can be found in the middle of the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, thousands of miles from shore; these sea striders differ little from their freshwater cousins except in the distance of their habitat from land.10 Living as he did more than two centuries before Darwin, Moffett had no notion of the evolutionary relationship between shellfish (crustacea), such as lobsters, crabs, shrimps, and prawns, and the insects. The former are not only evolutionary forebears of the latter, but they also compete for the same ecological niches; and in their plenitude and variety, they crowd out nearly all marine insects, properly so called, in saltwater habitats. Few ecological niches exist where a bug might compete with shrimp, krill, and pelagic barnacles. Unlike the arachnids for which Moffett is remembered in the popular imagination (“Little Miss Muffett / Sat on a tuffet”), “water-spiders”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 225

11/9/22 1:36 PM

226

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

have six legs, not eight, and are “predacious filter feeders” that consume “small zooplankton organisms trapped at the sea surface.” They are, in turn, prey for seabirds and some fish (especially travelly), as well as surface-dwelling crabs.11 Five species of Halobates inhabit the global ocean, all of them preferring the warm waters of tropical and subtropical regions. In the Atlantic, the species Halobates micans “is evidently limited by the 21 [degrees] C isotherm,” with, according to Lanna Cheng, “the highest numbers caught in waters at 28 [degrees] C.” Accordingly, the five species of ocean-dwelling Halobates are native to such warmwater regions as the Red Sea, the Banda Sea, the waters around Hawaii, and in coastal regions where mangrove forests abound.12 Neither Moffett nor any of his contemporaries knew of the pelagic members of this family of insects. These quick, active bugs bear a superficial resemblance to spiders, with half-centimeter-long bodies and legs three times as long. Cheng, a leading marine entomologist and preeminent authority on sea striders, notes that all species of Halobates are “totally wingless at all stages of their life cycle and are confined to the air-sea interface, being an integral member of the pleuston community” (“pleuston” and “neuston” refer to organisms that inhabit the sea’s surface).13 No wonder Moffett, with his love of spiders, appreciated their freshwater cousins, for they resemble “shiny spiders skating over the sea surface.” Discovered by the Estonian naturalist Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz while he was exploring aboard the Russian vessel Rurik on an 1815–1818 circumnavigation, Halobates has since become well known to marine scientists. Eschscholtz identified three species: H. micans, H. sericeus, and H. flaviventris.14 “No mention of their presence has been found in the logs of Christopher Columbus’s (1451–1506) ships,” Cheng points out, “or other ships that sailed to and from the new world” until the nineteenth century, when the scientists of the Challenger expedition (1873–1876) discovered six new species, bringing the total to eleven. Sea striders are vulnerable predators that possess great vertical mobility and greater speed, and they have limited capacity to contend with rough weather. An insect that relies on surface tension to occupy its ecological niche on the surface of the sea fares poorly in stormy waters. For this reason, the five species of Halobates that inhabit the world’s oceans are mostly found in regions characterized by relatively calm conditions all year long.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 226

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Water Bugs

|

227

For all that he left to be discovered by future biologists, Moffett got an awful lot right, at least when it came to water bugs. Insects are the most common life-form on Earth. More than a million insect species have been identified, many of which inhabit aquatic environments at some stage in their life cycle. Moffett’s “water-beetles” and “waterspiders” belong to a class of insects known as water striders, all of which dwell on the surface of various bodies of water. There are many species of water strider, most of them pond skaters or water striders dwelling in freshwater habitats, such as ponds and swamps, or in brackish coastal environments, such as marshes and estuaries. Modern marine scientists separate the crustaceans and marine insects into distinct taxa, noting that they differ significantly in terms of their morphology, physiognomy, and ethology. Moreover, the surface of most estuaries, lakes, and rivers, as well as the sea, is a veritable biotic soup replete with such organisms as Moffett describes, and many others besides. Among the marine zooplankton are pelagic snails, euphausids (krill), pterapods, gastropods, barnacles, and copepods (the single most prevalent life-form on this planet), not to mention the phytoplankton, which perform photosynthesis, and the various bacteria and diatoms. Insects, crustaceans, and arachnids comprise the Arthropoda, which have distinct differences (although some crustaceans are closer to some insects than they are to other crustaceans). Myriad small organisms live on or near the surface of the water, but they are not, for the most part, insects. Yet some of these life-forms are indeed insects, and these belong for the most part to two groups. The water strider (pond skater, water bug) is an insect belonging to the suborder Heteroptera and the family Gerridae. These surface dwellers are easily confused with the Veliidae, another subfamily of semiaquatic insects commonly known as riffle bugs, smaller water striders, or broad-shouldered water bugs. The two varieties resemble each other, especially at different stages of development, to the extent that the two groups can only be decisively differentiated by their internal genitalia, which differ. It seems obvious that Moffett’s “water-beetles” are riffle bugs, while his “water spiders” are water skaters, Veliidae and Gerridae, respectively. In presenting his detailed descriptions, Moffett described certain features of their anatomy and behavior that make them truly extraordinary.15 Insects derive from the crustaceans, having crawled out of the global ocean millions

BotelhoV1-final.indb 227

11/9/22 1:36 PM

228

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

of years ago, and evolved on land. Very few insects have crawled (or flown) back (in evolutionary terms) to a life at sea, in part because the niches that they might occupy are already inhabited by myriad crustaceans and other arthropods.16 Moreover, the life aquatic presents distinct disadvantages to an insect, which cannot survive being submerged for long. There are thus very few species of ocean-dwelling insect, and those that exist happen to be—all of them—water striders or, in Moffett’s terminology, water spiders. Perhaps it is mere coincidence that Moffett penned his descriptions of water striders within a few years of England’s emergence as a sea power; perhaps not. But what is certain is that his water striders bear more than a little resemblance to the denizens of a nation just beginning to send its ships across oceans whose surfaces, in the warmest and calmest regions, were frequented by these tiny aquatic lives. Moffett completed his Theater of Insects within a decade of Drake’s 1577– 1580 circumnavigation and less than a decade before the defeat of the Mighty Armada guaranteed that English ships would ply the waters of the global ocean in vast numbers that would increase enormously in the ensuing centuries. One cannot help wondering whether Moffett harbored some inkling that the surface of the oceans abounded with tiny lives of a kind that would remain undetected for the next two centuries even while their freshwater cousins glided and leaped on the shady waters of English rivers, streams, estuaries, puddles, lakes, and ponds. By studying these strange aquatic beings, Moffett gave his world a glimpse of the multitudinous biosphere that was, for early moderns, hidden in plain sight. Notes 1. Ogilvie, Science of Describing. 2. Subsequent references to the Theater of Insects appear parenthetically by page number. I am grateful to the Middlebury College Rare Book Library, and particularly to librarian Danielle Rougeau, for use of their reprint of the 1658 edition and of Middlebury’s fine first edition of Topsell’s Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes. 3. Ogilvie, Science of Describing, 12. 4. See Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean; Mentz, Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 228

5. Insects don’t have lungs or gills. The tracheal system of an insect is a series of tubes for absorbing oxygen. 6. Parry, Discovery of the Sea. 7. Pedersen, Mermaids. 8. Helen Rozwadowski’s discussion of the Challenger expedition offers a particularly engaging history of the marine sciences (Fathoming the Ocean). 9. I am grateful to the scientists of the Sea Education Association with whom I sailed on voyages in the Atlantic,

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Water Bugs Pacific, and Caribbean between 2002 and 2016 for introducing me to Halobates and for their informative accounts of marine life of all kinds. 10. Cheng, “Marine Insects and the Sea-Skater.” 11. Andersen and Cheng, “Marine Insect Halobates.” 12. See Cheng, “Marine Insects and the Sea-Skater.”

|

229

13. Lanna Cheng is the veritable Moffett of the marine sciences of our time, having pioneered the study of marine entomology. See “Pioneer in the Study of Marine Insects,” Sunday Times (London), September 6, 2015. 14. Andersen and Cheng note that “all three species remain in good standing” (“Marine Insect Halobates,” 119). 15. See Cheng, Marine Insects. 16. Ibid.

Bibliography Andersen, Nils Moller, and Lanna Cheng. “The Marine Insect Halobates (Heteroptera: Gerridae): Biology, Adaptations, Distribution, and Phylogeny.” Oceanography and Marine Biology: An Annual Review 42 (2004): 119–80. Brayton, Dan. Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Cheng, Lanna, ed. Marine Insects. New York: American Elsevier, 1976. ———. “Marine Insects and the SeaSkater Halobates (Hemiptera: Gerridae).” In Encyclopedia of Entomology, edited by John L. Capinera. London: Springer, 2008. Mentz, Steve. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. New York: Verso, 2009. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 229

by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Facsimile reprint: New York: Da Capo, 1967. Ogilvie, Brian. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Parry, J. H. The Discovery of the Sea. New York: Dial Press, 1974. Pedersen, Tara E. Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2015. “Pioneer in the Study of Marine Insects.” Sunday Times (London), September 6, 2015. Rozwadowski, Helen. Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005. Topsell, Edward. The Historie of FoureFooted Beastes. London, 1607.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Chapter 14

WORMS Worms of Conscience

Karen Raber

Thomas Moffett’s discussion of worms in his Theater of Insects takes up a disproportionate number of pages in part because there are so many varieties of worms (the term covers everything from earthworms to intestinal parasites) and in part, I would argue, because the worm looms larger than most other insects as a competing agent, dwelling not just alongside but within humans themselves. Worms are both metaphor and matter; as we will see, they both divide and unite at many levels and in many registers—the body with its behaviors, internal and external action, life and death, creation and destruction. Worms colonize specific bodies, disrupting claims to the singularity of individuals, and by influencing human conduct they trouble assumptions about human reason, authority, and autonomy.1 Moffett’s entries for worms depict a veritable helminthic cosmos within each human being, diverse and responsible for complex effects on individuals and groups. But it is also crucial to consider the position of the Theater of Insects as a physico-theological natural history, one that fills a pivotal role in negotiating changing hermeneutic frameworks and cultural objectives, since in this respect, Moffett’s work reveals a parasite that is eternally adaptive to new intellectual and historical hosts, just as it is to its many physical ones.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 230

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

231

In this chapter, I focus on the ways in which new protoscientific paradigms for explaining human behavior (among which Moffett perhaps belongs) appropriate and reposition an older but continuing Christian tradition involving the “worm of conscience.” The old worm, newly refurbished, is endowed in a text like Moffett’s with character, collective identity, and increased power over human populations, and it thereby inevitably attenuates any human claim to sovereignty over body and mind. In keeping with the shape of other natural histories, Moffett’s section on intestinal and other internal bodily worms assembles a host of tales from classical and contemporary texts, a kind of compendium of worm lore. Much of this is unremarkable: he observes that worms bedevil children more than any other group; they are linked to humoral changes in the gut when they appear there; they can be expelled by the consumption of bitter herbs; and so on. Moffett engages in debates about whether the tapeworm is a single creature or a collection of “seeds” held together by a casing of mucus, whether worms can be found in places other than the intestines, whether they are the causes of certain diseases, and whether they are spontaneously generated by corrupt matter. Of this last controversy, Moffett offers a conclusion that “because living creatures are bred in the little world [of the body] as they are in the great,” and because “in the earth there are all kinde of humours, heat and spirit, that it may nourish,” so the body breeds worms, some of which cause no distress to their hosts—indeed, are, he claims, a sign of good health and may even have curative powers.2 Ian MacInnes has described the worm as a link between corruption and generation, observing that “worms were in their very essence a part of the putrefaction that engendered them” and were “hailed exemplars of generation itself.”3 For MacInnes, worms in general reveal the disturbing, uncontained copiousness of creation, the teeming fullness of both the micro- and the macrocosm. That perspective applies also to Moffett’s protoscientific representations. There are, however, specific qualities of worms that Moffett dwells on in the text. For one thing, he insists that worms can be found in every part of the body, not merely in the digestive system. “In the blood itself, some living creatures breed like to worms,” while among both classical sources and Moffett’s own acquaintances, stories abound of worms emerging from “the seed,” from the “matrix,” from kidneys,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 231

11/9/22 1:36 PM

232

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

under the skin, and from nearly every body part imaginable (1108). Having recounted the story of a “stone,” or a tumor made up of worms, the size of a pigeon’s egg voided by a royal physician “as a most troublesome birth at his fundament,” as well as his own experience with a woman from whom he “brought forth 35 stones like to Medlar seeds” by giving her a clyster, Moffett continues with this opinion: “Many there are that question the credit of Pedemontanus Arculanus, Guainerius, Trallianus, Bennivenius, and Montuus, because (besides the opinion of Galen) they have written that they have more then once seen stones in the head, lungs, greater veins, the gall bladder, under the tongue, in the joynts, and belly. But since daily experience doth clear them from a lie, we may say that the Greek speak, as Greekes were wont to doe, but that these men speak but the truth” (1107). In reporting on the symptoms of worm infestation, Moffett relays several cases of changes in human character, behavior, and mental states due to worms at work within. Thus, he reports, the disease known as Hauptwurm in Germany and Hungary resulted in patients falling into “the frenzie, or madness, and when they were dead, and their brains were opened, a Worm was found there” (1107). A woman “whom the neighbors thought to be bewitched” recovered when she “cast up a great ball of Phlegm” that contained a worm (1108). Cornelius Gemma, Moffett tells us, gives the details of another patient who suffered head pains and whose brain also harbored worms, discovered when she was dissected on her death (1107). In children, who are most susceptible to infestation, worms can cause changes in demeanor, leaving them “benummed,” or in a “swound,” or making them “like dotards speak strange words in their sleep,” although “very few of those do cry, for most of them are void of reason, and are silent” (1112). Even in adults, he says, “they that have Worms their eyes at first shine, their cheeks are wan, at night they have cold sweats . . . they are angry with those that awake them, they speak strange words, sometimes they are in a lethargy, and pick straws,” among other symptoms (1112). The association of worm infestations with strange languages, madness, and pathological behaviors establishes worms’ participation in permitting or hindering human reason and language, two of the central factors that have historically anchored arguments for human exceptionalism.4 It is tempting, in fact, to link Moffett’s reference to “Greek” speech (incomprehensible to many) with his own objectives

BotelhoV1-final.indb 232

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

233

in correcting or confirming other authorities on the subject—he is the interpreter and translator who can make sense of all this prior commentary—or even with the relatively recondite nature of worms’ collective comportment within the human body (in which case, Moffett is the observer peculiarly qualified to sort the evidence and find the truth of worms’ nature). Certainly, in Moffett’s account, worms’ physiological ubiquity allows them to manipulate human faculties beyond the movements of the gut or the bowels. Moffett characterizes worms as mobile agents with their own desires and responses to stimuli; they are a commonwealth within the living body whose aims might coincide with or diverge from their host’s. Coughing, for instance, might be caused by worms “no greater than Lute-strings” creeping “from place to place” (1108). Those taking physic for worms must be cautious about “exasperating” them with “vehement remedies,” and patients with tapeworms should be carefully dieted to prevent their human hosts experiencing discomfort: “Wherefore we grant them wine mingled with water, and let them eat often both for their need, and that the Worms may not gnaw them” (1119, 1114). The pacification of worms looms large in treatments beyond Moffett’s text, as I’ve discussed elsewhere.5 In The Theater of Insects, placating them contributes to their ability to signify health, defends against their rebellion or migration, which might cause disease, and acknowledges that qualities like reason and intelligible speech do not belong inalienably, uniquely, and inherently to human beings. Moffett also takes note, in a manner consistent with natural philosophy, of the incredible variety of worm phenotypes as he attempts to classify them according to their visible and invisible attributes. Thus, he gives minute descriptions of body shapes, sizes, number of legs, color, and more. He distinguishes “ascarids” from “Gourd worms” and others because they irritate the host more: “They have their name from ascaria, because they bite and tickle” their hosts (1110). It is this tendency that makes some worms so much more troublesome than others; tapeworms and some roundworms reside comfortably within their hosts, only indirectly affecting health. Ascarids, however, create constant, nagging pain. Moffett does not directly link ascarids with the proverbial worm of conscience as we shall see other authors do. Yet Moffett’s long list of the mental conditions associated with worm infestations, and his translation of ascaria as “bite and tickle,” already hint at a potential

BotelhoV1-final.indb 233

11/9/22 1:36 PM

234

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

overlap between his natural history of worms and their appearances in religious texts from biblical times forward. In the remainder of this chapter, we’ll journey from that earliest sacred origin of the worm of conscience, through its later translations as it is digested in both literature and natural philosophy and medicine. As a result of its progress through history, literature, and protoscience, the worm metamorphoses into a complex hybrid of matter and metaphor, a source of spiritual and physical health and disease, and the source of agential frictions that shape human bodies, souls, and minds.

