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 8 “Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?”: Apes and Others on the Early Modern Stage James Knowles In the “Induction” to Marston’s Antonio and Mellida (1600) the boy actors debate their upcoming roles in a scene suffused with anxiety about identity, sexuality, and, ultimately, the effects of playing. The boy playing Antonio (who later dresses as an Amazon) suggestively describes his cross-dressed role as “an hermaphrodite,two parts in one,” but the part of Galeatzo,Duke of Florence, is reserved for most comment. This role is described as “a right part for Proteus or Gew; ho, blind Gew would ha’ done’t rarely, rarely.”1 Proteus provides an obvious figure for the transformative skills both required and threatened by the early modern stage, but “blind Gew” presents a puzzle. According to some critics “blind Gew” was a “blind performing baboon” alluded to in plays and in Jonson’s Epigrams as a comparison for Mime to “out-zany” as he may also “out-dance the babion.”2 Yet the editions of these texts evidence some uncertainty as to Gew’s identity.For some he is an ape, for W. R. Gair “an actor specializing in ape-like mannerisms,” and for Ian Donaldson “a showman.”3 Interestingly, Gew appears as an ape in Nungezer’s Dictionary of Actors and Other Persons Associated with the Public Representation of Plays in England before 1642, where he is the only animal among the human cast.4 This uncertainty does not simply testify to scholarly confusion but rather encapsulates the variety of apes and ape imitators on the early modern stage. More crucially,Gew’s uncertain identity evidences the confusions that apes and their connection to humans engendered in the thinking of the period, confusions exacerbated by the mimetic (apish) activity of acting. Widespread testimony shows apes that danced and performed gestures obscene or political (the ape who “come[s] over the chain for the King of England, and back again for the Prince, and sit[s] still on his arse for the Pope and the King of Spain”), and at least one company of performing apes was licensed in 1606.5 Masques seem to have been a particular venue for “ape” dances, and Bacon associates baboons with masques in his Essays.6 Importantly , there seem to have been two classes of ape-performers on the early modern stage—trained apes and boys or men dressed as apes—and at least one adult actor, Thomas Greene, appears to have specialized in aping the apes. If apes themselves present a disturbing series of images that question the nature of human identity, adult ape-actors intensify these anxieties. This chapter argues that apes had a particular—and disconcerting—place on the early modern stage. Centrally, the ape raised questions about the boundaries of the human and animal, a highly uncertain and contested limen. There existed a real fear that men (and, more likely, women or boys) might easily continue the postlapsarian trajectory of decay and metamorphose toward the animal. This fear raises the second dimension to the interaction of early modern stage and the simian as acting was often (even ubiquitously) described as “aping” or “apish.” Often this “aping” trope is simply read as metaphorical, but in light of the unstable human/ape divide in early modern thought, the anxiety in “aping” may lie in the possibility that by playing the ape—or just playing—actors (boys in particular) risked becoming apelike or, even, apes. Overlaid by a further category confusion in which ape and apelike were not clearly distinguished, the issue of animal acting highlights the fragility of human status.For Protestant writers,in particular , animal-human cross-dressing reveals the dangerous “animality of humanity.”7 The ape has a peculiarly potent place in early modern culture. The representation of apes encompasses a long, complex, and varied history of allegorical and symbolic representations in a wide range of forms.Apes were becoming more familiar, not simply as exotica in the specialized wonderzones of the menagerie or theater but as domestic pets. Keith Thomas even claims that by the sixteenth century pet monkeys were a “normal feature” of urban middle-class households.8 Thomas’s suggestion bears out Daston and Park’s argument that the early modern period saw a gradual disappearance of the marginal exotic and the emergence of the exotic within and also parallels the complexity of reaction they trace around the early modern monstrosity. Reactions to the monstrous, they argue...

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