Abstract
Shakespeare alludes to apes, baboons and monkeys in 24, or roughly two-thirds, of his plays. This essay joins together two of the most striking images, from Hamlet and Timon of Athens, respectively, to create a diptych illustrating the variability and adaptability of what I am calling Shakespearean primatology. Shakespeare anticipates the discoveries of twenty-first-century primatologists by demonstrating that neither morality, including acts of interspecies altruism, nor nepotism, including the global in-group bias known as speciesism, originated with humanity.
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Notes
Citations of Hamlet are from the Thompson and Taylor (2006) edition, by act, scene and line number.
Citations of Timons of Athens are from the Dawson and Minton (2008) edition, by act, scene and line numbers.
The women in the play, a group of Amazons and two prostitutes, speak a total of three lines.
These images, as well as related phenomena, including but not limited to the so-called ‘infinite monkey theorem,’ will be taken up in more detail in my monograph on Shakespeare and Primatology. To date, Shakespeare's Caliban, the ‘salvage and deformed slave’ in The Tempest, has attracted the most, if not the only, attention from primatologists. Indeed, just two years after the publication of Darwin's Descent of Man, Daniel Wilson argued, in Caliban: The Missing Link, that Shakespeare
had already created for us the ideal of that imaginary intermediate being, between the brute and the man, which, if the new theory of descent from crudest animal organisms be true was our predecessor and precursor in the inheritance of this world of humanity. (Wilson, 1873, xi–xii)
More recently, Dale Peterson and Jane Goodall have coauthored Visions of Caliban: On Chimpanzees and People, in which Peterson postulates a connection between the ‘earliest detailed description of gorillas and chimpanzees’ in England, in 1607, and the genesis of Shakespeare's character (Peterson and Goodall, 2000, 15). Likewise, Denise Albanese, comparing Caliban's language lessons at the feet of Miranda to Goodall's own fieldwork, suggests that Caliban's ‘productive ambiguity’ between man and ape puts the attentive reader on a path, ‘however distantly, to primatology’ (Albanese, 1996, 63).
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Maisano, S. Shakespearean primatology: A diptych. Postmedieval 1, 115–123 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2009.3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2009.3