I. Don Worm Answering Beatrice’s demand that he kill Claudio in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick continues his “merry war” with her by suggesting his fitness for marriage, and with it a kind of immortality: Benedick. Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably. Beatrice. It appears not in this confession. There’s not one wise man among twenty that will praise himself. Benedick. An old, an old instance, Beatrice, that lived in the time of good neighbors. If a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in monument than the bell rings and the widow weeps. Beatrice. And how long is that, think you? Benedick. Question: why an hour in clamor and a quarter in rheum. Therefore it is most expedient for the wise, if Don Worm, his conscience, find no impediment to the contrary, to be the trumpet of his own virtues, as I am to myself.6 Benedick anthropomorphizes the proverbial worm of conscience as “Don Worm,” obliquely reminding us that Don Pedro and the noble Claudio have been woefully short on conscience in their misprision and destruction of Hero. Their joking attempt to return the male community to “normal” practice has, by the time Don Worm appears, fallen flat: Benedick’s speech here follows a jarringly violent encounter among the three friends and subsequent scenes during which the laughing Pedro and Claudio will do extreme penance for Hero’s “murder.”

BotelhoV1-final.indb 234

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

235

Don Worm possesses the highest rank the world of the play allows; “he” is Don Pedro’s and Don John’s social equal and, I think, their alter ego; he is the missing companion who might have averted the disaster at the wedding—and he is active, “biting and tickling” in the most unusual, contrary places. Don Worm’s elevation hints at parallels between legitimate and bastard brothers, where both characters would prefer to dwell on differences, suggesting a leveling where we might expect clear distinction by birth and rank. Ultimately, it is not Don John but the lowly Borachio who confesses his sin in the play, thus to some degree repairing the damage done by his “betters.” When Borachio tries to claim sole responsibility, however, Leonato corrects him: “Not so, villain, thou beliest thyself. / Here stand a pair of honorable men— / A third is fled—that had a hand in it.”7 Although Leonato will later consider both Claudio and Don Pedro absolved, the play does not distinguish at first between their ill deeds and Don John’s. All three, the audience is invited to understand, could do with a good dose of worms to prick their consciences a bit further. Benedick’s anthropomorphized worm of conscience belongs to a long history in which the internal, secret promptings of morality seem to the sufferer the intercession of another entity altogether—usually God, or the God-voice assumed to dwell within each human being. The tradition probably evolves out of a series of biblical passages, which reference the “worm [that] shall not die.” In Mark, the worm is mentioned three times in one passage: And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thy foot offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter halt into life, than having two feet to be cast into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire: Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. (Mark 9:43–48, AV)

BotelhoV1-final.indb 235

11/9/22 1:36 PM

236

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

The Hebrew word used in Mark, tolah or tolayah, references a worm associated with corruption, probably a maggot.8 Similar passages occur throughout the Bible: Isaiah 66:24 references the worm in a refrain to indicate the ongoing punishment of the unrighteous: “their worme shall not dye, neither shall their fire be quenched, and they shall be an abhorring unto all flesh.” Augustine, in The City of God, identifies this biblical worm with the pangs of conscience, commenting on the scholastic argument over the nature of what was then termed “synderesis” (the spark of conscience): “However, those who have no doubt that in hell there will be sufferings for both sould and body hold that the body will be gnawed, as it were, by the ‘worm’ of grief. This is certainly a probable enough view, since it is absurd to think that either pain of body or anguish of soul will be lacking there. For myself, however, it seems preferable to say that both ‘fire’ and the ‘worm’ apply to the body, and that the reason for making no mention in Scripture of the anguish of the soul is that it is implied, though not made explicit.”9 Augustine’s interpretation shares its central premise with the commentary of his contemporary, Jerome, who finds in the book of Ezekiel evidence that humans have what is also termed a “spark” of conscience.10 For mainstream medieval religious thought, synderesis was a standard point of reference for describing God’s inextinguishable influence on human moral choice; the concept could be conveyed by terms like worm, spark, and scintilla nearly interchangeably—all referred to an innate inclination, to the capacity for intuitive moral reasoning. While there are complex arguments among scholastics over the exact nature of synderesis, whether as spark or worm, they agree with Augustine that the worm has both physical and spiritual effects.11 By the late Renaissance, however, Protestantism’s emphasis on human corruption tended to reject this version of moral reason: humanity’s absolute pollution by original sin, and its consequent reliance on grace for salvation, was incompatible with the idea that there exists within even the most depraved soul a spark of the divine. Thus, observes critic Robert A. Greene, the spark of conscience is “snuffed” in early Protestant theology.12 Martin Luther initially embraces the scholastic worm of synderesis, but the idea of the spark is quickly eclipsed in his insistence on faith as the only path to moral awareness. Synderesis likewise survives in John Calvin’s theology, even though he is more adamant about human corruption: as he writes, “For such knowledge of

BotelhoV1-final.indb 236

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

237

God as now remains in us is nothing else than a frightful source of idolatry and all superstitions. . . . Thus in the whole of our nature there remains not one drop of uprightness.”13 But even for Calvin, the worm survives this theological banishment: “The worm of conscience, sharper than any cauterizing iron, gnaws away within,” he promises elsewhere.14 Other religious writers continued to be comfortable with the long tradition of conscience’s ascarid-like biting and tickling. Nicholas Breton’s 1616 The Crossing of Proverbs asks, “Which is the worst worm in the world?” and answers, “The worm of conscience.”15 The persistence of the worm over the spark might indicate that the more bestial and material imagery satisfied Calvin’s and other Protestants’ sense of humanity’s wicked and degenerate nature. Yet John Abernethy hedges with simile: “To all men, conscience is as a God, sitting in the middle of a man’s heart. . . . It accuseth and condemneth; making the heart to be pricked, and so smite its selfe: and like a worme to gnawe the heart, stirring up shame, sadnesse, sorrow, feare, and our own thoughts to trouble and affray us.”16 In The Devil’s Banquet (1614), Thomas Adams recounts the price of indulgence: The wicked man cannot want furies, so long as he hath himselfe. Indeede the soule may flye from the body, not sinne from the soule. An impatient Iudas may leape out of the priuate hell in himselfe, into the common pit below; as the boyling fishes out of the Caldron into the flame. But the gaine hath beene, the addition of a new hell without them, not the losse of the old hell within them. The worme of Conscience doth not then cease her office of gnawing, when the fiends begin their office of torturing. Both ioyne their forces to make the dissolutely wicked, desolately wretched.17 Robert Bolton’s fire-and-brimstone sermon warns those who have ignored the worm too long: “I say, that then the time, and turne is come; that the worme of conscience, destitute now or ever of any further satisfaction from sensuall sweetnes, will ragingly turne upon the Soule, devoure like a Lion, knaw like a Vulture, vex eternally.”18 This is only a very tiny sampling of the hundreds of appearances the worm makes in early modern religious literature, suggesting that Don Worm as a spiritual partner within the host survives these theological tribulations to evolve a rich afterlife as a cultural commonplace.19

BotelhoV1-final.indb 237

11/9/22 1:36 PM

238

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

As Shakespeare’s reference indicates, the worm of conscience takes up residence in literature as well. It shows up, for instance, in the moral to Chaucer’s “Physician’s Tale”: Beware, for no man wot whom God will smite In no degree, nor in which manner wise The worm of conscience may agrise Of wicked life, though it so privy be.20 Shakespeare’s plays actually abound in worms of all kinds, and worms of conscience are no exception. Queen Margaret in Richard III wishes on Gloucester eternal suffering through the worm’s agency: If heaven have any grievous plague in store Exceeding those that I can wish upon thee, O, let them keep it till thy sins be ripe, And then hurl down their indignation On thee, the troubler of the poor world’s peace! The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!21 Robert Greene’s Pandosto, Shakespeare’s source for The Winter’s Tale, likewise gives space to the worm. Pandosto opines to Franion in terms that resonate with the phrasing of religious helminthology: “Conscience is a worm that ever biteth, but never ceaseth.”22 What is fascinating about the worm of conscience is that it functions in vastly divergent dimensions: as the voice of God in one’s mind and heart, it is unspeakably vast, ineffable, a fragment of divinity itself; as the bodily worm that gnaws from within, it is absurdly small and insignificant, beneath notice, fully “common” in every sense of that word. Benedick’s offhand comic personification of Don Worm speaks to both aspects: Don Worm is as “great” (at least in status) as Don Pedro and his noble bastard brother, but trivial enough to be mocked and invoked in a moment when Benedick wants to justify self-praise.

II. The Worm Travels In Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist, Face advises the tobacconist Drugger, “You must eat no cheese” because it “breeds melancholy, / And that

BotelhoV1-final.indb 238

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

239

same melancholy breeds worms.”23 Face’s offhand remark is part of the fraud he is perpetrating, yet his recommendation has a kind of truthiness to it: early modern belief in spontaneous generation indicated that corrupt matter might indeed breed worms, among other small insects (and cheese was frequently observed to be especially prone to such a thing), and melancholy humors were associated with disease. Thus a corrupted digestive tract overburdened with melancholic humors might “breed worms.”24 Certainly the links Face gestures to, between food, humoral balance, and disease, were entirely familiar to Jonson’s audiences, and so Face’s “knowledge” is just good enough to fool Drugger. Face’s prescription relies on the familiarity of early modern materialist conceptions of what we would now call psychology, and contemporary assumptions about insect biology. These derive from the growing popular interest in, and often experience with, alchemy and medicine, as well as natural history and other forms of empirical or experimental science. Face may be hilariously comical in his imposture, but as my opening examples from The Theater of Insects demonstrate, plenty of actual early modern natural philosophers and physicians were unsurprised to find worms at the root of their patients’ odd behavioral problems. In early modern medical literature, the worm of conscience undergoes translation into something more concrete, observable, and no longer exclusively associated with theology’s preoccupation with the condition of the human soul. The worm of conscience, we might say, gets reincarnated as a more earthbound, physiological phenomenon; it gets, in other words, medicalized. It is worth a detour into recent medical science to appreciate the long historical trajectory that the “worm of conscience” follows. Some of us are probably familiar with the case of the animal parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which infects cats and mice. Traditionally, the disease caused by this little worm, toxoplasmosis, has been of concern for pregnant women who might come into contact with cat feces, since it can cause fetal brain damage or death. Healthy adults, however, have been assumed to experience no ill effects from a case of toxoplasmosis, and so the worm has generally been ignored, —until, that is, scientists discovered the worm’s odd role in mouse brains, and evolutionary biologist Jaroslav Flegr embarked on a related series of studies designed to illustrate its far-reaching effects on populations. Years ago, parasitologist Joanne Webster demonstrated that T. gondii was genetically

BotelhoV1-final.indb 239

11/9/22 1:36 PM

240

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

programmed to target dopamine production in the brain during the stage at which it encysts itself; this allows the parasite to modify mouse behavior, making rodents less afraid of cats and even positively attracting them to cat urine.25 Flegr studied the parasite’s similar encysting of human brains and found that it is equally capable of hijacking human brains, with differential results according to the host’s gender (men become more resistant to rules, more aggressive and less fearful; women become more rule abiding, image conscious, and so on; both genders have delayed reaction times). “If Flegr is right,” reads a recent article on his work in the Atlantic magazine, “the ‘latent’ parasite may be quietly tweaking the connections between our neurons, changing our response to frightening situations, our trust in others, how outgoing we are, and even our preference for certain scents. Flegr also believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia.”26 Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in fact, is willing to link a whole era of social and artistic change to the influence of the worm: he notes that schizophrenia, which involves increases in the same neurotransmitter T. gondii stimulates, arose at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century when the keeping of cats became popular in urban centers like Paris and London. As the craze for cats spread from lefties and artistes, so the incidence of schizophrenia surged.27 T. gondii illustrates the capacity of parasites to traverse the domains of the body, its ethico-political positioning in regard to law and governance, and its influence in cultural-historical change. As the author of the Atlantic article also remarks, the worm’s actions demonstrate that we humans, who assume we know where identity, agency, and personality originate, are far more in the thrall of “tiny puppeteers” than we have previously recognized. Renaissance natural histories and medical texts clearly anticipate the same crossovers between moral behavior, internal mental processes, and the rather more material coexistence of parasites within humans. As Moffett’s many examples of strange speech, madness, and even witchcraft associated with worms illustrate, the idea of humans dancing to the manipulations of “tiny puppeteers” was not especially surprising to many early moderns. The early modern transmutation of the (metaphoric) worm of conscience into a physical, material worm that influences behavior does not follow a direct path, and it is not a sudden event. It proceeds through

