To cite this Article Fudge, Erica(2011) 'The Human Face of Early Modern England',
Angelaki, 16: 1, 97 — 110
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.564366
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2011.564366
The Human Face of Early Modern England
Erica Fudge (Middlesex University, UK)
In an anonymous 1598 translation of Aristotle’s Politics we read that ‘Nature who
hath bestowed the power of Speech vpon man, maketh nothing in vaine.’1 Perhaps
more recognisable in its modern rendition, ‘man is the only animal whom [nature] has
endowed with the gift of speech,’2 this is an idea that has haunted western philosophy
since the fourth century BCE. It is a conception of difference – perhaps even the
conception of difference – that continues to do two inseparable things: to construct the
human as the only meaning-making species, and to relegate animals to a place of
silence. This is a silence based on their perceived inability to speak, and it is also a
silence based on humanity’s unwillingness to speak fully about and for them. Indeed,
writing at the end of the twentieth century Jacques Derrida noted that the animal as a
being with a capacity for a response and not just a reaction is ‘something that
philosophy perhaps forgets, perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself.’3
It is not just speech that is at stake in Aristotle’s statement. There are other issues that
go with his claim about humanity’s unique status that are sometimes forgotten, or
rather are subsumed under a concentration on spoken language. He continues (again,
quoting from the 1598 translation):
1
Voice which is the signifier of ioy and sadnes, is bestowed for this cause vpon
other creatures, for euen Nature proceedeth so farre in them, that shee giueth
them a feeling of ioy and griefe, and a power to declare the same to others.
But Speech is giuen vnto vs to signifie what is profitable and what
vnprofitable, and consequently what is iust and what vniust. For this is a
proprietie belonging vnto man aboue all other liuing creatures, that he onely
hath a sense and feeling of good and euill, and of iust and vniust. The
communion of which things begetteth and establisheth a house and a Cittie.4
The distinction of voice and speech, then, is to be read as a manifestation of another,
preceding difference. An animal, for Aristotle, cannot be just or unjust because such
conceptions require access to a realm of abstraction that is not available to the animal
mind, a mind which is capable only of reacting to – and thus of giving voice to –
immediate circumstances. In this worldview a plant has a vegetative soul which
allows for growth, nutrition and reproduction; an animal has a vegetative and a
sensitive soul, which allows for movement and sensory engagement with the physical
world; a human has a vegetative, a sensitive and a rational soul which is immortal and
gives access to the abstract.5 Because of its limitation to the sensual world an animal
cannot be said therefore to live socially, for social living must be underpinned by, for
example, an agreed set of ethical (i.e. abstract) rules. Following this train of thought
into the early modern period – my focus in this essay – Sir Francis Bacon wrote in
1625 that ‘whosoever in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit for friendship,
he taketh it of the beast, and not from humanity.’6 To be alone - to live outside of
society - is to be not human.
2
But it was not only that animals were believed to be outside of the realm of the social
in this period. They were also not constituted as individuals. Alongside abstract
knowledge animals were believed to lack self-knowledge, something vital for both
individual and social being. Sir Miles Sandys, writing in 1634, asked a series of
questions with a clear answer:
Doth the horse know that he is a horse, or, that he is a beast, and thou a man?
… or doth the Dogge (which of all beasts is mans chiefe attendant) know,
whether thou art a man, or a beast? no certainely. … onely man knowes that
hee is man.7
Two decades later, the Hertfordshire physician John Bulwer, whose work is central to
this essay, wrote that ‘men descending into themselves may know themselves to be
men and not beasts, and learne to order this August Domicil of man reverently to the
health of the Body, and the honour of the Soule.’8 Self-knowledge is available only to
humans, and – like abstract knowledge - allows for social living. Having access to the
abstract notion ‘the human’, and knowing who one is oneself and whether the other is
a human or a beast, sits at the foundation of a society. So a dog can only ever be an
attendant; it can be made to serve humanity but can never be a full member of the
human community.
In this essay I look at a number writings from the first half of the seventeenth century
and trace out the ways in which this argument of exclusion circulates. The materials
used here form a particular discourse on animals which is informed by and, in large
measure, repeats Aristotle’s ideas. An alternative early modern point of view is
3
explored elsewhere.9 In this essay, moving out from questions of language and
communication, I explore how these early seventeenth-century discussions of
sociality and individuality take up the body as well as the mind. The possession of a
face is at the centre of these debates. Indeed, in this period called both the
Renaissance and the early modern, where ancient past and contemporary modern are
entangled, discussions about faces are always discussions about being human.
Meaningful Bodies
It is not only animals that have been relegated by their lack of speech. In ancient
Greece, for example, human deafness was linked to muteness which, in turn, was
understood to go ‘hand-in-hand with an inability to reason’.10 Once again, this
conception was followed by later writers, and in his 1648 Philocophus: Or, The Deafe
and Dumbe Mans Friend John Bulwer noted:
The condition that they are in who are borne deafe and dumbe, is indeed very
sad and lamentable: for they are looked upon as misprisions of nature, and
wanting speech, are reckoned little better then Dumbe Animals, that want
words to expresse their conceptions; and men that have lost the Magna Charta
of speech and priviledge of communication, and society with men.
