Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature (review)

At the end of the introduction to Animal Characters, Bruce Boehrer states his book’s “modest” goal: “to sketch in a bit of western literary history by studying the development of concepts of literary character from the standpoint of interspecies relations” (27). Earlier in the introduction, Boehrer explains his “core argument” less modestly: “Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherit a crisis of distinctions that expresses itself through a fixation on the human-animal relationship; Descartes resolves this same crisis a priori, by granting humanity exclusive access to consciousness . . . and in the process, he also creates a new purpose for literary activity—that of drawing and redrawing the species boundary through the elaboration of literary character as defined by the revelation in words of a distinctive personal interiority” (10). To accomplish this, Boehrer explores the history of character before the rise of the novel and the premodern literary use of nonhuman animals as characters.

The book is divided into seven sections: an introduction that surveys animal studies texts and some treatments of literary character; five chapters, each focusing on a particular nonhuman animal; and a short conclusion on Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. Before the Enlightenment, literary character depended on an Aristotelian understanding of temperament, in which humans and animals shared qualities such as “courage and cowardice, generosity and jealousy, calmness and irascibility” (16). Those pre-Cartesian characters were not individuated but rather existed “primarily as an instrument of class taxonomy” (18). This conception of character enables Boehrer to discuss particular animals who are characters in literary texts, as well as groups of animals with characteristic temperaments who serve cultural functions.

Boehrer’s opening chapter, on horses in texts from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso to Paradise Lost, is perhaps the most successful in showing how animals are true characters in the premodern and early modern world. The chapter traces the “literary legacy” of the horse Baiardo, who appears in Orlando Furioso, the early thirteenth-century Les Quatre Fils Aymon (translated by William Caxton in 1489), the Italian romance Morgante (1483), and Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1483). With his master, Rinaldo, the chivalric Baiardo shares the “heroism and nobility” “that serves to distinguish” both characters “from lesser human beings and lesser horses” (36). Shakespeare responded to that image of noble man and noble horse by conflating women and horses, a conflation that provides him “with a powerful antichivalric image, an antidote to [that] heroic dyad” (44). Boehrer also reads Richard II and The Two Noble Kinsmen as nostalgic responses to chivalric heroism. Both texts regretfully abandon “the romance tradition’s privileged relation between horse and rider . . . while also celebrating and exalting certain personal attachments that extend across the species barrier” (56). Milton’s Paradise Lost also features in this chapter. While Milton rejects the chivalric horse character, he believed that animals “could reason,” and his epic, while it has very few horses, is quite interested in “animal figures of divine inspiration” (67, 64). The chapter ends with a quick look at Don Quixote’s parody of heroism, which includes a broken-down workhorse. Boehrer contends that Cervantes marks the end “of the horse as a heroic and rational agent” (73) in European literature.

Although chapter 2, on parrots, briefly discusses John Skelton’s “Speke, Parrot” and Ben Jonson’s Volpone, it is largely concerned with the changing cultural image of parrots in relation to the Reformation. Boehrer traces a descent for the parrot from its veneration in Catholic texts and images to its denigration in anti-Catholic discourse. While that denigration had religious roots, it colored the image of the parrot so thoroughly that, even in thoroughly secular texts, the bird became “a conventional emblem of mindless iteration” (75). The chapter is copiously illustrated with religious images that demonstrate the “sacred associations that ally” the parrot “with Catholic belief and papal culture” (87). But as the Reformation gathered steam, the bird instead came to symbolize meaningless talk.

Chapter 3...