BotelhoV1-final.indb 240

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

241

overlaps and borrowings from one genre to another, as transgressive as the worm itself. Moral writings sometimes seem to either set the terms for or reflect the ubiquity of the shift toward a medicalized psychological worm effect. Abernethy, the sermonist who hedged with a simile, for instance, describes a faulty conscience or one atrophied by disuse as “cauterized by iron.” He explains that the Pauline use of the image of a worm is appropriate because the conscience’s excision of sin is analogous to cutting away rotten or gangrenous (and therefore wormy) parts of the diseased body or searing flesh that has been exposed to venomous bites. The resulting scar will fall away, taking with it moral capacity. A cauterized conscience, he concludes, cannot “truly and holily witnesseth, accuseth, nor excuseth.”28 Mobilizing language and imagery from medical treatments of the body, Abernethy casts the worm in the role of infection, agent of decay, and biting serpent; thus, he situates the worm as a bodily scourge, even if his conclusion is that only faith can offer a complete cure. The force of Abernethy’s representation of the worm comes not from abstract threats to one’s soul but from his readers’ identification with besieged and broken anatomies. In related fashion, Bolton compares “the never-dying worme, that naturally breeds, and growes bigge in every unregenerate conscience” to a “wolf” in the foot: “Feede it continually with fresh supply of raw flesh, and it will let the Body alone; but with-draw that, and it devoures upward.”29 The “wolf” Bolton is referring to here is most likely a type of wolf-worm. Today, that name is reserved for the parasitic larva of the Cuterebra, a type of botfly, that burrows into the flesh through a cut or open sore and moves gradually upward until it infects the brain. In Bolton’s England, the reference was perhaps more general: a “wolf” could indicate any number of species of worm, most of them associated with agriculture, not human physiology and parasitology. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Johannes Goedaert’s 1682 Of Insects as the first use of the term wolf-worm in his reference to “live worms, which our Dutch Boors call ‘woolves’ ”; these are garden-variety worms attacking plants. But the use of the descriptor wolf appears throughout early modern medical literature to describe any number of cancerous, erosive, or parasitic diseases. Although it is reasonable to assume that Bolton is gesturing toward either the medical or the botanical meaning of “wolf,” the actual circumstances he recounts seem indeed to more closely align his “wolf” with the effects of the botfly larva: as he says, “Feede it

BotelhoV1-final.indb 241

11/9/22 1:36 PM

242

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

continually with fresh supply of raw flesh,” to draw it out rather than let it rise within. One remedy reproduced in many medical treatises for an infestation of botfly larvae is the application of raw meat to the wound; the meat deprives the larva of oxygen, at which point it burrows into or through the meat and leaves its host’s flesh.30 Again, the power of Bolton’s appeal rests in his conflation of spiritual with material through his appeal to his readers’ knowledge of medical lore and natural history, if not actual experience with pests in the field and garden. Early moderns clearly suffered horribly from infestations by parasitic worms and were obsessed with how to identify and treat them. Moffett’s Theater of Insects assembles a plethora of examples of worms’ variety, size, and effects: “I have seen some red, yellow, black, and partly white”; “Platerus had such a Worm dried that was eighteen ells long, I saw it”; “a Smith did vomit up a worm with grosse plegm, almost a foot and half long, very plain, with a red head that was smooth”; “he voided by stool a great black Worm with black hair, five feet long, as big as a cane” (1109). So profound was infestation in some patients that they were reputed to have vomited or excreted hundreds of them, or sometimes huge ones of prodigious length, odd coloration, or with multiple limbs. Moffett includes medical lore from classical sources, as well as his own observations of those tormented with parasites, and provides recipes for treating all kinds of infestations. His text, like most other natural histories, is inclusive rather than disciplinarily narrow; indeed, there was as yet in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries no clear distinction between a text like Moffett’s and dietary treatises, works of natural philosophy, recipe books, husbandry manuals, and medical treatises.31 A quick tour through the later seventeenth century, however, offers a cornucopia of gruesome particulars on worms as disease. R. C[lark], the author of Vermiculars Destroyed (1690), advises readers that they should take some time to learn “what strange and direfull enemies these depopulating vermiculars are.”32 Summarizing previous authors’ observations of worms in nearly every body part, responsible for a broad variety of diseases including plague, he gives instructions for a series of experiments to reveal that worms can breed from nearly any substance on earth. They are, in other words, inescapable. William Ramesey’s 1668 Helminthologia blames its object of study for “macerating and direfully cruciating every part of the Bodies of mankind

BotelhoV1-final.indb 242

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

243

. . . killing more than either the sword or plague.”33 John Hall’s Observations on English Bodies recounts the case of Richard Wilmore, who “vomited black worms about an inch and a half long, with six feet and little red heads.”34 A. B.’s The Sick Man’s Rare Jewel cautions, “Sometimes they [worms] creep up into the stomach, and thence by the Gula they ascend into the mouth itself, from whence, being open, they spring forth.”35 Worms evacuate the body through feces and urine, but also through the skin, the eyes, the nose, and, of course, through the anus and the mouth. Like Moffett’s remarks on worms in blood, kidneys, and other organs, medical literature tracks the presence of worms in virtually every possible body part, including the brain. Ramesey’s compendium of cases includes that of a “young man which labored of an Acute Fever, that voyded worms by the Ears”; another patient was “violently macerated with the Head-ache by reason of a worm upon the Dura mater.”36 Ramesey cites the Observations of Dutch physician Petrus Forestus, which details “one wickedly vex’d with the Head-ache, which no means easing, he commanded the sutures of his cranium should be opened, whereupon the chirurgeon found upon the dura mater an ill-favoured worm, which being removed, his pain forever ceased.”37 Some of these later writers echo Moffett in citing cases where worms are specifically responsible for distortions of behavior. Ramesey writes of an Italian “that had never been in Germany, and yet he spake the German tongue most elegantly, being as one possest by the Devil, nowithstanding was cured by a Physistian that administered a Medicine which expell’d an infinite number of worms, whereby he was also, wholly freed of his knowledge of the German tongue.”38 Now whether we would agree that speaking German is a kind of affliction or disease, we can certainly see in an account like this one a general willingness to connect parasites not only to the physical discomfort of the body but also to the spiritual or characterological by-products of the mind. If the religious commentary borrowed some of its weight and impact from the medical literature, the medical literature in turn lent protoscientific validity to the concept of the worm of conscience. The Sick Man’s Jewel echoes Moffett’s cases of “strange words” spoken by patients in the throes of worm infestation when it includes among the symptoms of worm infestation “pains in the head, talking idly, and epileptical convulsions.”39 Both Clark and Ramesey agree that worms are generated

BotelhoV1-final.indb 243

11/9/22 1:36 PM

244

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

spontaneously and may be caused not only by humoral imbalances but by witchcraft or possession. Clark recounts his experience of a patient: In 1687, who lived in Shoreditch, a Woman above Sixty, who had a continual Trembling about her Heart, so that she could not rest Day nor Night: and withal, was strangely tempted to cut her Husband’s Throat, without any Reason, for she protested she lov’d him intirely, having been married many years, during which Time he had always been very respective to her, and never gave her any occasion to entertain such Diabolical Thoughts. Hearing this, I advised her to make her Address to a Divine, for such in this case were more proper than a Physician. The Woman still insisted on my Powder; I gave her a Paper—four or five days after she came for another, affirming she was much better; but not returning to me again, I sent to see what was become of her, the Person that went found her in good Health, and those wicked Fantastick hellish Temptations subdued, and vanished.40 In this anecdote we find all the ingredients of a comprehensive account of worm work: a human being is suddenly overcome with ideation that cannot be explained by any reasonable means, leading even her physician to believe that she is possessed and in need of spiritual help. Nevertheless, his temporizing use of his patented worm remedy results in her complete recovery. There is nothing here quite as direct as in Ramesey’s report of a headache relieved when a worm is taken from the actual “dura mater” of the brain, but Clark clearly means his audience to appreciate that his “Powder” saves this patient not only from physical suffering, but from torments to her soul should she act on her “temptation.”41 Whether this patient actually suffered from worms is a foregone conclusion, since she appears in a treatise on vermiculars (her case immediately below a set of images of worms) and since she is healed by Clark’s vermicular powder.42 The fact that the religious and the medical literature on worms conducted a kind of dialogue with each other meant that early moderns considered parasitical worm infestations as an internal conflict over identity and agency, indistinguishable from the metaphysical battle for control over their souls. Indeed, this process deconstructed any

BotelhoV1-final.indb 244

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms

|

245

fi xed notion of “human” agency, rendering the effects of God-instilled conscience analogous to, even interchangeable with, the influence of tiny parasitic “puppeteers” in the brain. Human beings, the Renaissance understood, were always already colonized by strange creatures, whether material or divine, and so were only imperfectly, tenuously in control of themselves—of what it meant to have a self, a soul, a mind. Don Worm traveled far and through different lands, but his shaping presence adapted and survived. Notes 1. A number of critics have discussed early modern worms: Ian MacInnes argues that the worm complicates the dividing line between life and death by signaling the fertility that can emerge from within decay (“The Politic Worm”). Alanna Skuse treats the worm as one of the zoomorphic representations of cancer in Constructions of Cancer, 61–74. Randall Martin’s Shakespeare and Ecology includes a chapter on Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra that finds the worm “a flagship trope” for “evolutionary attitudes toward human-animal relations” (134–65, 139). Finally, I have argued that the worm belongs to a competitive commonwealth imagined to dwell within the human body (Raber, Animal Bodies). 2. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 1110–11. Subsequent references to Theater of Insects are cited parenthetically by page number. Moffett includes the tale of Democritus of Athens, who was told by the Oracle to take worms for an illness, as evidence for worms’ potential health-giving qualities (1107). 3. MacInnes, “The Politic Worm,” 259. The classical topos for the generativity of putrified matter is Virgil’s Georgics, which describes the process for restoring a failed stock of bees by fermenting a bull’s carcass (241). 4. This argument is thoroughly explored in, for instance, Erica Fudge’s Brutal Reasoning.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 245

5. Raber, Animal Bodies, 113–14. 6. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, 5.2.68–81. 7. Ibid., 5.1.259–61. 8. ‫ תּוֹלָ ע‬usually signifies worm. 9. Augustine, City of God, 503. 10. Cited in Robert A. Greene, “Synderesis,” 197–98. 11. For more on the medieval tradition of the worm of conscience and its variants, and on its transitions over time and among genres, see ibid. and Wright, “World’s Worst Worm.” 12. Robert A. Greene, “Synderesis,” 204. 13. Calvin, Commentary on John, 3:6, 1:5, quoted in Robert A. Greene, “Synderesis,” 204. 14. Calvin, Institutes, I.3.3. 15. Breton, Crossing of Proverbs, sig. B2v. 16. Abernethy, Christian and Heavenly Treatise, 104–5, emphasis mine. 17. Adams, Devil’s Banquet, 188. 18. Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting, 105. 19. I am including only a minuscule portion of examples of references to the worm of conscience that a search of the literature returns, since the image and phrase are nearly ubiquitous. 20. Chaucer, Chaucer’s Poetry, 405. 21. Shakespeare, Richard III, 1.3.217–22. 22. Robert Greene, Pandosto, 12. 23. Jonson, Alchemist, 3.4.107–8. 24. In fact, Moffett engages with the debate over whether worms can breed only from corruption: he concludes

11/9/22 1:36 PM

246

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

that like worms in the “great world,” the earth, they breed from all humors: “I conclude therefore that from every raw humour of the body Worms may breed and not only from crude or corrupted phlegm” (1110). See Webster, “Effect of Toxoplasmosis gondii.” Macauliffe, “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy,” 38. See, for instance, Torrey and Yolken, “Toxoplasma gondii and Schizophrenia.” Abernethy, Christian and Heavenly Treatise, 105. Bolton, Instructions for a Right Comforting, 105. Cancer is also represented as a wolf, in addition to a worm. See Skuse, Constructions of Cancer, 62–72, although in her account, the connection between the two is not as direct as in Bolton’s example. Early modern natural histories were complex amalgams of all of these categories of information; for an in-depth study of the genre, see Ogilvie, Science of Describing.

32. C[lark], Vermiculars Destroyed, 3–4. 33. Ramesey, Helminthologia, 41. 34. Hall, Observations on English Bodies, 104. 35. A. B., Sick Man’s Rare Jewel, 172. 36. Ramesey, Helminthologia, 40. 37. Ibid., 24. 38. Ibid., 42. 39. A. B., Sick Man’s Rare Jewel, 172. 40. Clark, Vermiculars Destroyed, 20. 41. Maggot, we might remember, is not only the name for a worm, but also the term for fantasies and delusions. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first instance of this usage occurs 1625 in John Fletcher’s Women Pleased: “Are not you mad my friend? . . . Have not you Maggots in your braines?” (sig. Eeeeee2v). Samuel Wesley calls his 1685 collection of nonsense poems Maggots, or Poems on Several Subjects. 42. Clark coyly leaves it to his readers to decide whether his treatment cured her, and although she did not “void” a worm “visible to the eye,” he reports that she did void “an abundance of strange stuff ” (Vermiculars Destroyed, 21).

Bibliography A. B. The Sick Man’s Rare Jewel. London, 1674. Abernethy, John. A Christian and Heavenly Treatise. London, 1622. Adams, Thomas. The Devil’s Banquet. London, 1618. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Translated by Gerald Walsh, Demetrius Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel Honana. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Bolton, Robert. Instructions for a Right Comforting Afflicted Consciences with Speciall Antidotes Against Some Grievous Temptations. London, 1631. Breton, Nicholas. Crossing of Proverbs, Crosse-Answeres, and CrosseHumours. London, 1616.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 246

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Vol. 1. Translated by Henry Beveridge. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845. C[lark], R. Vermiculars Destroyed. London, 1690. Chaucer, Geoff rey. Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology, Edited by E. T. Donaldson. New York: Wiley, 1975. Fletcher, John. Women Pleased. In Comedies and Tragedies, by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. London, 1647. Fudge, Erica. Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Greene, Robert A. “Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Worms Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 2 (1991): 195–219. Greene, Robert. Pandosto. In The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, edited by James O. Halliwell, vol. 8. London: J. E. Adelard, 1859. Hall, John. Observations on English Bodies. London, 1657. Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. In Four Comedies, edited by Helen Ostovich. London: Longman, 1997. Macauliffe, Kathleen. “How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy.” Atlantic Monthly (March 2012). MacInnes, Ian. “The Politic Worm: Invertebrate Life in the Early Modern English Body.” In The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature, edited by Jean Feerick and Vin Nardizzi, 253–74. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Martin, Randall. Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Raber, Karen. Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 247

|

247

Ramesey, William. Helminthologia. London, 1668. Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works, 5th ed. Edited by David Bevington. New York: Pearson, 2004. ———. Much Ado About Nothing. In The Complete Works, 5th ed., edited by David Bevington. New York: Pearson, 2004. ———. Richard III. In The Complete Works, 5th ed., edited by David Bevington. New York: Pearson, 2004. Skuse, Alanna. Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England: Ravenous Natures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Torrey, E. Fuller, and Robert H. Yolken. “Toxoplasma gondii and Schizophrenia.” Emerging Infectious Diseases 9, no. 11 (November 2003): 1375–80. Virgil. Georgics, book IV. Translated by Henry Rushton Fairclough and G. P. Gould. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Webster, Joann P. “The Effect of Toxoplasmosis gondii on Animal Behavior: Playing Cat and Mouse.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 33, no. 3 (2007): 752–56. Wright, Jonathan. “The World’s Worst Worm: Conscience and Conformity During the English Reformation.” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 113–33.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

