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 1 Unpicking the Seam: Talking Animals and Reader Pleasure in Early Modern Satire Kathryn Perry Whether they are apocalyptically angry or merely scornful, satires can be recognized by the nature of their engagement with readers. They work toward constructing an alliance between the satirist and the like-minded reader, distancing the reader from the target under scrutiny. Regardless of the seriousness of the subject matter, this alliance typically depends on the satirist’s ability to give the reader pleasure as well as to generate feelings of disgust, bitterness, or alienation. The pleasure taken in satire is not simply the pleasure of laughter; it is more fundamentally the pleasure of unruly fantasy, which might incorporate the manipulation of representations that point to the world outside the text or the dream of triumphing over an opponent through the power of rhetoric. The satirist’s interests, defined in this way, can be powerfully served by zoomorphism,by configuring satire as what Jennifer Ham and Matthew Senior call an animal act,in which the human shares space and consciousness with the beast.1 Early modern English culture was saturated with animal metaphors and personae,and early modern English satire was compulsively zoomorphic. This could take a variety of forms. In the exchange of invective or abuse, the most direct form of satire, the target might be called an animal; the satirist might set out to expose the beasts within apparently civilized human society; or the satirical text, in the form of a fable or a longer, episodic narrative, might use talking animals as characters. In this chapter I discuss the first two categories, but my main interest is in talking animals and the nature of the pleasures early modern readers may have taken in them.Investigating talking animals as a source of pleasure is one way to find out how these chimerical literary and cultural constructions, surprisingly common in early modern satire, work. The fundamental assumption on which this chapter is based is that the principal pleasure to be had from any talking animal text is the game of playing with recognized animal attributes, making apt, unlikely, or outrageous correspondences with human types or behaviors. The pleasure for authors is in reimagining the correspondences between the human and the animal; the pleasure for readers is in detecting them. The game may be ahistorical, but the cluster of attributes,often incompatible,associated with each species is historically inflected.Moreover,the attributes of a “rhetorical” animal,to borrow Harriet Ritvo’s term, have very little in common with its “material” counterpart.2 Early modern representations of the sparrow as lecherous or the pelican as self-sacrificing are no more unreasonable than the way the hippopotamus (responsible for more human deaths every year than any other African animal) is represented in contemporary children’s culture as comic and benign. From the beginning of the twentieth century, talking animals have been absorbed into the world of children’s literature, film, and television, where they reign supreme. Talking animal texts occupied a different, though possibly analogous position in the hierarchy of early modern literature: rather than being set apart in a separate literary sphere, they were ranked at the bottom of the literary ladder and labeled “low.” In both the early modern and modern periods, there is an insistence on the simplicity, triviality, and transparency of talking animals and their suitability for innocent readers. The most common form taken by early modern talking animal texts was animal fables, which could be used to instruct the young and socially subordinate , doctrinally (via homilies) or grammatically (via Latin primers).3 Talking animals in these texts sugar the instructive pill; they exist to entertain .However,talking animals are unruly constructions,and “low” can easily become riotous or scatological, in the tradition of carnival formulated by Mikhail Bakhtin. As we shall see, Bakhtin’s idea of carnival makes sense of many of the attributes of talking animals: his concept of the grotesque body, for example, is recognizable as the animal body or the human body in its animal aspect.4 The simplicity or “lowness” attributed to talking animal texts can become a specialized kind of pleasure when readers assume talking animal texts to contain encoded representations of recognizable and powerful individuals.5 In these cases, the supposed simplicity or “lowness” of the animal vehicle is often remarked upon; it simultaneously attracts and deflects penetrating readings.In his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534),written in the Tower, Sir...

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