Human relations with fishes globally are arguably one of the central sites of conflict and tension occurring at planetary scale. In describing our current geological epoch with the term ‘Anthropocene’, Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer point to a number of human–animal relationships that mark out the proposed geological epoch: the growth in global cattle populations and species extinction are listed. Notably, wild capture fisheries – or ‘mechanized human predation’ as they are described – are also singled out for attention. Fisheries are today an important component of the global economy, with seafood products one of the world's most traded food commodities. Today, fisheries have been positioned as a central pillar of human food supplies; it is estimated that annually up to 2.3 trillion fishes are captured from the oceans. Leaving aside the impact upon the trillions of animals who are the target of this industry, the environmental impact of the growth of industrialised fisheries is deeply concerning. In 1990, around 10% of global fish populations (or ‘fish stocks’) were extracted from the seas at unsustainable levels; by 2019, this figure rose to 35.4 percent. From this perspective, the last 50 years of industrial fisheries might be understood as a slow process of emptying the oceans of sea life; for example, Daniel Pauly claims that over the last half century populations of large fish such as bluefin tuna and Atlantic cod have been reduced by 90%. These extraordinary statistics are more depressing when wastage data is taken into account; for example catch reconstructions suggest that unreported ‘discards’ from industrial fisheries – that is, nonmarketable fish species who are killed and thrown back into the oceans – account for a significant proportion of annual wild fish capture, more than total global subsistence fishing.

In the civic pageant Himatia-Poleos: The triumphs of olde draperie, or the rich cloathing of England, commissioned by the Draper's Company for the installation of the draper Sir Thomas Hayes as new Lord Mayor of London in 1614, Anthony Munday (1553– 1633) made a vigorous, albeit ineffectual, attempt to defend clothes made from plain, English broadcloth against imported dyed and finished fabrics. Since the climate was so conducive to sheep rearing, English ‘cloth’ invariably meant wool: ‘England's Draperie, More worth then gaudie brauerie’ (Munday 1614, 13). Traditionally, English cloth took the form of undressed and unfinished broadcloth, also known as ‘white cloth’, in contrast to the finished, dyed and often more ostentatiously colourful attire or ‘gaudie braverie’ of imported cloth. Thus, the adjective ‘gaudy’ was deeply embedded in the economic and environmental crises of the English cloth trade.

White and English

Munday's glance at the latest trends in both cloth manufacture and dress entails two key elements that characterised the discussion of time-honoured woollen cloth versus the newer fabrics, which, importantly, were not invariably of foreign manufacture. First, the former was held to be simply of higher quality than its novel counterpart, which was by implication much inferior, and by designation foreign regardless of its actual origin. Second, Munday's claim is that the unornamented condition of broadcloth was both essentially English and morally superior. These are tropes that apply to an increasingly prominent idea of an ‘English race’, and they are markedly evident in the early Jacobean arguments about the textile trade and indeed often achieve their expression by means of it.

Today, the fashion industry makes up ten per cent of humanity's carbon emissions, dries up water sources, and pollutes rivers and streams. Back in Shakespeare's day, dyers and leather-workers, in particular, came into conflict over access to clean water (Hayward 2017, 35) and poured their polluting by-products into the air and into the Thames. These professions also contributed to the city's stench. Paul's Wharf (or Poles Wharf) was the place where the Dyers’ Company had been located from the sixteenth century on. The adjoining streets were all occupied by the dyeing business. As noted by Isabel Karremann, ‘[t]he craft of dyeing clothes was a notoriously insalubrious activity’, a fact corroborated by a report of the Dyers’ Company: ‘Urine might be used; woad can be extremely smelly; much water is used’ (Karremann 2023, 233). As to tanners, they usually soaked their hides in a mixture which could contain dog droppings or even ‘Pigeons Dung’ (House of Commons Journal, vol. 1, 11 November 1558) in order to soften them and prepare them for tanning. The hides were put in vats situated near the Thames, and which were full of oak bark and water, and the process lasted several months. Tanning was thus a filthy industry, which was all the more damaging to the city's urban environment as the number of tanneries had kept growing since the sixteenth century. At the end of the seventeenth century, ‘there were about eighty tanneries in Bermondsey and Southwark where the industry was concentrated’ (Clarkson 1960, 246). The proximity of these tanneries to the Globe in Elizabethan London already suggests that, when attending the performance of a play, the audience would also have gone through a powerful olfactive experience.

Introduction

In the last few decades political theology has become a vibrant field of studies with a widening scope of analysis. In the already classic work by Carl Schmitt, political theology is circumscribed to the relation between the divine and the human polity, in particular to the link between theology and the juridical foundations of the sovereign state. Such a link is made clear in the famous analogy between the miracle in theology and sovereign decision on the exception. It is hardly noticed, however, that Schmitt's political theology remains committed to a political community circumscribed to the human being alone, or the civitas humana, as he calls it.