C h a p t e r 15

SCORPIONS Flame of Fire Beaten: Scorpions in and out of Mind

Eric C. Brown

The title page of Thomas Moffett’s 1658 The Theater of Insects features at its center an illustrated beehive, an entirely expected showcasing of the insect that “exceed[s]” every other lesser creature in the book in both usefulness and delight, pleasure and ornament. Outside the margins of this framed image, a butterfly (a rather drab one) and a Spanish fly also decorate the page. Above them, two on either side and completing the scene, are four scorpions. Contrastingly, the title page of the 1634 publication Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum is far more crowded; it offers but a single scorpion, placed outside the framed beehive in the lower left corner. In addition, an enlarged millipede extends across the bottom of the frame, and nine other creatures—including a spider, flies, beetles, a caterpillar, and a more pictorially interesting lepidopteran—inhabit, more or less symmetrically, the side margins. In the 1658 edition, most of these graphic images are subsumed and expressed instead verbally by the subtitle (“Bees, Flies, Caterpillars, Spidrs, Worms, &c.”), leaving and multiplying the scorpions below in an uncluttered and eye-catching danse macabre around the hive. The shift in design highlights an ongoing tension in Moffett’s approach throughout his work and captures a larger indeterminacy. These scorpions (reprinted, like the rest of these images, from later

BotelhoV1-final.indb 248

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Scorpions

|

249

illustrations in the book) are less comfortable iconographic specimens. Indeed, their appearance seems most disconnected from the bees—and even the moth and beetle—organizationally, aesthetically, and symbolically. If the bees are domestic and contained, framed on the page as they are compartmentalized in their hive, the scorpions are loose and vaguely menacing. If the moth and Spanish fly are relatively inert and undynamic, the scorpions are engaged, kinetic, almost coordinated. Their juxtaposition suggests the extremes of insect signification in the book: the admirable bee giving way to an image most readers would have associated with things dangerous, even diabolical. But Moffett’s larger project in Theater of Insects is always a redemptive one, remotivating even the basest insects as elegant, fruitful, and, most important, useful animals. In this way, the scorpions offer a nice swerve toward the bees. Moffett later points out not only their deadly poisons but the ways in which such toxins could be reappropriated for the benefit of all humankind. And so the scorpions on the title page, dissociated from details of venom or any kind of threatening pose, also perform here as mild functionaries of a broader comic spirit in Moffett’s Theater: two almost embrace in a kind of reel, and the quartet together appear more for the sake of showing off their inimitable aesthetic design than to frighten a desert traveler: there is little of the “writhing tail and clasping claws,” as Ovid put it in his vision of the monstrous constellation Scorpio that sends Phaeton to his doom. Rather it is the kind of finely tuned grace Moffett underscores in his preface about all lesser creatures: “For however in shew they are most abject and sordid, yet if we look more nicely into them, they will appear far otherwise than they promise in the bare outside.”1 Thus, the scorpion’s mortal poison could be concocted into “oil of scorpion,” a substance whose well-known healing properties, documented by Moffett, included especially the “wounds they made.” It is exactly the kind of looping paradox that Moffett appreciated, a creature that contains such multitudes that it embodies even its own contradiction. The scorpion figures in Moffett’s project, however, in a way that also supports a broader sense that the popular and literary imagination of the early modern period regarded the scorpion as an especially indeterminate creature. Edward Topsell derived the very name “scorpion” from the Greek Sckanoos erpein because in its movements, “the motion is oblique, inconstant and uncertain, like as the flame of fire

BotelhoV1-final.indb 249

11/9/22 1:36 PM

250

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

beaten with a small winde.”2 Perhaps some of this chaotic motion is conveyed on the title page, where the scorpions play as supplements to the squared-off vision of neat and tidy bees and where they seem to inhabit a space beyond the material world—scorpions of the mind, as Macbeth famously conceived them. Moffett’s etymology also suggests this kind of dispersal: he cites the Greek word for “scorpion” as denoting the “scattering [of] its venome” (1049). Beyond their uncertain motion, however, and as an extension of their status as an especially imagined creature for English readers—one largely exotic and steeped in legend and fable—the scorpion comes to be associated with infinitude, inscrutability, and insubstantiality. Shakespeare’s use of the scorpion in Macbeth provides a helpful gloss on the versatility of the image. Its immediate context in the third act of the play is Macbeth’s pursuit of Banquo; the scene falls between his contracting with the murderers and the murder itself. Early in the scene, Lady Macbeth chastises him for his moodiness: How now, my lord, why do you keep alone, Of sorriest fancies your companions making, Using those thoughts which should indeed have died With them they think on? Things without all remedy Should be without regard: what’s done, is done.3 Her language here urges a formal closure, the very extinction of what she interprets to be Macbeth’s ongoing remorse, his “brain-sickly” cares, over the murder of Duncan (2.2.43). She attempts to steer him from the kind of unbounded “fancies” that lead him elsewhere to proclaim his blood will the “multitudinous seas incarnadine” and to the sort of finitude that should be the end of all “things without remedy” (2.2.59). Macbeth counters her by arguing that only the dead find such peace and that the “torture of the mind” causes him to “lie / In restless ecstasy” (3.2.21–22). Moreover, such ecstasies are not brought on by Duncan alone but by the continued threat of Banquo and his heirs: “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife! / Thou know’st that Banquo and his Fleance lives” (3.2.36–37). For Shakespeare here, the scorpions specifically contrast with the closure of Lady Macbeth’s earlier exhortation. It is not just the virulence and severity of the stings—a multitude of scorpions infecting Macbeth’s thoughts—but their persistence and numberless multiplication.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 250

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Scorpions

|

251

His mind is “full” of them—there is no discrimination, no accounting, no starting or ending point. They are the rough manifestation of his “restless ecstasy,” transporting him into the limitless pangs of fancy that ultimately drive him into madness. There is also a sense in which the scorpions double here as the promise of a curative—that howsoever these pains are limitless, they are remediable in a way Lady Macbeth does not anticipate. It is the same paradox that serves Moffett in illuminating the purgative power of the scorpion’s oil even while elaborating on its venom. For Macbeth, the scorpions are directly associated with Banquo and Fleance themselves, the “grown serpent” and “the worm that’s fled” who “in time will venom breed” (3.4.28–29). Thus, for Macbeth, the scorpions lurk inside and outside as the stinging pangs of regret—regret, that is, that Banquo and Fleance still live— and as the bestial representation of Banquo and Fleance themselves. They are nowhere and everywhere, infinitesimal and all-consuming. And finally, these scorpions provoke the outward activation and sublimation of Macbeth’s covert mental agitation into the violence of the tyrant—a violence that ends all thoughts of remorse.4 The idea of the scorpion as representing the extremes of pain, or the limitless quality of a tortured mind, appears frequently in other mentions of the animal. In 1 Kings, Solomon’s son Rehoboam receives the poor advice to treat his half-brother Jeroboam and his people even more “grievously” than their father, Solomon, had done: “My father made your yoke heavy, and I will add to your yoke: my father also chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions” (1 Kings 12, AV). John Milton transformed this conceit in his Eikonoklastes to a critique of Charles, in which the scorpions have been further weaponized by the king into a whip themselves: “And that he acted in good earnest what Rehoboam did but threat’n . . . and to whip us with his two twisted Scorpions, both temporal and spiritual Tyranny, all his Kingdoms have felt.”5 A further intensification occurs in Paradise Lost, when Death confronts Satan at the Gates of Hell: Back to thy punishment, False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings, Lest with a whip of Scorpions I pursue Thy ling’ring, or with one stroke of this Dart Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before.6

BotelhoV1-final.indb 251

11/9/22 1:36 PM

252

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

While the tyrannical qualities of Milton’s Death make the whip of scorpions an apt device, given its biblical legacy and Milton’s construction of it elsewhere, it is also apparent in this context that the whip of scorpions augments the divine punishment already allotted. It supplements, as wings to Satan’s speed, and in its supplementation, it agitates and mobilizes: Death imagines Satan fleeing from the agony of its stings; his punishment then becomes ultrakinetic rather than locked in place or chained in a lake of fire. Moreover, the whip of scorpions is typologically a forerunner of Death’s own dart, which is to say, Milton conceives of Death himself as a scorpion figure, a scorpion whose virulence is particularly beyond imagination: a “strange horror,” made up of “pangs unfelt before.” Indeed, like Death itself, whose figure is entirely ambiguous and amorphous— The other shape, If shape it might be call’d that shape had none Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb, Or substance might be call’d that shadow seem’d, For each seem’d either— Milton finds in the scorpion a perfect correlate for pain that seems to exist everywhere and nowhere (2.666–70). It is a shadowing of the material world, an indeterminacy that with its infinite variety—a variety Death too embodies—baffles the mind and presses its limits. As Milton draws on the scorpion’s strangeness and ineffability, Moffett’s description of the agony caused by scorpions is equally horrifying for its concrete detail, which he provides in vivid abundance: You shall first know the stinging of a Scorpion thus: The place is presently red and inflamed, and by turns, (as in an intermitting Ague) waxing cold, and the sick is sometimes better, sometimes worse. He sweats all over, his hairs stare upright, his whole body waxeth pale, his secrets swell, he breaks winde backwards, his eyes run with clammy tears and filth, his joynts grow hard, and he hath the falling of the Tuel, he fomes at mouth, he is drawn backwards by convulsions, and troubled with the Hickop, and sometimes great vomiting, he is quickly weary of labour, he is vexed and troubled with sense of horror, the outward parts of his body are cold, a pricking pain

BotelhoV1-final.indb 252

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Scorpions

|

253

runs over all his skin, sometimes he thinks that hail falls upon him . . . after these fainting, then swounding, and finally death. (1052) Indeed, the constellation of effects, taken in sum, is grotesque in its excesses: the cycling temperatures, clammy exudations, the uncontrolled flatulence, the foaming and vomiting and hiccupping, all convey a body whose boundaries are no longer intact. Even the imagined sensation of hail resembles something out of Dante’s Inferno, so that the scorpion produces violations not just of physical integrity but of natural order, an utter collapse of interior and exterior. Other symptoms that Moffett lists verge on the ridiculous: he recounts how one type of scorpion causes “a shaking palsie, and a Sardonian laughter . . . like to that of fools” (1050). But perhaps the single most compelling and terrifying anxiety produced in the early modern psyche by scorpions seems less to do with the scuttling array of physical agonies than the very undetectability of the scorpion, a seemingly perpetual dislocation in which the scorpion never materializes until its sting is felt. Often the sting itself was remarkable for its insubstantiality—an invisible bullet, “either very little or nothing at all, there appearing no hole” (1050). Thus, from the smallest possible source and vector, the scorpion could produce death ex nihilo. This is surely behind Milton’s design of his Scorpion-Death, and perhaps behind other diabolical associations of the scorpion. When Jesus tells his disciples in Luke 10:19, “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you,” it is a reassurance that depends on conquering the relative invisibility of their enemy. (To that extent, the serpents and scorpions are synecdoche for “all the power of the enemy,” seen and unseen.) Something of this disproportionate scale is conveyed in the verse of Quintus Serenus, included by Moffett and consistent with his project of assigning increasingly greater value to smaller and smaller things: These are small things, but yet their wounds are great, And in pure bodies lurking do most harm, For when our senses inward do retreat, And men are fast asleep, they need some charm, The Spider and the cruel Scorpion Are wont to sting, witnesse great Orion,

BotelhoV1-final.indb 253

11/9/22 1:36 PM

254

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Slayn by a Scorpion, for poysons small Have mighty force. (1057) That even the great hunter Orion could be laid low by a scorpion suggests the infinite susceptibility of all creatures to the scorpion’s power. Though the verse also marks especially the vulnerability of those “fast asleep,” who are physically defenseless, and the conflation of that vulnerability with the inward retreat of the senses also seems to parallel Shakespeare’s location of the scorpion as primarily involved with inner states—the poison of fear and apprehension that in dreams knows no bounds. (Perhaps influential here too was the notion that scorpions were also thought to spontaneously generate in the brain: Topsell mentions both a scorpion “bred in the brain, by continuall smelling to this herb Basill”; another, a maid, and after her death, “there were found little Scorpions in her brain.”)7 Contrastingly, the scorpion also takes on epic proportions, as in the book of Revelation when the locusts emerging from the abyss assume scorpion-like attributes, and in this case their massive scale and marvelous appearance, rather than their invisibility or infinite unpredictability, are the sources of awe: And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass of the earth, neither any green thing, neither any tree; but only those men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there

BotelhoV1-final.indb 254

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Scorpions

|

255

were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months. (Rev. 9:3–10) Almost every monstrous quality of these apocalyptic insects depends on their extreme visibility; though they emerge from “a bottomless pit” that itself issues forth smoke that obscures the sun, the reckoning depends on a kind of radical spectacle. The locusts are gigantic, and they bear the ostentations of royalty; their hair is long, teeth leonine, exoskeleton as hard as iron, and their sound is the very clamor of epic warfare. Their scorpion tails are both another sign of this excess—the most appalling pain imaginable—while also a concession to the seeming limitless quality of scorpions, whose numbers are so great as to seem infinite, fit denizens of a bottomless pit. It is a magnification that also lends to scorpions a vaguely draconian look: scaly and long tailed, violent pincers, almost overdetermined in their ability to inflict damage from all directions. And various representations of dragons, such as the heraldic wyvern, often absorb the scorpion recombinantly. Thus, Edmund Spenser in Visions of the World’s Vanitie describes “an hideous Dragon, dreadfull to behold” with a “forkhed sting, that death in it did beare” (71, 74), and in his Faerie Queene is even more elaborate: the dragon’s tail bears “two stings in-fixed. . . . Both deadly sharpe, that sharpest steele exceeden farre” (1.11.103–4). In the culminating attack on the knight Redcrosse, the dragon closely resembles a scorpion in its approach: “advauncing high above his head, / With sharpe intended sting so rude him smot” (1.11.339–40). Such scorpion gigantism, then, sometimes functions as a means of amplifying the vague and untraceable qualities of the scorpion in miniature. But in general, as tends to be affirmed in the natural science of scorpions, the larger the species, the less virulent the venom. It remains through their slightness and unreadability that scorpions produce the greatest physical and psychological violence. This subtlety in the scorpion often emblematically indicates deceit. Nona Flores cites Gregory the Great’s gloss as paradigmatic: scorpions are like those people who “are charming and innocent by appearance, but they carry behind their back venom which they secure.”8 Flores further details a number of instances in which the scorpion has been portrayed as a signifier for especially female treacherousness, from Ecclesiasticus 26:7 (“An evil wife is a yoke shaken to and fro: he that

