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The Human Face of Early Modern England
Erica Fudgea
a
School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XH, UK
Online publication date: 03 May 2011
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
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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 16 number 1 march 2011
n 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
recognizable 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 meaningmaking 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):
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I
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,
erica fudge
THE HUMAN FACE OF
EARLY MODERN
ENGLAND
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 that
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
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/010097^14 ß 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.564366
97
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early modern england
vegetative, a sensitive and a rational soul that 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.
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 of 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 will be explored elsewhere. 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 present
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-inhand with an inability to reason.’’9 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 because without expression: they cannot
be witnesses, cannot draw up wills.10 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.11 Thus Bulwer argues that communication
might be possible in ways other than speech: that
meaning might come from movement, not just in
98
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fudge
the interpretation of lip motion but in the form
of gesture which is, he states, the ‘‘universall
language of Humane nature.’’12
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 make-up) 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’’ respectively13). 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.’’14
Thus, in arguing for a universal language and
in tracing classical precedent, Bulwer establishes
what he regards as a trans-cultural and transhistorical human nature, and a new way of
marking out what makes the human a human.15
Of the handshake, for example, he writes:
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.16
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 too ‘‘when the hand hath been
99
lost,’’ and likewise we are asked to recognize that
it is not an animal’s different anatomy that
excludes it from the realm of hospitality.17
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.’’18 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.’’19
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.20 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.21 In them, actual spoken
dialogue played a minor role, something that
apparently undermines the prioritizing 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
early modern england
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before the people remained in the woods and
mountains, vagarant and dispersed like the wild
beasts.’’22 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
emphasized in the court masque. Dance itself
was recognized in early modern theorization as
conveying meaning. Jennifer Nevile writes:
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.23
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.’’24 Courtly dancing revealed
a rational mind in that it reflected grace and an
ability to act in accordance with socially agreed
rules – that is, 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.25
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, animalheaded 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 barbarian,
satirical, and bestial.’’26 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.’’27 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.’’28 It is the
animal aspect of the satyrs – what reveals them as
less-than-human – that will, they hope, be
overlaid by a civility which is symbolized 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.29 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.30
Where Oberon has the power to superficially gild
the satyrs’ lack of humanity, James can truly
transform the world.31
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 are played by
members of the court. The acknowledgement
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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’s staging was from the throne
and thus, literally and figuratively, in the masque
it is the sovereign alone who has the true
perspective.32 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.33 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’’).34 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 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.35
101
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.’’36 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.37
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 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’s ‘‘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.38
The masque is not a salute to power as always
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early modern england
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 Comus’s 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.39
Later the Attendant Spirit says that Comus’s
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.40
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?’’41 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 in to temptation
is made more like the beasts than the angels by
Comus’s drink, something signified in the
gaining of the animal head.
The loss of face and reason has two related
outcomes. First, we are told that the drinkers,
‘‘all their friends, and native home forget / To roll
with pleasure in a sensual sty.’’42 Their Circean
animalization 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.
In this text, Heywood categorizes 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:
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 Tipplinghouses, 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.43
An earlier version of this listing of animalized
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.44 The metamorphosis
of Comus’s 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
102
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Fig.1. Frontispiece fromThomas Heywood, Philocothonista, orThe Drvnkard,Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized (London:
Robert Raworth,1635) ß The British Library Board. (Shelfmark C30d11). Reproduced with permission.
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.45
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.’’46 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
103
by an outside force. A member of the herd
in A Masque is tricked into joining and held in
place by Comus’s magic potion. They therefore
have no agency and they cannot alter the nature
of that 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.47 For
the unknowing drinker, however, it is a truly
poisoned chalice with only one possible outcome.
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early modern england
Comus’s 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.’’48 They have lost the ability to tell
whether or not they are human. 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.’’49
The animalization, 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.50
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.51 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 literalization 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’s 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.’’52 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 that includes the
character ‘‘Comus, the god of cheer, or the belly’’
and is believed to have influenced Milton.53 The
chaotic motions of the later Comus’s 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 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
storytelling 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’s 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.’’54 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.55 An orderly dancer, like a good horseman,
revealed himself to be a controlled and
104
fudge
controlling human.56 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.
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just nodding
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 prelapsarian 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.57
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.’’58 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.’’59 This lack of expressive countenance is superficially due to the physical fact of
105
an animal’s musculature: it is this, he states, that
prevents them from laughing.60 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 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.’’61 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.’’62 In A Pleasant
History: Declaring the whole Art of
Phisiognomy (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.’’63 The grace that is lacking
that he refers to is God’s grace – the grace of the
early modern england
soul – but it is equally a grace manifest in the
body. Instead of dancing, these unregenerated
brutes simply move and follow their senses.
