Andreas Höfele: Stage, Stake, and Scaffold. Humans and Animals in Shakespeare’s Theatre

Andreas Höfele takes as his starting point the oft-discussed, but never fully explored, notion that the similarities in site and spectacle of the early modern theatre and the bear garden inspired dramatists to ‘think with’ animals. Höfele adds a third site to the comparison – the places of juridical punishment where criminals and martyrs were flogged and executed. Borrowing Yuri Lotman’s idea of a ‘semiosphere’, he argues that this ‘family resemblance’ encouraged a three-way traffic of each site’s affective energies and capacity for signification, which he characterises as a form of ‘intermediality’. His point is that the authors and spectators of early modern drama had a cultural imagination which inevitably incorporated animal baiting and public punishment and that these influences suffuse the drama with their meanings (and vice versa). This intermedial relationship promoted the use of analogical thinking with humans and animals and the book’s self-confessed aim is to offer an “approach to Shakespearean anthropology which takes full account of its reliance on the presence of animals” (p. 15).