BotelhoV1-final.indb 255

11/9/22 1:36 PM

256

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

hath hold of her is as though he held a scorpion”) to an image of a scorpion with a woman’s face in the twelft h-century Ancrene Riwle. Chaucer uses the device in “The Merchant’s Tale,” when January laments the infidelity of his young wife: O sodeyn hap! O thou Fortune unstable! Lyk to the scorpion so deceyvable, That flaterest with thyn heed whan thou wolt stynge; Thy tayl is deeth, thurgh thyn envenymynge. O brotil joye! O sweete venym queynte!9 And Dante’s magnificent use in the Inferno of the gargantuan and chimerical Geryon marks the height of such allegory, drawn perhaps from other medieval commentaries on the Locusts of Revelation.10 The Pilgrim’s winged transport to the seventh circle and the fraudulent sinners, Geryon is described as having “the face of a just man” with a tail “quivering in the void, twisting upwards the poisonous fork that armed the point like a scorpion’s.”11 It is a figure drawn partly from the manticore of legend, though Dante’s allegorical construction is complex and unfolds in the poem through a series of epic conceits, including one that also associates Geryon with the web spinning of Arachne. Some of this iconography depends surely on the natural history of scorpions as elusive, nocturnal, and prone to sting by surprise—lying under stones all day, crawling overnight into empty boots and remote corners of houses. Moffett reports that some even “come not only into chambers, but get into feather beds, and lay themselves down sometimes close to those that are asleep” (1051). All this seems once again to extend the nightmarish quality of the scorpion, which might appear from anywhere at any time and thus seem infinite in its presence. Indeed, the infinite quality of the scorpion often materialized into something literally countless—an anxiety produced by the swarming fecundity of many lesser creatures, in fact. Moffett recounts the tale of an area of Persia in which “you shall light upon an infinite number of Scorpions, whereupon the King of Persia being to ride that way, commands the Citizens three daies before to hunt the Scorpions, and assigns a very great reward for those that catcht most of them” (1052). Otherwise, “by reason of the multitude of scorpions lying under every stone, there should be no passage” (1052). But certainly the most extraordinary claim of the

BotelhoV1-final.indb 256

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Scorpions

|

257

scorpion’s deceptiveness—and perhaps the most unusual report on the scorpion in the entire Theater of Insects—is Moffett’s tale of scorpions that avoid the traps and wards set around houses by teaming together to form a great chain whereby one scorpion, in the end, will succeed in its sting: The Scorpions get up to the roofs of houses, and if they can finde any tyle broken they will remove it, and one of the strongest of their Captains, (trusting to the force of his claws) hangs down by this chink, and his tail hanging down, then another upon his back comes down as by a ladder, and takes hold by the others tail, and a third takes hold of the seconds tail, and a fourth by his tail, and so the rest, until such time as by links they can reach the bed, then the last comes down and wounds one that lies asleep in his bed, and runs back again by the links of his fellowes, and so all the rest in order shift away, unlosing as it were the chain, untill they are all got up again upon one anothers backs. (1051) While this seems closer to the craft of ninja than arachnids, Moffett’s anecdote also supports the sense of scorpions as inescapable, as inevitable as death itself. Their coordination and camaraderie are celebrated more in this narrative than is their animosity, but if scorpions were imagined capable of such feats—removing broken tiles, following orders from their captain, building artificial ladders and endless chains (“and a fourth by his tail, and so the rest,” ad infinitum), and then slinking away before anyone knows what has happened—any hope for avoiding their mortal wounds seems faint indeed. For all their dissociative and disruptive properties, the scorpion maintains Moffett’s model of existing exegetically both in malo and in bono. Even the scorpion that slays Orion, eternized as the constellation Scorpio, is in most accounts of the legend a kind of ecowarrior. He defends all other creatures against the wanton and indiscriminate destruction of the Hunter, who has vowed to exterminate every living creature on earth. The treachery of the scorpion becomes redeemed in Topsell’s hands as well when he compares their deceptiveness to the edification of an epigram because “the force and virtue of an Epigram is in the conclusion.”12 And the Elizabethan poet Barnabe Barnes

BotelhoV1-final.indb 257

11/9/22 1:36 PM

258

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

captures well the specific antitheses of the scorpion in one of his zodiac sonnets, in which the Petrarchan lover finds both pain and remedy in his beloved: Then like the Scorpion did she deadly sting me, And with a pleasing poison pearced me, Which to these utmost sobbes of death did bring me, And through my soules faint sinewes searc[h]ed me: Yet might she cure me with the Scorpions oyle If that she were so kind as bewtifull.13 Moffett also notes that scorpions are their own best antidote, “for being laid to their own wounds they made, they cure them, as is generally known.” (Other home remedies he lists include everything from hawkwood and house mice “cut asunder” to daffodil wine and human urine.) And he lavishes some praise on them aesthetically as well, incorporating them into “that admirable variety, comeliness, and fecundity that is in insects” (888). He details, for instance, in lyrical notes the seven colorful brands of scorpion (carried over from Nicander’s work on poisonous animals, the Theriaca): white, red-mouthed, “wan and blackish,” “inclining to green,” black and blue or pale, black and murrey and green, and flame-colored (1050). Finally, Moffett includes a page of curative functions of the scorpion in general: burned to ash and mixed into decoction, oil of scorpion was thought excellent for dissolving kidney stones, “admirable” against even “the greatest plague,” and in fact a vaccination “against all venome,” not to mention delivery from jaundice, the ague, and other aches and pains (1051). Because of the extremes straddled by this creature—unimaginable pain and death to a virtual panacea—the scorpion occupies representationally as vast a range of signifiers as any creature in Moffett’s catalog. In the popular imagination—which for early modern England was the scorpion’s primary locus—its pain was incomparable, beyond expression, and so a figure for all things of inscrutable origin and order: death and the devil rolled into one. Its scope was infinite, its subtlety unfathomable, and its stature was the stuff of both folkloric nightmare—those endless chains of scorpions invading a home—and elevated, epic discourse, from Revelation to Dante, Spenser to Milton. While few mentions of the scorpion equivocate about the potency of its poison, it is

BotelhoV1-final.indb 258

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Scorpions

|

259

nonetheless its strange indeterminacy, within and without, subtle and spectacular, a torturous balm, “inconstant and uncertain, like as the flame of fire beaten,” that best characterizes its intricacies. Notes 1. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 886. Subsequent references to Theater of Insects appear parenthetically by page number. 2. Topsell, Historie of Four-Footed Beasts, 750. 3. Shakespeare, Macbeth, 3.2.8–12. Subsequent references to Macbeth appear parenthetically by act, scene, and line number. 4. See Biggins, “Scorpions, Serpents, and Treachery,” and Cain, “New Play by Shakespeare.” In a similar vein, see Rogers, “Breeding Scorpions.” 5. Milton, Eikonoklastes, 800. See also Killeen, “Chastising with Scorpions.” 6. Milton, Paradise Lost, 2.699–703. On Milton’s use of the Scorpion constellation, see Daniel, “Astrea,” and Hillier, “Betwixt Astrea.” 7. Topsell, Historie of Four-Footed Beasts, 753. 8. Flores, “Effigies Amicitiae,” 172. See also Friedman, “Antichrist,” 113n18, for a longer list of similar exegeses.

9. Chaucer, Merchant’s Tale, lines 2057– 61. For a full reading of this instance, see Pace, “Scorpion of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.” 10. See Friedman, “Antichrist,” 113. Geryon may also owe something to the tradition of flying scorpions. Moffett is largely incredulous of the reports, though he cites Apollodorus (via Pliny) and Nicander as recording them. Pliny further asserts, “For this pest of Africa, the southern winds have provided means of flight as well, for as the breeze bears them along, they extend their arms and ply them like so many oars in their flight; the same Apollodorus, however, asserts that there are some which really have wings” (Natural History, 11.30). 11. Dante, Divine Comedy, 215. 12. Topsell, Historie of Four-Footed Beasts, 756. 13. Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 25.

Bibliography Barnes, Barnabe. Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593). In The Poetry of Barnabe Barnes, edited by Alexander B. Grosart. Manchester, 1875. Biggins, Dennis. “Scorpions, Serpents, and Treachery in Macbeth.” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965): 29–36. Cain, William E. “A New Play by Shakespeare: Making Sense of Macbeth.” Shakespeare Newsletter 60, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 2010): 17–22. Chaucer, Geoff rey. The Riverside Chaucer. Edited by Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1987. Daniel, Clay. “Astrea, the Golden Scales, and the Scorpion: Milton’s Heavenly

BotelhoV1-final.indb 259

Reflection of the Scene in Eden.” Milton Quarterly 20, no. 3 (October 1986): 92–98. Dante. The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno. Translated by John Sinclair. New York: Oxford University Press, 1939. Flores, Nona. “ ‘Effigies Amicitiae . . . Veritas Inimicitiae’: Antifeminism in the Iconography of the WomanHeaded Serpent in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Literature.” In Animals in the Middle Ages, edited by Flores. New York: Routledge, 2000. Friedman, John Block. “Antichrist and the Iconography of Dante’s Geryon.”

11/9/22 1:36 PM

260

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972). Hillier, Russell M. “ ‘Betwixt Astrea and the Scorpion Signe’: The Conjunction of Astrology and Apocalyptic in Milton’s Psychostasis.” Cambridge Quarterly 37, no. 3 (2008): 305–23. Killeen, Kevin. “Chastising with Scorpions: Reading the Old Testament in Early Modern England.” Huntington Library Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2010): 491–506. Milton, John. Eikonoklastes. In Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957. ———. Paradise Lost. In Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957. Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie

BotelhoV1-final.indb 260

of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. Pace, George B. “The Scorpion of Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.” Modern Language Quarterly 26, no. 3 (1965): 369–74. Pliny. The Natural History. Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley. London, 1893. Rogers, Kathleen Béres. “Breeding Scorpions in the Brain: Obsession in Keats’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” Essays in Romanticism 19 (2012): 33–47. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. In The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1997. Spenser, Edmund. The Complete Works in Verse and Prose. Edited by Alexander B. Grosart. London, 1882. Topsell, Edward. The Historie of FourFooted Beasts and Serpents. London, 1658.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

E pi l o gu e

CREATURES Keith Botelho

On Saturday, July 11, 1675, in the city of London and its suburbs, miraculous and innumerable swarms of flies were reported to be “seen flying together, that they seem’d to be desending like Showers of Rain, to the great Wonder and Admiration of several Spectators. . . . In some Streets they flew so thick and low, that they in a manner were ready to strike Passengers in the Face, who were obliged to lift up their Hands, Gloves, to fright them away; and in other Places these Insects would fly in great Swarms into Windows that were open, making a great sort of a Buzzing, to the great Astonishment of the People that beheld them.”1 The “incredible Numbers” continued the next day, as “near BloomsBury, the Flies fell down there in such Swarms, that they swept them up by Pecks.” While one insect might annoy, many might, as was the case above, astonish, amaze, and terrify. The second half of the seventeenth century witnessed the publication of numerous texts that offered ways to combat invasive nonhuman pests. For instance, the final section of the 1699 treatise England’s Happiness Improved features “rare experiments” (recipes) for destroying a host of offensive insects including fleas, lice, flies, moths, ticks, spiders, worms, and emmets.2 And a 1700 broadside advertisement for one R. C. who lived near Bridewell noted that he or she would “give to all People a

BotelhoV1-final.indb 261

11/9/22 1:36 PM

262

|

Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance

Secret how they may utterly destroy Buggs.”3 As is today, extermination of pesky insects, of restoring a certain peace of mind, is a necessity for most humans, who pay to avoid coexisting with the earth’s tiniest creatures. Because most insects fail to be seen as possessing creaturely charisma, people often do not grasp the singular insect through the cloud of their own fears. While revulsion sometimes is the innate response to insects, the preservation and use of these tiny creatures can not only reap ecological benefits but also profit humans. Consider, for instance, chapulines, a grasshopper found in Mexico. These high-protein insects and others like them “could represent a significant source of sustenance for the world’s population” and leave a smaller ecological footprint than cattle, pigs, or chickens.4 In 2017, they were offered for sale (toasted with lime and chili seasoning) at T-Mobile Park, the home of Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners, and became a wildly popular concession item. Yet as studies have shown, consumer psychology and a lack of culinary and cultural exposure to the benefits of bugs poses a hurdle to integrating insects into Western diets.5 Acceptance and embracing of entomophagy come when we think of bugs not as an enemy to be eradicated but rather as ecological and biological allies. Even Thomas Moffett saw the benefits of ingesting insects, noting that “their bodies and their labours do work upon our bodies”; in discussing bees, for instance, he says bees can be “pounded,” “strained,” and “burn[ed]” and ingested for a number of cures and restoratives.6 Moffett, of course, was the organizing principle for this book, yet although his text seems encyclopedic, it is not complete, and there remain a number of insects that deserve further inquiry. Although the preceding chapters capture the range of beastly inhabitants on the early modern page and in the early modern imagination, new avenues could be examined through the louse, the earwig, the mosquito, the dragonfly, the aphid, the tick, and the cricket. What narratives emerge here? How do these tiny creatures coexist with humans and other vertebrates? What do insect entanglements with other bugs mean for early modern environments? Speaking of the differences of viewing beasts with the naked human eye versus through microscopes or magnifying glasses, Anthony Horneck, in his 1677 The Great Law of Consideration, asks, “How inconsiderable an Insect is a Flie? How despicable a Creature is a Mite? Yet

BotelhoV1-final.indb 262

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Epilogue

|

263

he that through such Glasses, beholds in them all the perfections of the largest animals, the multiplicity of their parts, the variety of their motions, and how curiously every limb is wrought, how mathematically all their little members are framed, and set together, cannot but wonder at the spectacle.”7 In some ways, this is what we have attempted to do with the chapters in this book: to give a close-up view of early modern insects and space not only to contemplate their tiny features but also to consider more broadly how insects resonate in culture. By localizing these tiny beasts at a specific historical moment, these chapters thus point to the creaturely charisma of insects—their multiplicities, their singular advantages, their wonder. Notes 1. Relation of the Most Miraculous. 2. England’s Happiness Improved. See also Smith, Experience’d Fowler, which contains sections on how to kill and destroy pismires, slugs, snails, earwigs, caterpillars, fleas, lice, nits, and fl ies. 3. R.C., Black-fryers. For a history of pesticides used to eradicate insects, see Allen, War on Bugs.

4. Gomez, “Side of Grasshoppers.” 5. House, “Consumer Acceptance.” See also Waltner-Toews, Eat the Beetles. 6. Moffett, Theater of Insects, 906. 7. Horneck, Great Law of Consideration, 15.

Bibliography Allen, Will. The War on Bugs. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2008. England’s Happiness Improved. London, 1699. Gomez, Eric. “A Side of Grasshoppers.” ESPN. http://www.espn.com/espn /feature/story/_ /id/22946221/at-seattle -mariners-games-grasshoppers -favorite-snack. Horneck, Anthony. The Great Law of Consideration: or a Discourse, Wherin the Nature, Usefulness, and Absolute Necessity of Consideration, in Order to a Truly Serious and Religious Life, Is Laid Open. London, 1677. House, Jonas. “Consumer Acceptance of Insect-Based Foods in the Netherlands: Academic and Commercial Implications.” Appetite 107 (December 1, 2016): 47–58.