Hill goes on:
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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.’’64 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.65 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, 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.66
Thus facial expression and its readable language
are, like riding, an externalization 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’s 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 will cause
Collaterall Nods, such as wee use when the
partyes to whom we make the signe are on
the one side of us.67
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
106
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fudge
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.68
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
judgement. 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 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.
notes
1 Aristotle, Aristotles Politiques, or Discovrses of
Government (London: Adam Islip,1598) 13.
2 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett
(Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) II: 446,
1253a9.
3 Jacques Derrida, ‘‘The Animal That Therefore
I Am (More to Follow)’’ in The Animal That
Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans.
David Wills (New York: Fordham UP, 2008) 11.
4 Aristotle, Aristotles Politiques 13.
5 For a more detailed account of these ideas in
this period see Katherine Park, ‘‘The Organic
Soul’’ 464 ^ 84 and Eckhardt Kessler, ‘‘The
Intellective Soul’’ 485^534 in The Cambridge
History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles
B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP,1988).
107
6 Francis Bacon, ‘‘Of Friendship’’ [1625] in Essays,
ed. Michael J. Hawkins (London: Everyman, 1973)
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
How To Do Things With Shakespeare, ed. Laurie
Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 185^209.
7 Sir Miles Sandys, Prudence, The first of the
Foure Cardinall Virtues (London: W. Sheares, 1634)
42^ 43.
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
[aka Anthropometamorphosis] (London: Thomas
Gibbs, 1658),‘‘A Hint of the Use of this TREATISE’’
n. pag.
9 Martha L. Edwards,‘‘Deaf and Dumb in Ancient
Greece’’ inThe Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard
J. Davis (London and New York: Routledge
1997) 35.
10 John Bulwer, Philocophus: Or, The Deafe and
Dumbe Mans Friend (London: Humphrey Moseley,
1648) 102, 103^ 04. In this period, as earlier, deafness and dumbness were perceived to be absolutely linked. Rene¤ 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 The Philosophical Writings of Rene¤ Descartes, eds.
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald
Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) I: 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’’ in The Reports of Sir Edward Coke
(London: W. Lee, 1658) Part IV: 334 ^39. 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) 507.
11 Bulwer, Philocophus sig. A4v.
12 Ibid. sig. A3v. Other early modern thinkers
interested in this are discussed in Dilwyn Knox,
‘‘Ideas on Gesture and Universal Languages
c.1550 ^1650’’ in New Perspectives on Renaissance
Thought: Essays on the History of Science, Education
and Philosophy in Memory of Charles Singer,
early modern england
eds. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London:
Duckworth,1990) 101^36.
13 John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natvrall Language
of the Hand [1644], ed. James W. Cleary
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,1974) 6.
14 Ibid. 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): 23^50.
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15 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
UP,1999) 42^ 43)
16 Bulwer,Chirologia 91.
17 Ibid. 22.
18 Ibid. 88.
19 John Bulwer, Chironomia or The Art of Manual
Rhetoric [1644] in Chirologia 155.
20 A discussion of hands and agency in early
modern thought that reflects on these ideas is
Katherine Rowe, ‘‘‘God’s handy worke’’’ in The
Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early
Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman and Carla
Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997)
285^309.
21 Blair Hoxby, ‘‘The Wisdom of their
Feet: Meaningful Dance in Milton and the
Stuart Masque,’’ English Literary Renaissance 37.1
(2007) 74.
22 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie
[1589], eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice
Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1936) 6.
23 Jennifer Nevile,‘‘The Early Dance Manuals and
the Structure of Ballet: A Basis for Italian, French
and English Ballet’’ in The Cambridge Companion to
Dance, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2007) 13.
24 Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance
and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP,
2004) 2.
25 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) 1445.
26 James Knowles, ‘‘‘Can ye not tell a man from
a marmoset?’: Apes and Others on the Early
Modern Stage’’ in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals,
Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica
Fudge (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P,
2004) 146.
27 Ben Jonson, OberonThe Fairy Prince [1611] in Ben
Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel
(New Haven and London:Yale UP,1969) s.d. (stage
direction) 1^2, 27^28. 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 42^ 43. Like the deaf as they are designated in the law, these apparent humans are not
human at all.
28 Jonson, Oberon lines 73, 80 ^ 81, 83^ 84, 86.
29 Ibid. s.d. 216 ^17; line 248. On the white bears
and their history see Barbara Ravelhofer,‘‘‘Beasts
of Recreation’: Henslowe’s White Bears,’’ English
Literary Renaissance 32.2 (2002): 287^323.
