THE MORAL ANIMAL: DEFINING HUMAN NATURE IN THREE RENAISSANCE PLAYS (JONSON; 'VOLPONE'; SHAKESPEARE; 'KING LEAR'; WEBSTER; 'THE DUCHESS OF MALFI')

摘要

This study of three English Renaissance plays demonstrates how essential animal references are to their vision: Volpone is an animal fable about the notorious fox; King Lear is the Shakespearean tragedy with the most numerous and insistent animal images; and The Duchess of Malfi is a Jacobean tale of horror about a werewolf. In each play the animal presence alerts us to an inevitable central opposition between irreconcilable forces within human nature. The animal kingdom has played an important role in self-definition throughout human culture beginning with the animals in the earliest examples of storytelling and art. Psychology confirms the importance of animals as sexual symbols; anthropology interprets animals as a key to understanding culture. In the Renaissance, two important works concerning animals, the fables and the bestiary, undertook the more specific task of moralizing. Animals were regarded as a living text from which to learn. Volpone, through his ties to the fable fox, the bestiary fox, and Reynard, is both heroic villain and immoral moralizer, who presents the essential conflict between the desires for virtue and for vice and evil's fundamental role in bringing about good. The diverse animal images in King Lear present attempts by the characters to explain themselves and their place in the world: by definitions, in anthropologically interpretable events, in legend, myth, folklore, exemplum, in daily life. Two images in particular, the pelican and the centaur, expose the human dualities and unveil how good and evil can exist together in every human being. The wolf in The Duchess of Malfi takes us deep into the territory of the unconscious, exposing appetite as one of the most powerful psychological forces controlling human behavior and revealing violence as a distortion of this basic human drive. In these Renaissance plays, enriched by symbolic meanings that have surrounded animals from the beginning of human culture, animals invariably further exploration of human nature and raise questions of moral significance.