BotelhoV1-final.indb 263

Moffett, Thomas. The Theater of Insects: or, Lesser Living Creatures. In The Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, by Edward Topsell. London, 1658. R. C. In Black-fryers, at the End of the Paved Alley, near Bridewel-Bridge, at the Green Ball and Half Moon, Liveth R.C. Enquire at the Red Lion, Next the Bottom of the Steps. Who Will Give to All People a Secret How They May Utterly Destroy Buggs. London, 1700. Relation of the Most Miraculous Swarms of Flies. London, 1675. Smith, John. The Experience’d Fowler, or, the Gentleman, Citizen, and Countryman’s Pleasant and Profitable Recreation. London, 1697. Waltner-Toews, David. Eat the Beetles: An Exploration into Our Conflicted Relationship with Insects. Toronto: ECW Press, 2017.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

BotelhoV1-final.indb 264

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Contributors

Chris Barrett is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, where her research and teaching interests include early modern English literature, especially Spenser and Milton; lyric and epic poetry; critical animal studies; ecocriticism; and geocritical approaches to literature. Her published works include Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as articles and essays on, among other things, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, butterflies, fire, dragons, and ether. Her research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the Folger Library, Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Collection, and the Lilly Library. Roya Biggie is a Mellon Faculty Fellow and assistant professor of English at Knox College. Her research focuses on early modern embodiment, affect, race, and colonization. She is currently working on two book projects: one on cross-species sympathetic bonds in early modern tragedy and another on the racialized rhetoric surrounding plants in the period’s travel writing and horticultural texts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Early Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, and Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide (Arizona State University), and has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. Bruce Boehrer is Bertram H. Davis Professor of English at Florida State University. His latest books are Environmental Degradation in Jacobean Drama (Cambridge

BotelhoV1-final.indb 265

University, 2013) and Animals and Animality in Literature (coedited with Molly Hand and Brian Massumi; Cambridge University Press, 2018). Keith Botelho is professor of English at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity (Palgrave Macmillan), and he has published essays in journals including Studies in English Literature, Early Modern Culture, Early Modern Studies Journal, and Comparative Drama, and chapters in scholarly collections including The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, MLA Approaches to Teaching Aphra Behn’s “Oroonoko,” Ecological Approaches to Early Modern English Texts, Object Oriented Environs, Shakespeare and Geek Culture, and Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science. Gary Bouchard is a professor of English and the executive director of the Gregory J. Grappone, ’04 Humanities Institute at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire. He has published numerous articles on early modern poetry, especially the recusant poet Robert Southwell, S.J. He is the author of Colin’s Campus: Cambridge University and the English Eclogue (2001) and Southwell’s Sphere: The Influence of England’s Secret Poet (2018). Dan Brayton is professor of English and environmental studies at Middlebury College, where he holds the Julian W. Abernethy chair of literature. His articles on early modern natural history, blue cultural studies, Shakespeare, and traditional

11/9/22 1:36 PM

266

|

Contributors

boat building have been published in such journals and magazines as ELH, Forum for Modern Language Studies, and WoodenBoat. He has taught for the Sea Education Association, the Williams-Mystic Program in Maritime Studies, and Semester-at-Sea ashore and in vessels of various sizes on the Atlantic, Pacific, Mediterranean, and Caribbean. Eric Brown received his PhD in Renaissance literature from Louisiana State University; has twice been a visiting professor of literature and fi lm at Harvard University, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow in Renaissance studies; and has held additional visiting positions at the Université du Maine (Le Mans) and the University of Bergen, Norway, as a Fulbright scholar. He has published a number of works on lesser living creatures, including the edited collection Insect Poetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and most recently contributed the foreword to Entomological Epiphanies in Italian Culture, a special issue of Philological Quarterly. He currently serves as provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maine at Farmington. Joseph Campana is a poet, arts writer, and scholar of Renaissance literature. He is the author of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (Fordham University Press, 2012), the coeditor of Renaissance Posthumanism (2016), and the author of three collections of poetry—The Book of Faces (Graywolf, 2005); Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize; and The Book of Life (2019). He has received the Isabel MacCaff rey Essay Prize, the MLA’s Crompton-Noll Award for LGB studies, and grants from the NEA, the HAA, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Current projects include a study of children and sovereignty in the works of Shakespeare, titled The Child’s Two Bodies, and

BotelhoV1-final.indb 266

Living Figures, a study of energy, ecology, and creaturely life in early modernity. He teaches at Rice University, where he is Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English, editor of Studies in English Literature: 1500– 1900, and the director of the Center for Environmental Studies. Mary Baine Campbell is professor emerita of English, comparative literature, and women’s and gender studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Witness and the Other World; Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe (winner of the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize) and, on the topic of lesser living creatures, “Busy Bees: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Very Small” (Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies). Her current research and writing involves the circulation of dreams in the early modern Atlantic World. Perry Guevara writes on early modern literature, cognitive science, and the history of medicine. He has authored essays for Public Books, Shakespeare Studies, Early Modern Culture, and Configurations. While at Dominican University of California, he directed the program in Performing Arts and Social Change in partnership with Marin Shakespeare Company’s prison-theater program. He was also a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. Shannon Kelley is an associate professor in the English Department at Fairfield University. Her work has appeared in Renaissance Drama, Renaissance Studies, the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, and Studies in English Literature. Her current manuscript, “Shakespeare, Race, and the Trees of the Global Renaissance,” charts how race, gender, and trauma intersect by following a single metaphor of tree-becoming.

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Contributors Emily King is associate professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance drama at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Civil Vengeance: Literature, Culture, and Early Modern Revenge (Cornell University Press, 2019) and is at work on another book, titled Second Acts: Reanimation in the English Renaissance. Karen Raber is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and the author most recently of Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture (2013) and Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (2018). Her essays on animals, ecocriticism, and posthumanist theory have appeared in numerous journals and collections. She edits the Routledge series Perspectives on the Nonhuman in Literature and Culture and is currently working on a dictionary of Shakespeare’s animals and a monograph on the materiality of early modern meat. Kathryn Vomero Santos is assistant professor of English and codirector of the Humanities Collective at Trinity University. Her cross-historical research explores the intersections of performance with the politics of language, empire, and racial formation in the early modern period and in our contemporary moment. Santos coedited Arthur Golding’s “A Moral Fabletalk” and Other Renaissance Fable Translations with Liza Blake for the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations series (2017). She

BotelhoV1-final.indb 267

|

267

is completing a book about race, multilingualism, and assimilation titled Shakespeare in Tongues and coediting The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera with Katherine Gillen and Adrianna M. Santos. Santos currently serves as the performance reviews editor for Shakespeare Bulletin and early modern section editor for The Sundial. Donovan Sherman is an associate professor of English at Seton Hall University. His most recent book is The Philosopher’s Toothache: Embodied Stoicism in Early Modern English Drama (Northwestern University Press, 2021). His editorial projects include Shakespeare and Virtue: A Handbook, with Julia Reinhard Lupton (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), and a special issue, with Ineke Murakami, of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, titled “Performance Beyond Drama.” Steven Swarbrick is an assistant professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and editor, with Karen Raber, of a special issue of Criticism, “Renaissance Posthumanism and Its Afterlives” (2020).

11/9/22 1:36 PM

BotelhoV1-final.indb 268

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrative material. A. B., Sick Man’s Rare Jewel, The, 243 Abernethy, John, 237, 241 abortifacients, 182, 183 Adam (biblical figure), 38 Adams, Thomas, Devil’s Banquet, The, 237 Aesop’s fables, “Eagle and the Dung Beetle, The,” 175–76, 177, 182 See also Fables of Aesop Paraphras’d in Verse, The aesthetics. See beauty; repugnance Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 202 alienation, 85–86 Allen, Don Cameron, 153n8 Ancrene Riwle, 256 Anderson, Judith H., 153n7 anger, of wasps, 128, 138n9 animal turn, 6 anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, 68–69, 71–73, 75n52, 97, 219–22 ants, 35–44 biblical associations, 38 commonwealth of, 39–40, 44, 167 and exploitative labor, 167–68, 171n44 pismire term, 36, 45n6 and spiritual purpose, 38, 40–41 violence of, 42–43 work ethic of, 36–39, 40, 41–42, 44, 159, 167 aquatic life classification challenges in early modern period, 223–24 crustaceans, 222–23, 225, 227–28 diversity of, 227 See also water bugs arachnids. See spiders architecture, of hives, 118–19 archival digestion, 107n5 Arisoto, Ludovico, 118

BotelhoV1-final.indb 269

Aristotle on ants, 39–40 on aquatic life, 224 as authority in natural history, 217 on bees, 120 on butterflies, 144 on fleas, 49 on mimesis, 131 Moffett on, 79 on segmentation of insects, 65, 66 History of Animals, 120 art, and nature, 87–89 Artaud, Antonin, 133 assimilation, 132–33 Aubrey, John, 29, 30–31 Augustine, City of God, The, 120, 236 Bacon, Francis, Sylva Silvarum, 144 Ballestra-Puesch, Sylvia, 194 Baret, John, Alvearie, 138n4 Barnes, Barnabe, 257–58 Bass, Marisa Anne, 7 Bateson, Melissa, 72 Baxter, Nathaniel, 28–29 beast fables ants in, 37, 40, 44 and epic framing, 88 moral judgment conventions, 37 beauty of butterflies, 143 and truth, 101 becoming, 90, 132, 133 See also transformation bees, 111–23 commonwealth of, 126–27, 129, 138n2 differences and similarities with wasps, 127–29 diverse functions of, 112–13, 126 emotion in, 72, 75n55 hive architecture, 118–19

11/9/22 1:36 PM

270

|

Index

bees (continued) honey from, 127 humanity’s analogical fascination with, 111–12, 123, 129, 130 mystery of, 122–23 popularity of books on, 113–14 reproduction of, 108n18, 119–20 sensory experiences of, 115–16, 118 sexing of sovereignty, 119–22 silkworm domestication comparison, 21 threats to, 114–15, 118 work ethic of, 113 See also wasps beetles, 174–89 in Aesop’s fable, 175–76, 177, 182 medicinal properties, 179, 181–82 military prowess of, 177, 181 occult and witchcraft associations, 177, 179–81, 186–88 racial discourse on, 178, 184–85 religious symbolism of, 183, 185–86 reproduction of, 182–83 repugnance of, 176, 177–78, 186 wisdom of, 176, 181 Bell, Ilona, 53–54, 58n37, 58n40 Benjamin, Walter, 140n30 Bennet, Christopher, 4 Bennett, Jane, 82 Bernard, Richard, Sinners Safetie, The, 185–86 Bewley, Marius, 54 biblical associations of ants, 38 of aquatic life, 224 of locusts, 156–57, 166, 169n3, 171n37 of scorpions, 251, 253, 254–56 of worms, 235–36 Billings, Thomas, 190n22 biological determinism, 38–39 bites of fleas, 48–50 of spiders, 207, 209, 213n30 of worms, 233, 235, 237, 238, 241 See also stings Black Lives Matter, 75n39 blackness, 178, 184–85, 190n55 Boehrer, Bruce, 4, 5–6 Boerhaave, Hermann, 196

BotelhoV1-final.indb 270

Bolton, Robert, 237, 241–42 Bonnet, Charles, 211n4 Bonoeil, John, 25–26 Obseruations to Be Followed, for the Making of Fit Rooms, to Keepe SilkWormes, 25 Bon Saint Hilaire, François-Xavier, 198, 211–12n13 botfl ies, 241–42 Bourque, Monique, 5 Bouvier, Eugene Louis, Vie Psychique des Insectes, 71–72 Brennan, Michael, 31 Breton, Nicholas, Crossing of Proverbs, The, 237 Brinkley, Robert A., 153n8 Brown, David Sterling, 75n39 Brown, Eric C., 7, 65–66, 153n9 Browne, Thomas Hydrotaphia, Urne-Burial, 119 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 157, 169n9 Religio Medici, 102–3 Brumble, H. David, 52, 57n13 bubonic plague, 56 bugonia, 108n18, 120 Bullein, William, 98 Bunyan, John, Divine Emblems; or, Temporal Things Spiritualized, 151 Bury, Edward, Husbandmans Companion, The, 35–36 Butler, Charles, 116–18, 117 English Grammar, The, 116 Feminine Monarchie, The, 114, 116, 118, 120–21, 124n17, 129 Principles of Musick, The, 116 butterfl ies and moths, 143–52 confl ict with spiders, 88–89, 149, 201–2 speed of, 147, 148 story-retelling and re-visioning of, 144– 46, 148–52 buzzing of bees, 116 of flies, 68, 69, 75n35 of wasps, 127 Caillois, Roger, 132–33 Calvin, John, 236–37 Commentaries on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 68

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Index Cambefort, Yves, 178, 183 Camerarius, Joachim, Symbolorum & Emblematum ex Volatilibus et Insectis Desumtorum, 160, 161, 170n22 Campana, Joseph, 129, 130, 170n11 cannibalism, 66, 99–100, 106 Carey, Elizabeth, 212n21 Carey, Henry, Lord Hunsdon, 26 Carey, John, 47 Carlton, Dudley, 28 caterpillars, 144, 148, 201–2 Catheart, Dwight, 53 Catholicism, 54, 90, 140n35 Caxton, William, Subtyl Historyes and Fables of Esope, The, 158 centaurs, 184 Challenger expedition, 224, 226 Chamberlain, John, 28, 31 charisma, 8–9, 13, 123, 262–63 Charles I, King of England, 166 Charles II, King of England, 166 Chaucer, Geoff rey, 84 Merchant’s Tale, 256 Nun’s Priest Tale, 85, 147, 153n7 Physician’s Tale, 238 Cheng, Lanna, 226, 229n13 Chittka, Lars, 72 Church of Saint Lawrence, 116–18, 117 cicadas grasshoppers/locusts conflated with, 157, 169nn8–9, 170n23 music of, 158–59, 160, 162 Civil War. See English Civil Wars clamor of being, 82–83 defined, 82 of gnats, 80, 81–82, 93 See also buzzing; noise Clark, Andy, 64, 74n10 Clark, R., Vermiculars Destroyed, 242, 243– 44, 246n42 Cleopatra, De Ornatu, 60 cognitive ecology, 64–65, 74n10, 74n19 Columbus, Christopher, 226 commonwealth of ants, 39–40, 44, 167 of bees, 126–27, 129, 138n2 of wasps, 127–28 of worms, 233

BotelhoV1-final.indb 271

|

271

complaint poetry genre, 83 conscience. See worms of conscience consumption archival digestion metaphor, 107n5 indigestion, 70 of insects, 262 by maggots, 99–100, 102, 106 See also bites; medicinal properties; stings; worms contemptibility. See repugnance Cooper, Thomas Mystery of Witch-craft, 212n28 Romish Spider, The, 196, 204 corruption and decay bees generating through, 108n18, 120 maggots revealing, 100–101, 103 worms generating through, 231, 239, 245–46n24 See also transformation Cosimo, Piero di, Misfortunes of Silenus, The, 127 Cotta, John, 186 Cowley, Abraham, Poems, 170n26 Craik, Katherine, 4 Crane, Eva, 114 crickets, 64, 170n30 See also grasshoppers and locusts critical turns, 6–7 Cromwell, Oliver, 166, 167 crustaceans, 222–23, 225, 227–28 Dalgarno, George, 205 Danet, Pierre, 152n3 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, 253, 256 Davies, John, 51, 57n23 Day, John, Parliament of Bees, 114, 120 Dean, Jodi, 94n32 death and alterity, 102–4 fear of, 102–4 and indigestion, 70 and killability of flies, 61, 62, 67, 69, 75n39 and literary legacy, 104–5 See also corruption and decay decay. See corruption and decay Dekker, Thomas, 98 Lanthorne and Candle-light, 156–57 Deleuze, Gilles, 82–83, 93, 131–32

