Shakespeare's Political Zoology: Creature Life and the Rise of Constituent Power

The collision of human life, creature life, and popular sovereignty in Shakespeare's work is what I call Political Zoology in this dissertation. During the English Renaissance there was some overlap between political discourse and the studies of creatures, serpents, birds, and insects. Some of the political ideologies that were reflected in Renaissance bestiaries expressed views that gave common "lesser" creatures unique sovereignty over the most powerful creatures, like lions and men, which mirrored some of the language present in Protestant resistant texts. The first chapter of this dissertation lays the historical and theoretical groundwork for a politics of constituent power through the writings of Protestant Reformers, Thomist Counter Reformists, and contemporary political philosophers. The second chapter puts these political ideas in conversation with creature discourse in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The ass-headed Nick Bottom is the rude mechanical and common hybrid beast that flips the body politic on its head (or rather its ass), and makes creaturely commonness an unexpected sovereign force in the play. The third chapter examines the discourse of creature rights in As You Like It, which serves as a critique of the monarchy's claim to sovereign ownership over certain natural territories, and it also complicates the interpretation of Genesis that gives men absolute dominion over creatures. My fourth chapter examines the power of sovereign speech in Hamlet. The "dying voice," or the right of the king to appoint his successor is left in the hands of Horatio, effectively giving the most significant sovereign right to someone who is not part of the royal family. This dissertation concludes with an epilogue on Renaissance accounts of the electoral sovereignty of a special class lesser creatures: bees. By proposing a notion of political zoology that coheres through Renaissance political texts, early zoological investigations, a trifecta of Shakespeare's plays, contemporary theories of biopolitics, and recent ecocriticism, I aim to contribute to the current discussion on animal studies and politics in Shakespeare.