Bulwer thus repeats Aristotle’s distinction of human from animal as being about
speech and society (and it becomes clear that ‘animal’ as a category here includes the
less-than-human human), and he notes in the following pages the status of the deaf ‘in
Foro Civili’ as being one of exclusion. Legally, deaf people are without rights
4
because without expression: they cannot be witnesses, cannot draw up wills.11 But
Bulwer is challenging this Aristotelian conception. He suggests that a deaf person
might learn lip reading, or ‘ocular audition’ as he terms it, and so have language and
therefore enter the social world.12 Thus Bulwer argues that communication might be
possible in ways other than speech: that meaning might come from movement: not
just in the interpretation of lip motion, but in the form of gesture which is, he states,
the ‘universall language of Humane nature.’13
The signifying body that comes to the fore in Philocophus is of constant interest to
Bulwer. Whether he is worrying about facial musculature in Pathomyotomia (1649 –
a text to which I return), or body-modification (tattoos, scarification, the use of makeup) in Anthropometamorphosis (1650, enlarged 1653), the eloquence of the human
body is central. Indeed, his first work, published in 1644, is a study of gestural
language. This book is made up of two texts, Chirologia and Chironomia (‘the natural
language of the hand’ and ‘the rule of the hand’ respectively14). The first traces the
signification of individual hand gestures in classical texts as a way of establishing a
lexicon of natural, universal hand language while the second looks at the cultural
refinements of this natural language. For Bulwer, in gestural language the individual
can truly express themselves and thus be truly human. Indeed, he states that he will
‘handle gesture, as the only speech and general language of human nature.’15
Thus, in arguing for a universal language and in tracing classical precedent Bulwer
establishes what he regards as a trans-cultural and trans-historical human nature, and a
new way of marking out what makes the human a human.16 Of the handshake, for
example, he writes:
5
Our ancestors also had this expression of hospitable love in a real respect
when they knew no greater term of reproach than to call a man unhospitable.
This expression of the hand continues in force and estimation and bears such
sway among all nations (especially those that are northward) that he seems to
be disarmed of all humanity and to want the affability of expression who doth
(when there is occasion for it) omit this benevolent insinuation of the hand.17
Here, to be able to engage socially is to have a hand to gesture with, and the pun in
Bulwer’s statement that one who fails to offer the hand is ‘disarmed of all humanity’
seems to reinforce this. However, he had noted earlier that an arm can be eloquent
‘when the hand hath been lost,’ and likewise we are asked to recognise that it is not an
animal’s different anatomy that excludes it from the realm of hospitality.18 Rather
there is an incorporeal lack, more important than any corporeal one, which discounts
animals from the social world that the handshake opens up. The reason for the
absence of animals from this sphere of friendship is because the handshake is, Bulwer
states, a ‘natural expression [which] seems to result from the sympathy between the
will and the hands. For, the will [is] affectionately inclined and moved to stretch forth
herself; the hand is moved by the same spirit.’19 This gesture, as all gestures, is a
manifestation of volition, and so animals can never be understood to ‘speak’ even
physically because they are creatures lacking such will, which is a capacity of
reasonable beings only. An animal’s body movement is mere corporeal noise while
hands, Bulwer argues in Chironomia, ‘are not only assistant to eloquence but do
incredibly conduce to all the offices of reason and humanity.’20
6
Bulwer is not alone in his assessment of the body as a reflection of humanity’s
reasonable state. Such a belief gets played out in many works in this period.
Philosophical discussions linking reason and the flesh are constant and orthodox as
the humoral make-up of the body was one way of understanding the mind of the
individual. Robert Burton, to cite just one famous example, begins The Anatomy of
Melancholy (1624) with a lengthy discussion of the human frame, seeing it as
inseparable from his later discussion of human psychology.21 But this interest in the
body can also be traced in a different way in other areas of early modern intellectual
life. In the court masques of Jacobean and Caroline England, for example, the
potentially reasonable nature of the human body is reflected in the centrality of
dancing which was understood to be, as Blair Hoxby has written, ‘the raison-d’être’
of these court performances.22 In them actual spoken dialogue played a minor role,
something that apparently undermines the prioritising of speech in the distinction of
human from animal that can be found, for example, in George Puttenham’s
declaration that ‘Poesie was th’originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies,
when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant and dispersed
like the wild beasts.’23 From this conventional perspective, humans gathered to tell
tales and so society was born, whereas animals, beings without speech, cannot tell
tales and so can never be conceived of as being properly social.
Just as Bulwer argued for the possibility of ocular audition introducing the deaf to the
society of the hearing, so an alternative way of communicating – another kind of
speech - was emphasised in the court masque. Dance itself was recognised in early
modern theorisation as conveying meaning. Jennifer Nevile writes:
7
Dancing taught the chosen members of society control over their body and
over their actions, both when dancing and in day-to-day interactions with their
colleagues and superiors. It was visible evidence that a person was capable of
controlling their inner emotions as well. Dancing, therefore, functioned as a
social marker, as one of the ways a certain group in society defined itself and
excluded others.24
We can go further than this, I think. If dancing marks out class difference it also
marks out species difference. Nevile writes that ‘Movements of the body were
believed to be the outward manifestations of movements of the soul. Consequently, if
the movements of the body were ungraceful, then the movements of the soul would be
presumed to be similarly ugly and inharmonious.’25 Courtly dancing revealed a
rational mind in that it reflected grace and an ability to act in accordance with socially
agreed rules – i.e. the steps of the dance. An animal, lacking such a mind, was
therefore incapable of such dancing, and a performance of a disorderly dance
therefore said much about the species status of the dancer.26
In the court masques of the seventeenth century, then, it was not only the tales told but
also the dances danced that constructed human society, and this is marked in one
trope of the masque in which a shift from the opening chaos of the ‘antimasque’ to the
order of the courtly dance at the end was presented as being a movement from animal
(or less-than-human) to human. James Knowles, tracing the representation of such
less-than-humans (satyrs, animal-headed men) and apes in Stuart court performances,
has noted that ‘masque form, with its movement from antimasque to masque, was an
ideal vehicle for demonstrating the primacy of the civil, human, and royal over the
8
barbarian, satirical, and bestial.’27 Ben Jonson’s Oberon The Fairy Prince offers an
illustration of this. This masque was performed at Whitehall Palace on 1 January
1611. It opens with a scene ‘all obscure, and nothing perceived but dark rock, with
trees beyond it, and all wildness that could be presented’. In this place a group of