11/9/22 1:36 PM

272

|

Index

Deloney, Thomas, Pleasant Historie of John Winchcomb, The, 40, 45n23 Derrida, Jacques, 94n43, 134, 140n30 Descartes, René, 205 digestion. See consumption DiPasquale, Theresa, 54–55 disease and fleas, 56 and fl ies, 69 and worms, 232, 239, 241–43 See also psychology disgust. See repugnance dissection, 62–63, 63 Dobson, Mary, 69 Dodge, R. E. Neil, 212n21 Donne, John courtship of Anne, 53–54, 58n26 on maggots, 98 “Anatomy of the World, An. The First Anniversary,” 42 Deaths Duell, 100–101 “Defence of Womens Inconstancy, A,” 57n25 See also “Flea, The” dragon imagery, 255 Drake, Francis, 228 Drebbel, Cornelis, 216 Drummond, William, 57n22 Drury, Elizabeth, 42 DuBartes, Guillaume, 57n13 Dukas, Reuven, 65 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 29, 33n28 Dundas, Judith, 88 dung balls of, 176, 179 houses of, 174, 181 dung beetles. See beetles ecological thought, 62–64 See also cognitive ecology Edict of Nantes (1685), 25 Edwards, Karen L., 162–63 Eliot, T. S., 56, 58n27 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 26–27, 29, 31, 122 Elyot, Thomas, Book Named the Governour, The, 138n2 emblem tradition, 178 emotions, of insects, 71–73

BotelhoV1-final.indb 272

England emergence as sea power, 228 silk industry, growth and promotion of, 20–21, 24–26 See also English Civil Wars England’s Happiness Improved, 261 English Civil Wars cicadas/grasshoppers as royalists, 157, 160–63, 161 locusts/grasshoppers as antimonarchal, 156–57, 163–67 entomophagy, 262 epic (genre), 84, 86–87, 88 Erasmus, Adages, 176–78, 181, 182–83 eroticism, 48–51, 53–54 Eschscholtz, Johann Friedrich von, 226 Eucharist symbolism, 55 eyes, and inhuman perception, 91 fables. See beast fables Fables of Aesop Paraphras’d in Verse, The (Ogilby), 165 antimonarchal grasshoppers, 156, 163–64 labor of ants, 44, 167–68 scholarship on, 169–70nn10–11 translation dynamics, 157, 164 fear of death, 102–4 of scorpions, 253, 254, 256 of spiders, 194, 197–98 femininity, 101, 108n25 Ferne-seede, Anthony, 100 fertility, 100 See also reproduction Findlen, Paula, 7, 207 fish, and maggots, 99–100 Fitzroy, James, 224 “Flea, The” (Donne) ambiguity embedded in, 55–56 dating, 54, 58n26 marital symbolism, 52–53 reimagining of flea poetry genre, 47–48, 51–52 religious symbolism, 52, 54–55 sexual symbolism, 53–54 Flea of Madame Des Roches, The, 47, 50– 51 flea poetry genre, 47–48, 50–51, 56n4

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Index fleas, 47–56 and bubonic plague, 56 marital symbolism of, 52–53 religious symbolism of, 52, 54–55 sexual symbolism of, 48–51, 53–54 Flegr, Jaroslav, 239–40 Fletcher, John, Women Pleased, 246n41 fl ies, 60–73 anthropomorphizing of, 68–69, 70–71, 73 confl ict with spiders, 149, 203–4, 208–9 dissection of, 62–63, 63 killability of, 61, 62, 67, 69, 75n39 and parasite concept, 67–68, 69, 70, 75n35 See also maggots Flores, Nona, 255–56 food sources, insects as, 262 Forel, Auguste, Social World of Ants, The, 43 Forestus, Petrus, Observations, 243 Foucault, Michel, 22 Fowler, Alastair, 32n14 France, silk industry, 24, 25 Françon, Marcel, 56n2, 57n17 free will, of ants, 38–39 Freud, Sigmund, 86 Frisch, Karl von, 115 Fudge, Erica, 75n52, 96 Galilei, Galileo, 216 Gardner, Helen, 47, 56n4 Gedde, John, 114 Geffe, Nicholas, 25 Meanes and Sufficiencie of England, for to Have Abundance of Fine Silk, [T]he, 24 Gemma, Cornelius, 232 gender ambiguous, 201–2 sexing of sovereignty, 119–22 See also men; women georgic verse, 23, 24, 30, 32n14 Gerridae, 227 Gesner, Conrad, 5, 20, 79, 202, 211n8, 224 Historia Animalium, 217–18 gnats, 77–93 agonistic role of, 81, 83, 84 clamor of, 80, 81–82, 93

BotelhoV1-final.indb 273

|

273

military prowess of, 80–81 transformation from lesser to greater, 90–93 Goedaert, Johannes, Metamorphem et Historum Naturalem Insectorum Libri Tres, 196, 205–7, 241 Gough, Melinda, 136 government. See commonwealth grasshoppers and locusts, 155–68 antimonarchal associations, 156–57, 163–67 biblical associations, 156–57, 166, 169n3, 171n37 cicadas conflated with, 157, 169nn8–9, 170n23 distinctions between, 155 as food source, 262 as idle, 158, 167, 171n37 music of, 158–59, 160, 162 royalist associations, 157, 160–63, 161 Greene, Robert, Pandosto, 238 Greene, Robert A., 236 Gregory the Great, 255 Grew, Nehemiah, 197 grief, 62, 67, 68–69, 70–71 Grissell, Eric, 43 grotesqueness. See repugnance Grusin, Richard, 6 Guattari, Félix, 82, 131–32 Gunpowder Plot (1605), 204 Haber, Judith, 108n25 Hall, John, Observations on English Bodies, 243 Hall, Kim F., 178, 184 Halobates, 225–26 Haraway, Donna, 68, 70, 74n33 Harmon, Katherine, 155 harp imagery, 159, 160 Hartlib, Samuel Rare and New Discovery of a Speedy Way, A . . . for the Feeding of SilkWorms, 25 Reformed Common-Wealth of Bees, The . . . with the Reformed Virginian Silk-Worm, 25, 114, 120 Hauser, David R., 203 Hayes, Gerald, 116 Henderson, Judith Rice, 202–3

11/9/22 1:36 PM

274

|

Index

Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 27–28, 29, 31 Herbert, William, third Earl of Pembroke, 28, 32 Herodotus, 42 Herrick, Robert, 99 Hesiod, Theogony, 148 Hester, M. Thomas, 54, 55, 58n43, 58n48 Heywood, John, 212n25 Spider and the Flie, The, 149, 196, 202– 4, 203 Hill, Thomas, Profitable Instruction of the Perfect Ordering of Bees, A, 127 Hillman, David, 74n25 hive architecture, 118–19 Hoefnagel, Joris, 139n16 Holland, Philemon, 65, 128, 179, 182 Hollar, Wenceslaus, 163, 165 Hölldobler, Bert, 39 Homer, Iliad, 85, 148 honey, 127 honeybees. See bees Hooke, Robert, 35, 216 Micrographia, 62, 63, 78 Horneck, Anthony, Great Law of Consideration, The, 262–63 hornets. See wasps Houliston, Victor, 4 Hufnagel, Joris, 7 human comparisons. See moral comparisons and models; relationality humility topos, 30 idleness/laziness, 37–38, 43, 158, 167, 171n37 imitation, 131–33, 139n21 indigestion, 70 industriousness. See work ethic innocence, of animals, 68 insecticide, 69 insect life and charisma, 8–9 critical turns in scholarship, 6–7 insects, etymology, 65–66 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, 120, 210 James I, King of England, 24, 25–26, 204 Jeroboam (biblical figure), 251 Jerome, 236

BotelhoV1-final.indb 274

John Rogers, Sagrir, or Doomesday Drawing Nigh, 171n37 Johnson, Samuel, 58n27 Jonson, Ben Alchemist, The, 238–39 Bartholomew Fair, 134–38, 140n32 Jonston, Jan, Historiae naturalis de insectiis, 198 Keene, Nicholas, 64–65, 74n19 Kerins, Frank, 57n23 killability, of flies, 61, 62, 67, 69, 75n39 kinship bonds, 66–67, 68–69 Koppelman, George, 138n4 Kosut, Mary, 119 Kubiak, Anthony, 139–40n29 Labé, Louise, Le Débat de Folie et d’Amour, 213n42 labor of ants, 36–39, 40, 41–42, 44, 159, 167 of bees, 112–14 and exploitative labor, 167–68, 171n44 vs. idleness, 37–38, 43, 158, 167, 171n37 and music, 159 of silkworms, 21–22 and social elevation of manual labor, 24, 36–37 of wasps, 126–27 Lacan, Jacques, 85 La Fontaine, Jean de, 200–201 Langbain, Gerard, 31 larvae botfly, 241–42 crustacean, 223 selves as larval subjects, 83, 89 wasp, 97, 98 See also maggots Latour, Bruno, 22, 23, 82 laziness/idleness, 37–38, 43, 158, 167, 171n37 Lee, William, 26–27 Lehane, Brendan, 57n24 Letellier, Jean-Baptiste, Memoirs et Instructions pour l’Etablissement des Meuriers, et Art de Faire la Soye, 25 Levett, John, Ordering of Bees, 114, 119, 120 Lewis, Jayne Elizabeth, 157

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Index Ling, Nicholas, 20, 31 Linnaeus, Carl, Systema Naturae, 217 Lister, Martin, 205–6 Historiae Animalium Angliae: De Araneis, 196, 197, 206, 207–8, 209, 213n36, 213n40 literary legacy, 104–5 Locke, John, 205 locusts. See grasshoppers and locusts Lodge, William, 208 Lodowyck, Francis, 205 Loomba, Ania, 175, 185–86 Louis XIV, King of France, 25 Louthan, Doniphan, 53 Lovelace, Richard, 163 “Ant, The,” 170n30 love poetry, Petrarchan, 52–53 Loveridge, Mark, 158, 168, 169–70nn10–11 Low, Anthony, 24 Lowenstein, David, 166 Luther, Martin, 236 luxury, of silk, 21–22 MacInnes, Ian, 100, 231, 245n1 MacMillan, Ken, 187 maggots, 96–107 classification challenges, 97–98 corruption revealed by, 100–101, 103 and meaninglessness, 104, 105–7 religious symbolism of, 101–2 transformation facilitated by, 102–4, 106, 107 utility of, 99–100 worms associated with, 98, 236, 246n41 magic and occult, 177, 179–81 See also witchcraft Malpighi, Marcello, 196 Mann, Jill, 37 manual labor, social elevation of, 24, 36–37 See also work ethic marine life. See aquatic life marital symbolism, 52–53 Markham, Gervase, 114, 119, 120 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus, 51 Marvell, Andrew, 21 First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness, The Lord Protector, The, 164–66, 170–71n33

BotelhoV1-final.indb 275

|

275

Marx, Karl, 39 Mary, Queen of England, 202, 203, 204 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 224 Maxwell, Lynn, 177 Mayerne, Theodore, 5 mayfl ies, 198, 205 Mayhew, Robert, 170n12 Mazzio, Carla, 74n25 Mazzola, Elizabeth, 153n7 meaninglessness, 104, 105–7 medicinal properties of beetles, 179, 181–82 of scorpions, 249, 251, 258 of spiders, 198, 211–12n13 See also disease men beetles as exclusively male, 182–83 sexing of sovereignty, 119–22 Mendl, Michael, 72 menstruation, 180, 182 Mersenne, Marin, 205 metamorphosis. See transformation metaphysical poetry, 58n27 microscopes, 62–63, 216 Middleton, Thomas Nightingale and the ant; and, Father Hubburd’s Tales, The, 40, 43 Revenger’s Tragedy, The, 21, 101 militaristic qualities of ants, 42–43 of beetles, 177 of gnats, 80–81 of water bugs, 222 Milton, John Eikonoklastes, 251 Paradise Lost, 138n2, 151–52, 157, 251–52 mimesis, 131–33, 139n21 Mitchell, J. Allan, 66, 69–70 Moffett, Thomas legacy, 3–5, 217–18 sericulture interests and expertise, 20–21, 23–24, 26, 27, 29–32 De Jure et Praestantia Chemicorum Medicamentorum, 5 Healths Improvement, 4–5 Lessus Lugubris, 28, 33n28 See also Silkewormes, and their Flies, The; Theater of Insects, The

11/9/22 1:36 PM

276

|

Index

Montaigne, Michel de, 127 Moore, Lisa Jean, 119 moral comparisons and models ants, 36–38, 41–42, 43–44 beetles, 181, 185–86 as characteristic of Renaissance natural history, 78–79 racial discourse, 178, 184–85 silkworms, 21–22 See also work ethic; worms of conscience More, Anne, 54, 58n26 More, George, 54 More, Thomas, 54, 74n8 Utopia, 138n2 Morton, Timothy, 62 moths. See butterflies and moths Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie (Spenser) compressed classical reception, 147–48 interpretation challenges, 147, 153n8, 212n22 mentioned, 196 as mock-epic, 86–87 and Moffet, 28, 147, 153n9 patronage, 212n21 publication, 146 revenge narrative, 201–2 revisioning of Ovid, 87–89, 148–51 mulberry silkworms, 21 See also silkworms mulberry trees, 25–26, 32 music of bees, 116 of grasshoppers/cicadas, 158–59, 160, 162 spiders as inspiration, 212–13n30 mutability. See transformation mythopoeic discourse, 5–6, 23 Nagel, Thomas, 130 nature and art, 87–89 and the pastoral, 85–86 Neill, Michael, 101, 103 Neri, Janice, 7, 62–63 Nicander, Theriaca, 258 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 82

BotelhoV1-final.indb 276

noise of grasshoppers/cicadas, 158–59, 160, 162 and sensory experience of bees, 115–16 See also buzzing; clamor; music nostalgia, 89 occult and magic, 177, 179–81 See also witchcraft ocean life. See aquatic life Odierna, Giovanni Battista, 216 Ogilby, John, 166 See also Fables of Aesop Paraphras’d in Verse, The Ogilvie, Brian W., 7, 78–79, 202, 211n4, 217, 218, 222 Olaus Magnus, 224 original sin, 101, 103, 236 Ovid, 42 Fasti, 127, 138n5 Metamorphoses, 22, 87, 88, 89, 146, 148– 51, 197 Ovidian epyllion, 4 pain emotional, 72–73 extremes of, 251–53 See also bites; stings; violence parasite, as concept, 67–68, 69, 70, 75n35 parasitic worms. See worms Parikka, Jussi, 7 Park, Katherine, 180 Parrin, Pierre, 196 Parry, J. H., 223 Pasquier, Etienne, 50 pastoral imagery, 85–86 patience, 160–61, 161 Patterson, Annabel, 169n10 Paul, Elizabeth, 72 Peacham, Henry, 26 pearl imagery, 91 Peck, Linda Levy, 25, 26 Pedersen, Tara, 223 Penny, Thomas, 5, 20, 190n34, 211n8 Perrine, Laurence, 53 pest control, 69 Petrarch, Trionfo della Morte, 28 Petrarchan love genre, 52–53 Philesius, 183