30 Ibid. s.d. 30; lines 271^74.
31 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
108
fudge
Ethiop, and revive a corse’’ (Complete Masques lines
223^25).
32 See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,1965) 37.
33 Jonson, Oberon s.d. 206, 336.
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34 Bulwer,Chirologia 6.
35 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, recognizes that clarity ^ natural
meaning ^ is gone forever and that human language is inherently fallen. In A Masque, too, words
and gestures lie: Comus’s 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 19. Indeed, Jeffrey 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) 9).
36 Stephen Orgel, ‘‘The Case for Comus,’’
Representations 81 (2003) 32.
37 John Milton, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle
[1634] in John Milton: Selected Shorter Poems
and Prose, ed. Tony Davies (London: Routledge,
1988) 67.
38 Ibid. s.d. 92, 974 ^75.
39 Ibid. 68 ^72. Bruce Boehrer helpfully translates
‘‘express’’ here as meaning a‘‘pressed out, externalized’’ resemblance in an essay that emphasizes
the Plutarchan influence on Milton. Boehrer,
‘‘Milton and the Reasoning of Animals: Variations
on a Theme by Plutarch,’’ Milton Studies 39.2
(2000) 54.
40 Milton, A Masque 526 ^30.
109
41 John Milton, Paradise Lost [1674 ed.], ed. Alastair
Fowler (London: Longman, 1968) Book IX: lines
900 ^ 01.
42 Milton, A Masque 76 ^77.
43 Thomas Heywood, Philocothonista, or The
Drvnkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized
(London: Robert Raworth, 1635) 4, 4 ^5, 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’’
335^36.
44 See Adam Smyth, ‘‘‘It Were Far Better be a
Toad, or a Serpent, then a Drunkard’: Writing
about Drunkenness’’ in A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and
Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England, ed.
Adam Smyth (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004) 199.
45 Further discussion of human drunkenness and
other dangers to species status are in Erica Fudge,
Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationalityand Humanityin
Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
2006).
46 Milton, A Masque 152.
47 Ibid. 65.
48 Ibid. 73^75.What Comus’s herd experiences 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 Annvs
Seneca, Both Morall and Naturall, trans. Tho. Lodge
(London: William Stansby,1614) 385.
49 Ben Jonson, Love’s Triumph through Callipolis
[1631] in Complete Masques 89^90. Knowles has
also noted the link between Milton’s masque and
AurelianTownshend’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 . . .’’’ 153.
early modern england
50 Milton, A Masque 463^ 69.
51 Bulwer,Chirologia 85.
52 Milton, A Masque s.d. 92,102^ 03.
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53 Ben Jonson, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue [1618]
in 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 ^ 43), and s.d. 5.
On Jonson’s influence on Milton see Orgel,
Jonsonian Masque 151.
54 John Holles, ‘‘Instructions for travel that my
father gave me the 22 July 1614,’’ cited by Barbara
Ravelhofer, ‘‘‘Virgin Wax’ and ‘Hairy MenMonsters’: Unstable Movement Codes in the
Stuart Masque’ in The Politics of the Stuart Masque,
ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1998) 255.
55 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’’ 255; Hoxby,‘‘Wisdom’’ 76.
56 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): 805^36. On gardens and human control see Andrew
Cunningham, ‘‘The Culture of Gardens’’ in
Cultures of Natural History, eds. N. Jardine,
J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP,1996) 41^ 47.
57 John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia Ora Dissection ofthe
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),’’
American Journal of Psychology 115.2 (2002): 275^99.
63 Thomas Hill, A Pleasant History: Declaring the
whole Art of Phisiognomy,Orderly vtteringallthe speciall
parts of Man, from the Head to the Foot (London: W.
Iaggard,1613) sig. A3r.
64 Ibid. sigs. A3v, 31v.
65 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 comandeth either manifestly
or obscurely’’ (Pathomyotomia 110, 30). On the link
between erection and expression see Stephen
Greenblatt, ‘‘Mutilation and Meaning,’’ in Body
in Parts 234 ^35. 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):1^21.
66 Bulwer, Pathomyotomia 14.
67 Ibid. 49, 50.
68 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 At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies
and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern
Period, eds. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and
Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1999) 33)
58 Bulwer, Pathomyotomia 190.
59 Ibid.
60 Ibid.104 ^ 05.
61 Ibid.12.
62 Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning
[1605], ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1974) 103. This phrase is quoted directly by
Bulwer,Chirologia 5.
Erica Fudge
School of Humanities
University of Strathclyde
7.28 Livingstone Tower
26 Richmond Street
Glasgow G1 1XH
UK
E-mail: erica.fudge@strath.ac.uk