satyrs (played by professional actors) are gathering and ‘running forth severally …
making antic action and gestures’.28 They are awaiting the presence of Oberon
(played by Prince Henry) who will, they hope, transform them: he will ‘gild our
cloven feet’, ‘Hang upon our stubbed horns / Garlands, ribands, and fine posies’,
‘stick our pricking ears / With the pearl that Tethys wears’, ‘Trap our shaggy thighs
with bells’.29 It is the animal aspect of the satyrs – what reveals them as less-thanhuman – that will, they hope, be overlaid by a civility which is symbolised in the
jewels and ornamentation that the Fairy Prince will bring. But when Oberon enters the
stage ‘in a chariot, which to a loud triumphant music, began to move forward, drawn
by two white bears’ his follower, ‘the foremost sylvan’, corrects the satyrs telling
them that the ‘True majesty’ in the room is James I and not his performing son.30
Silenus, ‘the prefect of the satyrs’, acknowledges this:
He makes it ever day, and ever spring,
Where he doth shine, and quickens everything,
Like a new nature: so that true to call
Him, by his title, is to say, He’s all.31
Where Oberon has the power to superficially gild the satyrs’ lack of humanity, James
can truly transform the world.32
9
At this point in the masque the satyrs disappear from the action, and the remaining
songs and dances are performed by ‘fays’ (fairies), and by Oberon and his knights,
who were played by members of the court. The acknowledgment of the presence of
the rightful monarch has transformed the action and order is restored by the
commanding gaze of the King. The best view of Inigo Jones’ staging was from the
throne and thus, literally and figuratively, in the masque it is the sovereign alone who
has the true perspective.33 But the order that is present is not manifested in a shift in
the spoken language of the text (the satyrs speak in rhyme, as do the fays). Rather,
order is represented as visible, bodily. It is in the dance - in the movement from the
satyrs’ ‘antic dance full of gesture’ to the controlled ‘measures, corantos, galliards,
etc.’ performed by the court at the end - that meaning is conveyed.34 Puttenham’s
claim that it was poetry that brought human society into being is only partly true. For
Jonson and other masque writers society is established through poetry but it is also
constructed in physical performance: in adherence to the socially agreed rules of the
dance.
But it is not just in dancing and hand gesture that the body is used to construct a
human. Bulwer argued that ‘Two amphitheatres there are in the body’, ‘the hand and
the head,’ and he planned, alongside his Chirologia and Chironomia two further
‘receptacles’ of his observations of human gestural language: Cephalelogia (‘the
natural language of the head’) and Cephalenomia (‘the Rule of the head’: i.e. ‘the
qualification of all cephalical expressions, according to the laws of civil prudence’).35
These texts do not exist, but Bulwer’s interest in the human head is a reflection of
wider cultural conventions that are linked to ideas about dancing and gestural
language. In a number of masques, and in other writings of the period, the face in
10
particular emerges as a place where the human can be found and it is to this that I now
turn. I will return to the writings of John Bulwer – to his work on the musculature of
the head, Pathomyotomia (which may be what became of his proposed head books) –
but I begin with another court text: John Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow
Castle. These are very different kinds of writing, but both reflect alike on the nature
of species difference and the role of the face in that difference.36
Losing Face
In 1634 Milton gained the commission to write A Masque Presented at Ludlow
Castle. The masque was commissioned to celebrate the Earl of Bridgewater’s
becoming the President of Wales and the Marches. This role saw Bridgewater as
Charles I’s representative in Wales, a place which was ‘considered wild and
uncivilized, and … very far from the center of both power and culture.’37 Involving
the Earl’s three youngest children in key speaking roles, the masque took up the
geographical location of Ludlow Castle itself and focused on the dangers of
borderlands: between the wood and the court; the savage and the civil; but also
between the animal and the human. The central character of the masque, Comus,
spends his time lurking in the dark woods for innocent passers-by whom he lures to
join his immoderate gang by (appropriately enough for the son of Bacchus and Circe)
offering a drink: by tempting their ‘fond intemperate thirst’ as the Attendant Spirit of
the woods says.38
The dramatic action of A Masque centres on the Lady who represents chastity, and
was played by the Earl’s daughter, the fifteen-year old Lady Alice Egerton. She
11
becomes separated from her two brothers in the wood and is captured by Comus and
shackled by him to a magic throne where she refuses his advances. She is released
only by the supernatural, immortal powers of Sabrina, the spirit of the river Severn
which borders Wales and England. The masque thus tells its moral story about
temperance, but it is also speaking about the dangers and closeness of savagery, a
typical conceit of this genre. But A Masque is inevitably more modest than any of the
court masques written for James or Charles, in keeping with its being presented in a
provincial ‘court’ rather than the royal one. The modesty, though, is also appropriate
to Milton’s focus on temperance in the text. While we begin with the antimasque of
Comus’ ‘rout of monsters … making a riotous and unruly noise’ and end with the
children’s ‘victorious dance/ Oe’r sensual folly and intemperance’, this is no simple
celebration of chastity’s victory over lechery.39 The masque is not a salute to power as
always already present in the figure of the monarch (as when, in Oberon, the change
occurs with the satyrs’ discovery that James is and has ever been present). Milton’s
masque, rather, is a didactic work of art. By the end of the performance Comus and
his followers have not been stopped, they are still lurking in the woods for the next
thirsty traveller. The text is thus a warning to all viewers and all readers (it was first
printed in 1637). Its meanings are aimed at a political level in that the masque glances
at the Earl’s work in maintaining order in the borderlands of England and Wales. But
they are also aimed at an abstract level in that it touches questions of human
moderation.
A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle also raises very interestingly the question of
being human. For what happens to the intemperate passers-by who are tempted by
12
Comus’ poisoned cup is that they are changed; they are metamorphosed in a very
particular way:
Soon as the Potion works, their human count’nance,
Th’ express resemblance of the gods, is chang’d
Into some brutish form of wolf or bear,
Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat,
All other parts remaining as they were.40
Later the Attendant Spirit says that Comus’
pleasing poison
The visage quite transforms of him that drinks
And the inglorious likeness of a beast
Fixes instead, unmoulding reason’s mintage
Character’d in the face.41
What the potion does, then, is take from the intemperate drinker the thing that marks
them as human: their face. For Milton, the face represents the reason and divinity that
sits within the human body. This is a trope he repeated in Paradise Lost some thirty
years later when Adam, discovering Eve has eaten the forbidden fruit, says: ‘How art
thou lost, how on a sudden lost, / Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote?’42
Like animals, so Adam believes, Eve is now wholly mortal, and she has lost her face,
and thus her humanity has been ruined. Likewise, in A Masque the human who gives
13
in to temptation is made more like the beasts than the angels by Comus’ drink,
something signified in the gaining of the animal head.