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Index phobia. See fear Pinciss, G. M., 140n35 pismires, as term, 36, 45n6 See also ants Pitter, Ruth, 212n20 Plato, 42, 158 Pliny on ants, 42 as authority in natural history, 217 on bees, 120 on beetles, 179–81, 182 on butterflies, 144 on fleas, 49, 57n13 on maggots, 98 on scorpions, 259n10 on segmentation of insects, 65 Natural History, 42, 65, 120, 128, 179, 217 poisoning, from butterflies, 143 See also venom political, the. See commonwealth; English Civil Wars; militaristic qualities; sovereignty Pope, Alexander, 57n24 Preston, Clare, 123 Prete, Frederick R., 122–23 Pride (allegorical figure), 51 Protestantism, 54, 90, 236–37 psychology schizophrenia, 133, 240 and worms, 232, 233, 239–40, 243–44 Pulter, Hester, “Pismire, The,” 40–41 Purchas, Samuel, Theatre of Politicall Flying-Insects, A, 9, 101–2, 122, 156 Raber, Karen, 96–97 racial discourse, 178, 184–85, 190n55 Ramachandran, Ayesha, 88 Rambuss, Richard, 83–84 Ramesey, William, Helminthologia, 242–44 Ray, John, 196, 197 Red, Francesco, 211n6 Reed, A. W., 212n25 Rehoboam (biblical figure), 251 relationality anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, 68–69, 70–73, 75n52, 97, 219–22

BotelhoV1-final.indb 277

|

277

disrupting humanity’s place in nature, 89–93 and ecological thought, 62–64 humanity’s analogical fascination with bees, 111–12, 123, 129, 130 and mimesis, 131–33, 139n21 and theater’s representational ambivalence, 134–38 wasps outside limits of, 129–30 religion and spirituality beetles associated with, 183, 185–86 fleas associated with, 52, 54–55 maggots associated with, 101–2 ritual sacrifice, 65–66, 108n18, 120 spiritual purpose of work, 38, 40–41 worms associated with, 235–37 See also biblical associations Remnant, Richard, Discourse or History of Bees, A, 114, 115, 120, 121 reproduction Aristotelian and Galenic-Hippocratic models, 183, 190n50 of bees, 108n18, 119–20 of beetles, 182–83 of fleas, 49 of maggots, 100 of spiders, 196, 211n6 spontaneous generation, 100, 108n18, 231, 239 of worms, 231, 239, 245–46n24 repugnance of beetles, 176, 177–78, 186 of maggots, 97 Richards, Jennifer, 124n17 Rigolet, François, 213n42 ritual sacrifice, 65–66, 108n18, 120 Rondeletius, Guillaume, 224 Ronsard, 50, 51, 57n17 Roston, Murray, 53 Rowland, John, 211n8 Rudnytsky, Peter, 52, 58n27 Rusden, Moses, Further Discovery of Bees, A, 111–12, 114, 115, 118–19, 120–21 sacrifice, ritual, 65–66, 108n18, 120 schizophrenia, 133, 240 Schwartz, Janelle, 7

11/9/22 1:36 PM

278

|

Index

scorpions, 248–59 biblical associations, 251, 253, 254–56 deceptiveness of, 255–57 etymology, 249–50 fear of, 253, 254, 256 flying, 256, 259n10 stings, 250–54, 255, 257 virtues of, 257–58 Scott, Charlotte, 71 Scott, Thomas, Belgicke Pismire, The, 38, 40, 43 sea life. See aquatic life segmentation in insect etymology, 65–66 and vulnerability, 66, 73 sensory experiences, of bees, 115–16, 118 Serenus, Quintus, 253 Sergianus, Ofi lius, Carmen of Pulice, 47, 49–50, 51, 56n2 sericulture and silk industry and culture of consumption and excess, 21–22 English growth and promotion of, 20–21, 24–26 and protectionism, 26–27 See also Silkewormes, and their Flies, The; silkworms Serres, Michel, 67–68 Serres, Olivier de, Theatre d’Agriculture et Mesnage de Champs, 24 sex and gender. See gender sexual reproduction. See reproduction sexual symbolism, 48–51, 53–54 Shakespeare, William Coriolanus, 151 Hamlet, 21, 98, 100, 105–6, 185 I Henry IV, 43, 138n2 Henry V, 112–13, 121 King Lear, 151, 158 Macbeth, 175, 250–51 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 175 Much Ado About Nothing, 234–35 Richard II, 104–5 Richard III, 238 Taming of the Shrew, 139n17, 175 Tempest, The, 91, 107, 174–75, 188–89 Winter’s Tale, A, 197–98, 238 See also Titus Andronicus

BotelhoV1-final.indb 278

Shannon, Laurie, 68, 94n47 shared suffering, 68, 74n33 Sherry, Richard, Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, A, 139n21 Sidney, Philip, 28, 30, 147, 153n7 Defence of Poesy, 131, 139n21 Siebmacher, Johann Ambrosius, 161, 170n12 silk, of spiders, 198 See also sericulture and silk industry; silkworms Silkewormes, and their Flies, The (Moffett) critical reception and legacy, 26, 28–29 economic argument, 27 factual grounding in sericulture experiments, 29–30 as georgic verse, 23, 24, 30 on grades of silk, 22–23 patronage, 28, 29, 30–31 publication, 4, 20, 31 silk industry. See sericulture and silk industry silkworms, 20–32 feedstock for, 25 grades of thread produced by, 22–23 royal, 25–26 work ethic of, 21–22 See also sericulture and silk industry; Silkewormes, and their Flies, The Simmes, Valentine, 20, 31 sin and blackness, 178 doctrine of, 68 original, 101, 103, 236 See also worms of conscience Skuse, Alanna, 245n1, 246n30 Smith, Charles G., Spenser’s Proverb Lore, 196 Smith, Henry, 138n9 Smith, Jane, 73 socialism, 39 Solomon (biblical figure), 38, 251 Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 131 sound. See buzzing; clamor; music; noise Southerne, Edmund, Treatise Concerning the Right Ordering of Bees, A, 113, 114, 120 sovereignty, sexing of, 119–22 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 53

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Index speed, of butterflies, 147, 148 Spenser, Edmund Complaints, 83–84, 88 (see also specific poems) Faerie Queene, 83–84, 85, 121–22, 128, 255 Shepheardes Calender, The, 28, 158 Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, 190n22, 255 See also Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterflie; Virgils Gnat spiders, 193–210 absence in insect treatises and literature, 196–97 ambivalence toward, in European culture, 197–201, 205 as ancient, 194–95 classification attempts, 207–8, 209, 213n40 confl ict with other insects, 88–89, 149, 201–2, 203–4, 208–9 fear of, 194, 197–98 medicinal properties, 198, 211–12n13 music and dance inspired by, 212– 13n30 six-legged, 200, 200, 212n18 violence of, 206–7, 208–9 water bugs connection, 220–21, 225– 26 weaving of, 87–88, 149–51, 200, 209–10 spirituality. See religion and spirituality spontaneous generation, 100, 108n18, 231, 239 Stallenge, William, 25–26 Stanley, Thomas, Anacreontics (translation), 162 Stansby, William, Witches Apprehended, Examined, and Executed, 187–88 stings of ants, 43 of scorpions, 250–54, 255, 257 of wasps, 138–39n9 See also bites Strabo, Geography, 159 Stubbs, John, 57n25 sucking, of fleas, 48–50 See also bites; stings suffering, 66, 68–69, 73, 74n33

BotelhoV1-final.indb 279

|

279

Swammerdam, Jan Der Bybel der Natuure, 196 Ephemeri vita, 198, 205, 211n12 Historia insectorum generalis, 196 swarms of bees, 121–22 and clamor, 82 of locusts, 156–57 of wasps, 128–29 sympathetic magic, 177 synderesis (the spark of conscience), 236 See also worms of conscience Taylor, Edward, “Spider and the Flie,” 208–9 Thacker, Eugene, 83, 93 theater representational ambivalence in, 134–38 and segmentation, 65–66 Theater of Insects, The: or, Lesser Living Creatures (Moffett) on ants, commonwealth of, 39–40, 167 on ants, moral model of, 36–38, 41–42, 43–44 on ants, violence of, 42–43 on ants, violence toward, 171n44 on bees, 112, 115–16, 119 on beetles, 181–82, 183–85, 191n61 on butterflies, 143–46, 153n9 on critics, 79–80 on dignity and worthiness of insects, 77–78, 79 on fleas, 48–49, 56n8 on flies, 60–61, 61, 69 on gnats, 80–82 on grasshoppers/locusts, 156, 158–59, 169n8, 170n23 on ingesting insects, 262 on maggots, 97–98, 99, 108n7 mentioned, 65 as mythopoeic discourse, 5–6, 23 publication and editions, 3–4, 5, 20, 44n4, 211n8 on scorpions, 249, 250, 252–53, 256– 57, 258 on silkworms, 21–22 on spiders, 195, 197, 198, 211n9 title page, 248–49

11/9/22 1:36 PM

280

|

Index

Theater of Insects, The: or, Lesser Living Creatures (Moffett) (continued) on wasps, 127–28, 129 on water bugs, as surface dwellers, 221, 224–25 on water bugs, detailed observations of, 219–22 on water bugs, marine crustaceans as, 222–23 on worms, 231–33, 242, 245–46n24 Thelen, Esther, 64 theology. See biblical associations; religion and spirituality Thomas, Keith, 6–7, 36–37 thought cognitive ecology, 64–65, 74n10, 74n19 ecological, 62–64 Tilley, Morris Palmer, Elizabethan Proverb Lore, 197, 211n7 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare) anthropomorphism, 68–69, 70–71, 73 host-guest-parasite distinction, 67–68, 69–70 kinship bonds, 66–67, 68–69 segmentation and vulnerability, 61, 66, 73 Topsell, Edward, Historie of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, The, 3–4, 20, 44n4, 181, 190n34, 211n8, 217, 249– 50, 254, 257 Torrey, E. Fuller, 240 Tortorici, Zeb, 107n5 Toxoplasma gondii, 239–40 toxoplasmosis, 239 Tradescant, John, 25–26 transformation bees producing honey from pollen, 127 of caterpillars into butterflies, 144, 148, 201–2 maggots facilitating, 102–4, 106, 107 translation, and sociopolitical climate, 156–58, 161–62, 164, 168 Traub, Valerie, 91 Tribble, Evelyn, 64–65, 74n19 trumpet imagery, 80, 81–82 Turner, Henry, 30 Tyson, Edward, 211n12 Tzetzes, John, 69

BotelhoV1-final.indb 280

Van Leeuwenhoek, Antonie, 216 Veliidae, 227 Venner, Thomas, 166 venom of ants, 43 of scorpions, 249, 251, 252, 255, 258 Verton, François de, 32 violence of ants, 42–43 of bees, 115 of butterflies, 143 of dissection, 62–63 killability of flies, 61, 62, 67, 69, 75n39 of scorpions, 250–54, 255, 257 of spiders, 206–7, 208–9 toward ants, 171n44 of wasps, 128, 138–39n9 Virgil on ants, 42 on bees, 120 Spenser on, 84 Aeneid, 85, 87, 126, 148, 168, 202 Culex, 85–86 Georgics, 108n18, 120, 126, 245n3 Virgilian georgic verse, 23, 24, 30, 32n14 Virgils Gnat (Spenser) disrupting humanity’s place in nature, 89–93 framing structures, 84–85 pastoral scene, 85–86 Virginia silk cultivation, 25, 26 virtues. See moral comparisons and models vulnerability, and segmentation, 66, 73 Waith, Eugene, 136 warfare. See militaristic qualities; violence wasps, 126–38 anger of, 128, 138n9 commonwealth of, 127–28 differences and similarities with bees, 127–29 larvae associated with maggots, 97– 98 relationality, outside limits of, 129–30 representational ambivalence in theater setting, 135–38 See also bees

11/9/22 1:36 PM

Index water bugs, 216–28 crustacean connection, 222–23, 225, 227–28 detailed observations of, 219–22 Gerridae, 227 Halobates, 225–26 spider connection, 220–21, 225–26 as surface dwellers, 221, 224–25 Veliidae, 227 watermarks, 199–200 Watson, Robert, 71 Watson, Thomas, Century, The, 51 Watts, Richard, Young Mans Looking Glasse, The, or a Summary Discourse Between the Ant and the Grasshopper, 158 weaving, of spiders, 87–88, 149–51, 200, 209–10 Weber, Max, 8 web imagery, 199–200, 200, 208 Webster, John, Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy, The, 104 Wechsler, Daniel, 138n4 Weiner, Andrew D., 153n8 Wesley, Samuel, Maggots, or Poems on Several Subjects, 246n41 whiteness, 184–85 Whitney, Geoff rey, Choice of Emblemes, 44, 190n22 Wilkins, John, 205, 207 Williams, Edward, Virginia’s Discovery of Silk-Worms, 25 Williams, Raymond, 86 Willoughby, Francis, 197 Wilmore, Richard, 243 Wilson, Edward O., 39, 75n37 witchcraft, 180, 186–88, 212n28, 244 Wolfe, Cary, 139n14 wolf-worms, 241–42

BotelhoV1-final.indb 281

|

281

women ailments of, 181–82 appearance and character of, 184 deception trope, 255–56 femininity, 101, 108n25 sexing of sovereignty, 119–22 witchcraft, 180, 186–88, 212n28, 244 Woods, Derek, 116 wool knitting industry, 26–27 work ethic of ants, 36–39, 40, 41–42, 44, 159, 167 of bees, 113 and exploitative labor, 167–68, 171n44 vs. idleness, 37–38, 43, 158, 167, 171n37 and music, 159 of silkworms, 21–22 and social elevation of manual labor, 24, 36–37 Worlidge, John, Apiarium, 113, 114, 119, 120 worms, 230–45 biblical associations, 235–36 classification of intestinal/bodily, 231– 33, 239–40, 242 disease and psychological associations, 232, 233, 239–44 maggots associated with, 98, 236, 246n41 reproduction of, 231, 239, 245–46n24 See also silkworms worms of conscience in literature, 234–35, 238 medicalization of, 239, 240–41 in religious thought, 235–37 Wotton, Edward, 20, 211n8 Wriothesley, Henry, third earl of Southampton, 25 Yates, John, Gods Arraignment of Hypocrites, 186

11/9/22 1:36 PM

BotelhoV1-final.indb 282

11/9/22 1:36 PM