Shakespeare Among the Animals examines the role of animal-metaphor in
the Shakespeare stage, particularly as such metaphor serves to
underwrite various forms of social difference. Working through texts
such as Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's Volpone, and
Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, different chapters of the study
focus upon the allegedly natural character of femininity, masculinity,
and ethnicity, while a fourth chapter considers the nature of the
natural world itself as it appears on the Renaissance stage. Addressing
each of these topics in turn, Shakespeare Among the Animals explores the
notions of cultural order that underlie early modern conceptions of the
natural world, and the ideas of nature implicit in early modern social
practice.