The loss of face and reason has two related outcomes. First of all, we are told that the
drinkers ‘all their friends, and native home forget / To roll with pleasure in a sensual
sty.’43 Their Circean animalisation is represented through human isolation and the
descent into the pleasures of the material realm. This transformation of human face
into animal head mirrors that seen on the frontispiece to Thomas Heywood’s
Philocothonista, or The Drvnkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized, a text printed
in 1635, the year after the performance of A Masque.
Image near here
Frontispiece from Thomas Heywood, Philocothonista, or The Drvnkard, Opened,
Dissected, and Anatomized (London: Robert Raworth, 1635) (c) The British Library
Board. (Shelfmark C30d11). Reproduced with permission.
In this text Heywood categorises different kinds of drunkenness using different kinds
of animals. Thus ‘Ebrietas Ovina’ (sheep drunkenness) is the category of those who
when drunk ‘seeme to be terrified with the feare of Sprites and Hobgoblines.’ Those
who ‘can stand upon no ground, but leape and dance, and caper, toy, laugh, sing, and
prattle, troubling the whole company with their Antick gesticulations, and tedious
verbositie’ are displaying ‘Ebrietas Vitulina’ (calf drunkenness). Last in his list are
the pig-drunks:
14
These are most ridiculous and nasty, who by giving themselues over to all
beastiall vinositie, by spending whole dayes, and consuming night after night
in Tavernes, and Tippling-houses, returne from thence, either led or carried,
who oft times stumbling, lie wallowing in the kennells, and so appeare no
other then Hoggs and swine, newly come durty and dawbed out of the
puddles.44
An earlier version of this listing of animalised drunkards can be found in Englands
Bane: Or, The Description of Drunkennesse which was written by Thomas Young
and published in 1617. Young became tutor to the young John Milton the following
year.45 The metamorphosis of Comus’ rout in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle
is thus a conventional one, and is one that is associated with drinking. Animals, this
discourse states, live only in the sensual present, and are thus incapable of forming
societies. And so losing control of one’s reason when one is drunk is also and
logically (not just metaphorically) a loss of humanity and a descent to the status of a
beast.46
But the second set of descriptions that is used to represent those who succumb to
Comus is also worth noting. What goes alongside the question of lack of temperance
and removal of face is a loss of something else. Comus refers to his followers as ‘a
herd’.47 Throughout the piece – which is 1023 lines long - they are described only as a
group: as a ‘rout’, a ‘rabble’. This is quite different from a society: a herd is a
collection of beings – flesh objects, almost - brought together by an outside force. A
member of the herd in A Masque is tricked into joining and held in place by Comus’
magic potion. They therefore have no agency and cannot they alter the nature of that
15
rabble. In this context, an individual animal is an impossible singular in a collective
noun – the herd. It is as if, in A Masque, Milton is representing the power of the
herdsman over the herd and, to speak more generally, of humans over animals, as
being analogous to sorcery. The ‘orient liquor in a crystal glass’ that Comus offers to
passers-by is potable dominion.48 For the unknowing drinker, however, it is a truly
poisoned chalice with only one possible outcome. Comus’ dupes drink the proffered
refreshment and lose their reason, lose their faces and lose their individuality all in
one movement, so much so that they fail to know this. After their transformation
‘they, so perfect is their misery, / Not once perceive their foul disfigurement, / But
boast themselves more comely than before’.49 They have lost the ability to tell if they
are human or not. Once again Milton is not unique. Three years before his work was
performed Jonson, in his masque Love’s Triumph through Callipolis, wrote that
‘slaves to sense’ were ‘Mere cattle, and not men.’50
The animalisation, like being human, has an internal cause. In A Masque one of the
Lady’s brothers outlines what happens to those who are not temperate. He states,
But when lust
By unchaste looks, loose gestures and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,
Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The soul grows clotted by contagion,
Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose
The divine property of her first being.51
16
The human soul sunk in sensuality is imbodied and imbruted: it has become flesh and
thus, in this conception, the human has become a mere animal. This is why gesture –
to return to Bulwer – is meaningful only when underpinned by animating reason.
Hence, when in Chirologia he mentions the ‘“horse-rhetoric” of Smithfield’ and the
very different ‘“fish dialect” of Billingsgate’, what he is referring to is the ‘cunning
management of the hand’ by merchants and traders at London horse and fish markets
and not the body language of animals because animals, lacking reason, can never be
understood to have such language.52 Thus, as speech and therefore human status is a
product of reason, humans sunk in vice lose their essential humanity; they become
animal-headed (a literalisation of their beastly minds). But these humans also
metaphorically lose their faces: they cease to know their friends and to know
themselves and are, in Jonson’s terms, mere cattle; in Milton’s a herd. They are not
active parts of a social grouping and they are no longer individuals, they are passive,
isolated, bodily beings trapped in a world of physicality.
This is presented on stage not in the speech of Comus’ rout (for they, appropriately,
have none, only ‘riotous and unruly noise’), but in their animal heads and their
‘Midnight shout, and revelry, / Tipsy dance and jollity.’53 Their sheer faceless
bodiliness here is thus part of that other complex of ideas through which the human is
being constructed in early modern thought: dancing, and dancing, as noted, is human.
