Bruce Thomas Boehrer. Shakespeare among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England.

Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2002. xii + 212 pp. + 11 b/w pls. index. illus. tbls. maps. bibl. $55. ISBN: 0-312-29343-7.

professor Bruce Boehrer has written an important book on an important subject--the nature of nature, and the changing visions of human and animal as reflected in art. The book demonstrates a wide-ranging knowledge of the climate of ideas about nature in the English Renaissance, both in England and beyond, combined with a lively and thoughtful consideration of how these ideas figure in modern thought.

One of the pleasures of reading the book is a sense of progressive revelation both within chapters and between chapters. As I progressed I found the chapters increasingly original and illuminating. Chapter titles do not adequately represent the richness of this experience. Chapter 1, titled "Shakespeare's Beastly Buggers," is, says Boehrer, about women; but it is much more about the fluid boundaries between animals and humans. The prime exhibit is A Midsummer Night's Dream with Puck as the chief example. Focusing, the author says, on masculinity, chapter 2, "The Cuckoo and the Capon," takes up the endlessly intriguing and ultimately baffling questions of horns and cuckoldry; the examples serve to illustrate problems of male identity as well as the inextricable linking of horns and adultery. The prime exhibits are Jonson and Middleton. Chapter 3, "The Dead Parrot Sketch," opened up for me an entirely new history of the rise and fall of the parrot in connection with New World exploration. The author connects parrots with race, and the book's dust cover suggests an affinity between the bird and a dark-skinned servant boy standing opposite the master, an aristocratic male. Finally, chapter 4 moves wittily from the discussion of the dangers of children and animals as dramatic stage distractions to performing bears and dogs. It culminates in a detailed and illuminating analysis of the role of Crab the dog in Two Gentlemen of Verona. This chapter is titled, not very helpfully, "Animal Fun for Everyone," but, as Boehrer says, it is devoted to the consideration of beasts as beasts. Thus the argument of the book has proceeded from a study of the permeability of boundaries between species, as epitomized by Puck, to the stubborn refusal of an animal, epitomized by Crab (in spite of his name), to be anything but a dog.

This pattern does not argue a progression of thought in the dramatist's work as a challenge to popularly accepted beliefs in a chain of being. It is rather a demonstration of the special potentials of drama to disturb conventional certainties--in the case of A Midsummer Night's Dream a "refusal to identify with a single binary term (human, male conservative, traditional, moral) at the expense of its opposite" (70). At the other extreme, among the multiple playacting humans of Two Gentlemen of Verona, Crab the dog remains ineluctably himself. Boehrer considers the play a failure but indulges in a delightfully hyperbolic praise of the dog: "I would like to make one modest claim for the play's unsurpassed excellence. For in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Shakespeare produced the most perfect dramatic role that he ever composed for a dog" (156).

He goes on to rank Crab with Hamlet, Othello, Shylock, Falstaff, Desdemona, and Viola. This is not a celebration of the merging of human and animal, but an appreciation of distinction. The point is not philosophic but a recognition of the dramatic effectiveness of the use of "a single binary term."

Although I admired the richness and detail of the four main chapters, I think, in fact, that the book suffers somewhat from too many organizing principles. In his introduction the author lays out three separate categories of human attitudes to animals: (1) absolute anthropocentrism--humans are radically different from all other life; (2) relative anthropomorphism--humans are superior but some are more superior than others; (3) anthropomorphism--humans are superior but with an animal nature that has the possibility of sinking below capacity. Having set out these three categories, Boehrer rarely uses them; and when he does, readers like me have very likely forgotten or confused the relatively useless definitions. He himself says, "... I have found it necessary both to generate [this] system of organization ... and then, having generated it, to leave it behind" (37).

There are eleven illustrations in the book, potentially illuminating companions to the text, but finally a great disappointment. A few are very helpful, but the six maps are so small and so poorly reproduced as to be merely tantalizing. In the detail of the Ebstorf map (113) which is claimed to show the earliest appearance of parrots on a European map, I could not find the parrots. In a book so good, it is hard to accept such correctable flaws. The final section of the book, "Suggested Further Reading," is a wonderful and very valuable survey of work in the field.

JEANNE A. ROBERTS

American University