Jonson, indeed, termed dancing a display of ‘the wisdom of your feet’ in his 1618
masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue which includes the character ‘Comus, the god
of cheer, or the belly’ and is believed to have influenced Milton.54 The chaotic
motions of the later Comus’ followers exist in opposition to the organized dances
performed by the children at the end of A Masque. These are dances that take place in
17
the castle rather than the wood thus marking also the spatial shift from animal outside
to human inside: the woods being the place that Puttenham’s story-telling humans left
behind. Thus we have various oppositions emerging in A Masque Presented at
Ludlow Castle that are utterly orthodox in their rendition of Aristotelian ideas:
between noise and articulate communication; between orgiastic gyration and orderly
movement; between the woods and the castle; and between animal heads and human
faces.
But dancing can be read in another way as well. In the early modern period it was part
of the education of a gentleman and was placed alongside horse riding as a truly
human accomplishment. Indeed, according to John Holles’ father in 1614, to learn
one skill alone was to be not a gentleman but a worker: ‘to dance only belongs to a
ballarin … and to ride only to a cavallerizzo. All must therefore go together.’55 But
once again it was not only class status that was at stake; species status must also be
considered. Success in both dancing and horse riding signalled control: in dancing it
was control over the animal self, the body; in riding, over the animal other, the
horse.56 An orderly dancer, like a good horseman, revealed himself to be a controlled
and controlling human.57 Thus, in Oberon, when Prince Henry enters the scene in a
chariot with ‘two white bears’ in harness and then performs a dance, he is revealing
his humanity twice over and in a most spectacular fashion: he controls the wildest of
animals, he controls himself.
Just Nodding
18
But on a more figurative level, riding a horse has another meaning. If to ride is to
control nature, a control lost at the Fall, riding is therefore a return, if only
temporarily, to a state of pre-lapsarian perfection. It is a moment of re-facing, you
might say. And this way of thinking about riding can be found almost forty years after
Jonson’s masque to provide another way of linking equestrianism and dancing to
possession of a face. In Pathomyotomia Or a Dissection of the significative Muscles
of the Affections of the Minde John Bulwer states that he is interested in ‘that which I
use to call the Clock-work of the Head, or the Springs and inward Contrivance of
Instruments of all our outward motions, which give motion and regulate the Dyall of
the Affections, which Nature hath placed in the Face of Man.’58 The mechanical
imagery he uses does not displace the conception of the reasonable nature of the
human face. In fact, so linked is the face with reason for him that in his outline of the
‘Scope’ of the book Bulwer states that his aim is ‘to describe such Actions only,
which are generally and universally used by all men, as apparent significations of
their Mind’.59 Animal actions are never of interest to him because they are never
evidence of a reasonable mind, and because of this, animals are not considered as
beings possessing faces. They can make meaning – can express the sensual worlds
they are engaged with – but not like humans: ‘It is well known that most of Creatures
[sic] that have no Countenance to expresse the variation of their Sensitive Appetites
and Imagination, do express their Senses by certaine motions or wagging of their
Eares.’60 This lack of expressive countenance is superficially due to the physical fact
of an animal’s musculature: it is this, he states, that prevents them from laughing.61
But there is another and much more powerful reason for an animal’s lack of face
which is, as it was in discussions of hands in Chirologia, about what lies beneath the
skin. Bulwer makes the claim that animals ‘have no Countenance’ on the level of the
19
soul as well as the body. Indeed, the two – the soul and the body – are inseparable as
it is the former that underpins his anatomical explanation as to how facial movements
take place, an explanation which defines what he means by a face.
Tracing what might be termed the bodily chain of command from the brain to the
nerves to the muscles, Bulwer argues that all the parts of the body are under the rule
of the soul: ‘for the instruments move, because they are moved by it.’62 The body is
thus a microcosm of the royal court in which command comes from its king. In
animals the soul that moves is merely sensitive and mortal, whereas in humans the
soul is reasonable and immortal. Thus, in a circular argument, humans have faces
because faces are sites of reasonable expression and only humans have reason, while
animals, lacking reason therefore lack faces. An animal’s idiom (if such a word can be
used) is always bestial. But this bestial idiom is available to humans too – those
animal-headed drunks in Heywood’s text testify to the possibility (although they
could not, of course, testify in court).
This human beastliness is, then, of the soul as well as of the body and a link between
physique and mind in which animals lurked in the human flesh can be found not only
in imaginative representation but in the science of physiognomy as well, a science
‘which discovereth’, as Bacon put it, ‘the disposition of the mind by the lineaments of
the body.’63 In A Pleasant History: Declaring the Whole Art of Physiognomy (1613),
for example, Thomas Hill states that he is considering in particular ‘the brutish sort:
which for the lacke of grace, and being not regenerated by Gods holy Spirit, … in
such manner, are moued to follow their sensuall will and appetites.’64 The grace that
is lacking that he refers to is God’s grace – the grace of the soul - but it is equally a
20
grace manifest in the body. Instead of dancing, these unregenerated brutes simply
move and follow their senses. Hill goes on:
the Creatures which are regenerated through the holy Ghost, doe not onely
endeuour to mortifie their fleshly appetites, but seeke to put away and correct,
all other inormities and vices resting in them: although there still continueth a
frailtie to sinne, and offences daily committed.
Control is what humans, those regenerated beings, must try to achieve. They will,
however, always fail, because they are human, but they must continue to try, because
they are human. Their inherent and inevitable frailty is visible in the body and Hill
writes, for example, that ‘The person hauing a bigge forhead, is slow and dull Witted,
compared vnto the Oxe, in that the Oxe is a slow beast, which hath a bigge
forehead.’65 What the science of physiognomy declares, then, is the fallen and
dangerously fleshy nature of the human. Just as a dance can become an orgy and a
rider can lose control of a horse, so a soul can be ‘imbodied, and imbruted’ and a
human face can become an animal head.
This link between horse riding, possessing a face and being human is represented in
two related ways in Pathomyotomia. Firstly, Bulwer’s conceit for expressing the
difference between voluntary (human) and spontaneous (animal) movement is
philosophically clichéd but also utterly appropriate.66 In humans:
The Braine commandeth as soone as it hath judged whether the thing is to be
avoided or persecuted, the Nerves commonly called Illatores or the Posts,
21
for the intelligence they give, bring the commandement, and Facultie; the
Muscle illustrated with the Animal Spirits obeyes, and moves the part
according to the command of the will: and as a Rider by the moving of his
Raines, guides his Horse: so the force of the Soule residing in the Braine,
moves the Muscles by the Nerves, as with Raines; for the will is like the
Rider, the Nerves to Raines, and the Muscles to the Horse.67
Thus facial expression and its readable language is, like riding, an externalisation of
the human’s internal, rational capacity. When this capacity is gone, so too is human
status. This can be seen in the animal-headedness of Comus’ followers who have
given in to their sensual appetites, but Bulwer offers another vision of this using a
different equine analogy, this time of a rather more shocking species: ‘If any man
would make triall to find after what manner this significant motion of the Head is
done, having got a fresh humane carkasse, the other parts besides the ligaments of the
vertebres being taken away,’ he should manoeuvre the head forwards and backwards
and watch the muscles move. These muscles which pull the head this way and that
are, he says, ‘represented in the raines of a Horse.’ As if to make the point more fully,
Bulwer advises his reader:
nothing can better shew you how to conceive of the office and function of
these Muscles, than if you should put a garter athwart about the hinder part of
the Head, bringing it from above the ears on each side-down to the breast, for
if you afterwards draw both the ends of the garter together, the Head wil give
a just Nod of assent: but if you pull the ends by turns one after another, you
22
will cause Collaterall Nods, such as wee use when the partyes to whom we
make the signe are on the one side of us.68
The human carcass is bridled and thus made horse. This is philosophically correct: a
human carcass is devoid of a soul as its immortal essence has flown and it thus lacks
the reason that marks it as human. This means that, like those animals referred to as a
herd, rout, or rabble, a human carcass has no agency, will, or reason. Its actions are
dictated by an external power: an anatomist playing at being a rider rather than a
herdsman, this time. But Bulwer does something else here as well. The head, he
writes, gives a ‘just Nod’. It appears at first glance that even this de-souled body is
capable of a reasoned reply. But this is soon corrected: the existence of ‘Collaterall
Nods’ reminds us that ‘just’ here means simple rather than morally correct. In this
discourse a human carcass, like an animal head, and an animal-headed human, can
never give a nod that is just because what can actually be seen when the muscles
move, when reins are put on, is simply animal agitation.69
But perhaps the fact that the human bridle Bulwer advocates here is working in
reverse leaving the ‘rider’ pulling from the front rather than behind is what allows for
the glimpse of a possibility that a carcass is capable of moral judgment. Where riders
can see and read only the body of the horses they are riding, sitting as they are on the
animal’s back, this harnessed human-horse is always facing the anatomist who is
holding the garter. Perhaps the equine imagery and the link between horse riding and
human control that recurs in this early modern Aristotelian discourse that I have been
tracing has another meaning, and a much more literal one than I have yet considered.
Perhaps we should read this discourse as always having been written from on top of
23
the animal, and wonder what might have been written if another position had been
taken: by an animal’s side, for example, or standing face-to-face with one. The former
is a position neither Milton nor Bulwer consider, the latter an impossible one as for
them a face is only ever human.
1
Aristotle, Aristotles Politiques, or Discovrses of Government (London: Adam Islip, 1598), p.13.
Aristotle, Politics, translated by Benjamin Jowett (Chicago: Encylcopaedia Britannica, 1952), II,
p.446, 1253a9.
3
Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),’ in Marie-Louise Mallet ed.,
The Animal That Therefore I Am, translated by David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press,
2008), p.11.
4
Aristotle, Aristotles Politiques, p.13.
5
For a more detailed account of these ideas in this period see Katherine Park, ‘The Organic Soul,’
(pp.464-484) and Eckhardt Kessler, ‘The Intellective Soul,’ (pp.485-534) in Charles B. Schmitt and
Quentin Skinner eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
6
Francis Bacon, ‘Of Friendship’ (1625), in Essays, Michael J. Hawkins ed. (London: Everyman,
1973), p.80. On the impossibility of human/animal friendship in early modern ideas see Erica Fudge,
‘“The Dog is Himself”: Humans, Animals, and Self-Control in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ in
Laurie Maguire ed., How To Do Things With Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp.185-209.
7
Sir Miles Sandys, Prudence, The first of the Foure Cardinall Virtues (London: W. Sheares, 1634),
pp.42-3.
8
John Bulwer, A View of the People of the Whole World: Or, A short survey of their Policies,
Dispositions, Naturall Deportments, Complexions, Ancient and Moderne Customes, Manners, Habits,
and Fashions (a.k.a. Anthropometamorphosis) (London: Thomas Gibbs, 1658), ‘A Hint of the Use of
this TREATISE,’ n.p.
9
See, Erica Fudge, ‘The Animal Face of Early Modern England: A Preliminary Portrait,’ Sociologia
Ruralis, forthcoming.
10
Martha L. Edwards, ‘Deaf and Dumb in Ancient Greece,’ in Lennard J. Davis ed., The Disability
Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p.35.
11
John Bulwer, Philocophus: Or, The Deafe and Dumbe Mans Friend (London: Humphrey Moseley,
1648), pp.102 and 103-4. In this period, as earlier, deafness and dumbness were perceived to be
absolutely linked. René Descartes assumed this in Discourse on the Method when he wrote of ‘men
born deaf and dumb’ who invented their own sign language. Descartes, Discourse on the Method
(1637) in John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch eds., The Philosophical Writings of
René Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Volume I, p.140. The founder of
precedent law in England, Edward Coke, links the status of a person non compos mentis with a person
incapable of language. Coke, ‘Beverley’s Case,’ The Reports of Sir Edward Coke (London: W. Lee,
1658), Part IV, pp.334-9. Emily Cockayne records the first deaf person drawing up their will as
Framlingham Gaudy in Norfolk in 1672. Cockayne, ‘Experiences of the Deaf in Early Modern
England,’ The Historical Journal 46:3 (2003), p.507.
12
Bulwer, Philocophus, sig.A4v.
13
Bulwer, Philocophus, sig.A3v. Other early modern thinkers interested in this are discussed in Dilwyn
Knox, ‘Ideas on Gesture and Universal Languages c.1550-1650,’ in John Henry and Sarah Hutton eds.,
New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays on the History of Science, Education and
Philosophy in Memory of Charles Singer (London: Duckworth, 1990), pp.101-136.
14
John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natvrall Language of the Hand (1644), James W. Cleary ed.
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974), p.6.
15
Bulwer, Chirologia, pp.5-6. The punning use of ‘handle’ is an echo of Titus’ pun ‘handle not the
theme, to talk of hands’ in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (c.1592). On the meaning of hands in early
modern culture and a discussion of Titus Andronicus see Michael Neill, ‘“Amphitheaters in the Body”:
Playing with Hands on the Shakespearian Stage,’ Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995), pp.23-50.
2
24
16
In this way he is going beyond classical writers for whom, as Gregory S. Aldrete has argued,
‘Gestures were an indispensable part of oratory and served many purposes. Hand and body motions
could mirror the verbal component of an oration, impart emotional shadings to the words, serve as an
alternative language for communication, and enhance the innate rhythmic nature of many orations.
Gesture truly offered a way for Roman orators to achieve eloquence not only with their words but also
with their entire bodies.’ Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp.42-3.
17
Bulwer, Chirologia, p.91.
18
Bulwer, Chirologia, p.22.
19
Bulwer, Chirologia, p.88.
20
John Bulwer, Chironomia or The Art of Manual Rhetoric (1644), in Chirologia, p.155.
21
A discussion of hands and agency in early modern thought that reflects on these ideas is Katherine
Rowe, ‘“God’s handy worke”,’ in David Hillman and Carla Mazzio eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies
of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), pp.285-309.
22
Blair Hoxby, ‘The Wisdom of Their Feet: Meaningful Dance in Milton and the Stuart Masque,’
English Literary Renaissance 37:1 (2007), p.74.
23
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker
eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p.6.
24
Jennifer Nevile, ‘The early dance manuals and the structure of ballet: a basis for Italian, French and
English ballet,’ in Marion Kant ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dance (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), p.13.
25
Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), p.2.
26
In the philosophy of the fifteenth-century Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino dancing also had a role to
play in constructing order. Thomas M. Greene writes: ‘Ficino’s magic was based on the doctrine that
certain figures (figurae) enjoyed a sympathy with a given heavenly body, and could be used to attract
its influence down to this world.’ These figurae included dance, music and facial expression. Ficino’s
ideas were present, Greene argues, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English court dances. Greene,
‘Labyrinth Dances in the French and English Renaissance,’ Renaissance Quarterly 54:4 (2001),
p.1445.
27
James Knowles, ‘“Can ye not tell a man from a marmoset?”: Apes and Others on the Early Modern
Stage,’ in Erica Fudge ed., Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p.146.
28
Ben Jonson, Oberon The Fairy Prince (1611), in Stephen Orgel ed., Ben Jonson: The Complete
Masques (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), s.d.1-2 and 27-8. Sir Miles Sandys
wrote of satyrs that they might have the ‘visage’ of men, but ‘they want a reasonable soule, which is
the sole difference betweene man and beast’. Sandys, Prudence, pp.42-3. Like the deaf as they are
designated in the law, these apparent humans are not human at all.
29
Jonson, Oberon, ll.73, 80-1, 83-4, and 86.
30
Jonson, Oberon, s.d.216-7; l.248. On the white bears and their history see Barbara Ravelhofer,
‘“Beasts of Recreation”: Henslowe’s White Bears,’ English Literary Renaissance 32:2 (2002), pp.287323.
31
Jonson, Oberon, s.d.30; ll.271-4.
32
A similar representation of James can be found in Jonson’s earlier Masque of Blacknesse (1605) in
which the Britannia is ‘Ruled by a sun that to this height doth grace it, / Whose beams shine day and
night, and are of force / To blanch an Ethiop, and revive a corse.’ In Orgel ed., Complete Masques,
ll.223-5.
33
See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965),
p.37.
34
Jonson, Oberon, s.d.206 and 336.
35
Bulwer, Chirologia, p.6.
36
The politics of these authors are also very different, and such differences might be traced in the texts
themselves. Milton, in Paradise Lost in particular, recognises that clarity – natural meaning – is gone
forever and that human language is inherently fallen. In A Masque, too, words and gestures lie: Comus’
disguise and false words signal this. Milton is also working within a political ideology in which fixed
hierarchy is not necessarily to be upheld: in which metamorphosis of the social order is a positive
possibility. Bulwer, on the other hand, distrusts slippery written and spoken language, and praises the
language of the body as a natural language that has, somehow or other, managed to ‘escape the curse at
the confusion of Babel’ (he does not explain how). See Bulwer, Chirologia, p.19. Indeed, Jeffrey
25
Wollock argues that Bulwer ‘no doubt believed that [the deaf’s] more natural way of seeing the world
made them inclined to support the King and the Laudian church, as opposed to what he considered the
artificial religious and political interpretations that the Puritans superimposed on reality.’ Wollock,
‘John Bulwer’s (1606-1656) Place in the History of the Deaf,’ Historiographia Linguistica 23:1/2
(1996), p.9.
37
Stephen Orgel, ‘The Case for Comus,’ Representations 81 (2003), p.32.
38
John Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634), in Tony Davies ed., John Milton:
Selected Shorter Poems and Prose (London: Routledge, 1988), 67.
39
Milton, A Masque, s.d.92 and 974-5.
40
Milton, A Masque, 68-72. Bruce Boehrer helpfully translates ‘express’ here as meaning a ‘pressed
out, externalized’ resemblance in an essay that emphasises the Plutarchan influence on Milton.
Boehrer, ‘Milton and the Reasoning of Animals: variations on a theme by Plutarch,’ Milton Studies
39:2 (2000), p.54.
41
Milton, A Masque, 526-30.
42
John Milton, Paradise Lost (1674 ed), Alastair Fowler ed. (London: Longman, 1968), IX, 900-1.
43
Milton, A Masque, 76-7.
44
Thomas Heywood, Philocothonista, or The Drvnkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized (London:
Robert Raworth, 1635), pp.4, 4-5 and 6. The ‘tedious verbositie’ of the calf-drunk marks their
expression as voice rather than speech. Drunkenness is legally understood in this period to give the
drunk a temporary status as non compos mentis. See Coke, ‘Beverley’s Case,’ p.335-6.
45
See Adam Smyth, ‘“It Were Far Better be a Toad, or a Serpent, then a Drunkard”: Writing about
Drunkenness,’ in Smyth ed., A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), p.199.
46
Further discussion of human drunkenness and other dangers to species status are in Erica Fudge,
Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2006).
47
Milton, A Masque, 152.
48
Milton, A Masque, 65.
49
Milton, A Masque, 73-5. What Comus’ herd experience is hardly happiness at all. ‘Doth the tickling
of the body cause a happy life?’ Seneca asked in Epistle XCII. The answer is clear: ‘Let that creature
which is borne to eate, onely depart from that most beautifull number of liuing creatures, and next vnto
the gods, and let him be numbred with brute beasts.’ Bodily pleasure is the pleasure of an animal.
Seneca, The Workes of Lvcivs Annævs Seneca, Both Morall and Naturall Translated by Tho. Lodge
(London: William Stansby, 1614), p.385.
50
Ben Jonson, Love’s Triumph through Callipolis (1631), in Orgel ed., Complete Masques, 89-90.
Knowles has also noted the link between Milton’s masque and Aurelian Townshend’s earlier Tempe
Restored (1632) in which there are also animal-headed men. He argues that the less-than-humans of
Tempe Restored ‘must choose their direction of translation’, whereas in Milton’s masque, the ‘beastmasquers’ are ‘animals without reason and unable to recognize their own bestiality, perhaps itself part
of a critique of the courtly beast-masquers who falsely consider themselves rational animals.’ Knowles,
‘“Can ye not tell…”’, p.153
51
Milton, A Masque, 463-9.
52
Bulwer, Chirologia, p.85.
53
Milton, A Masque, s.d.92 and 102-3.
54
Ben Jonson, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), in Orgel ed., Complete Masques, 239. The text
continues: ‘For dancing is an exercise / Not only shows the mover's wit, / But maketh the beholder
wise, / As he hath power to rise to it.’ (240-243), and s.d.5. On Jonson’s influence on Milton see Orgel,
Jonsonian Masque, p.151.
55
John Holles, ‘Instructions for travel that my father gave me the 22 July 1614,’ cited by Barbara
Ravelhofer, ‘“Virgin Wax” and “hairy men-monsters”: Unstable Movement Codes in the Stuart
Masque,’ in David Bevington and Peter Holbrook ed., The Politics of the Stuart Masque (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.255.
56
The other skill listed with dancing and riding that a gentleman was expected to learn was fencing,
which, again, involves bodily control. See Holles, ‘Instructions,’ p.255; Hoxby, ‘Wisdom,’ p.76.
57
Another kind of control of nature – gardening – was also an exercise in dominion and has been
linked by Nevile to dancing. See Jennifer Nevile, ‘Dance and the Garden: Moving and Static
Choreography in Renaissance Europe,’ Renaissance Quarterly 52:3 (1999), pp.805-36. On gardens and
human control see Andrew Cunningham, ‘The Culture of Gardens,’ in N. Jardine, J.A. Secord and E.C.
Spary eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.41-7.
26
58
John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia Or a Dissection of the significative Muscles of the Affections of the
Minde (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1649), sig.A2v. On this work see Thomas R. Geen and Louis G.
Tassinary, ‘The Mechanization of Emotional Expression in John Bulwer’s Pathomyotomia (1649),’
The American Journal of Psychology 115:2 (2002), pp.275-99.
59
Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, p.190.
60
Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, p.190.
61
Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, pp.104-5.
62
Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, p.12.
63
Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (1605), Arthur Johnston ed. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1974), p.103. This phrase is quoted directly by Bulwer, Chirologia, p.5.
64
Thomas Hill, A Pleasant History: Declaring the whole Art of Phisiognomy, Orderly vttering all the
speciall parts of Man, from the Head to the Foot (London: W. Iaggard, 1613), sig.A3r.
65
Hill, Pleasant History, sigs.A3v and 31v.
66
Bulwer’s unwillingness to allow humans to display anything but voluntary expression is a
problematic one, and at one point he makes the link between facial expression and an unwanted
erection. Bulwer asserts that there are two kinds of reason – ‘vigilantium’ and ‘dormientium’, ‘So that
in every motion the will cōmandeth either manifestly or obscurely.’ Pathomyotomia, pp.110 and 30. On
the link between erection and expression see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Mutilation and Meaning,’ in Hillman
and Mazzio eds., Body in Parts, p.234-5. Loss of control over the body as evidenced in sexuality – this
time wet dreams - in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle is the subject of Deborah Shuger’s ‘“Gums
of Glutinous Heat” and the Stream of Consciousness: The Theology of Milton’s Masque,’
Representations 60 (1997), pp.1-21.
67
Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, p.14.
68
Bulwer, Pathomyotomia, pp.49 and 50.
69
The terminology used in early modern texts itself is interesting, as Brian Cummings notes, with ‘the
word “animal” itself in early modern discussion divid[ing] in connotation: the animal on the one hand
is a creature inhabited by anima, by a “soul” or living principle; on the other, the animal is a physical
compound of organic, corruptible and mortal flesh.’ Cummings, ‘Animal Passions and Human
Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World,’ in Erica
Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and Susan Wiseman ed., At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural
Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p.33.
27