Over the course of the sixteenth century the codification of national costume saw a major development linked to the growth of increased mobility and cosmopolitanism. Cesare Vecellio's well-known illustrated book De gli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (1590) was composed of 420 woodcut illustrations of clothes associating parts of the world with costumes and material signifiers. Its aim was to produce a global cartography of dress and customs. While Vecellio, a close relative of the painter Titian, provided a well-documented section on Venice, the representation of Venetian habits had already been addressed by English travellers of the mid- Tudor period. The link between dress and regional specificity was explored as early as Andrew Boorde's First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge in the 1540s or Welshman William Thomas's History of Italy (1549). Boorde's and Thomas's eyewitness reports of Venice provided the first published records in English of the early modern Republic at a time when the city was engaging in an impressive cultural policy through the printing of both maps and costume books. Not only did English travellers’ narratives explore the conventional topos of the city's ‘mervaillest site’, renowned for its outstanding architecture despite an inhospitable topography, they also examined the singular sartorial customs of its inhabitants. This chapter investigates the way Venetian clothes and customs are represented in early modern English texts, whether travelogues, plays or pamphlets, in relation to geographical and cultural ecosystems.

European voyages of exploration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were driven by imperial ambition, new technology and trade. Northern routes across the Atlantic Ocean attracted merchants and investors who hoped that they would provide an alternative to the ancient Silk Road linking China with the West. During his first stay in Virginia in 1585, mathematician and navigational expert Thomas Harriot immediately noted the presence of ‘grasse Silke […] [t]he like groweth in Persia’ and placed it first in the list of ‘Marchantable commodities’ which opens A briefe and true report (Harriot 1588, B1r). Grass silk promised ‘in shorte time great profite to the dealers therein; seeing there is so great use and vent thereof as well in our countrey as els where’, and Harriot imagined silk farming would allow Virginia to rival the Persians, the Turks, the Italians and the Spaniards (Harriot 1588, B1v). The Silk Road to Virginia did not materialise as Harriot had dreamed it would, as fish, wood, grain and tobacco rather than silk proved to be more profitable exports, but textiles and clothing still proved to be an essential part of the economy, politics and discourse of exploration. On a practical level, clothing was crucial to the success of voyages, and especially so in northern parts of the globe: garments had to be suited to the weather conditions expected in a particular region and, like food, supplies needed to be adequate and hardwearing to last for the whole length of the voyage.

In January 1614 (or 1615), the only masque written by William Browne was performed at the Inns of Court, where Browne was a student. The Inner Temple Masque was a private affair; not only does the dedication state that ‘it was done to please ourselves in private’ (Browne 1869, II, 241), but the masque was not published until 1772 and it probably did not involve the King and Queen, as they would have been mentioned otherwise. Despite this semi-confidentiality, it had some success since Hill in his introduction to the play identifies a note from the Inns’ records informing us that a chimney was broken by would-be spectators attempting to see the show (Browne 1980, 181). Moreover, the masque needed a considerable amount of performers: six main singers and speakers, sixteen antimasquers, several musicians and choristers, and an unknown number of masquers. If the masque was probably less elaborate than other court masques, as it was paid for by the gentlemen rather than the Inns (ibid., 181), it nonetheless called for a costly set and lavish costumes, and involved many people, on and off stage.

The plot is very straightforward. It is directly inspired by the Odyssey, even though Browne used later sources as well, in particular Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx's Ballet Comique de la Reine (1582). It focuses on Ulysses’ stay on Circe's island. Rather than using this episode as a moral allegory, it provides a playful entertainment in a pastoral island inhabited by nymphs and satyrs.

In 1662, Sir John Falstaff debuted as the first Shakespearean character to make a stage appearance beyond the scope of his original plays. The frontispiece of The Wits, or, Sport upon Sport, a collection of drolls published by the bibliophile Francis Kirkman, features Falstaff alongside Mistress Quickly on the front edge of a platform stage (Figure 11).

Throughout Shakespeare's Elizabethan plays, the comic pair share a history of tavern encounters that range from their teasing of each other in the Henry IV plays (c. 1597) to Mistress Quickly's leading part in the collaborative scheme to trick Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and her offstage nursing of the dying knight in Henry V (both c. 1599). However, their side-by-side portrayal in the The Wits illustration does not refer to their shared storyline in Shakespeare. Instead, it points to their reappearance in the collection's opening playlet, The Bouncing Knight, or the Robbers Rob’d, which was adapted from the Falstaff scenes in 1 Henry IV.

In their new roles as characters in the The Wits drollery, Falstaff and Mistress Quickly are the first stage figures to overstep the boundaries of the Shakespeare canon. Dissociating them from their author and the context of his plays, the title-page illustration cuts them out of their original environment and relocates them among other popular characters of an earlier playhouse culture (like Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's Changeling) that populate the same stage. They are assigned a prominent space on the platform, with their gestures directed only at each other; and yet, their existence seems to be understood as deeply rooted in a tradition of theatre-making that literally environs them, both on the stage, which they share with the other personae, and beyond it, with members of the audience surrounding the oblong and peering at them from all sides.

Water is always in flux. It is a resistant, resilient element, hardly open to straightforward decoding, and which can be neither easily controlled nor easily contained. It is no wonder if few critics have paid attention to its presence within the carefully planned motion of an early modern stage play. It is true that Elizabethan theatre mostly relied on the performative power of language and on the audience's imagination. ‘I am invisible’ (2.1.186), Oberon famously declares in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If a character only had to say that he was invisible to become so in the spectators’ minds, one may then presume that, similarly, a character simply had to declare that he was wet to be regarded as such. The assumption, however, is complicated by the fact that, in the texts of the period, some stage directions mention wetness, indicating that, occasionally, water was actually used on stage. Water could thus be seen, heard and felt by actors and spectators alike. Logically enough, the most likely characters to enter drenched onstage were mariners such as the ones imagined by Shakespeare in the opening act of The Tempest: ‘we can be sure’, Maurice Charney wryly remarks, ‘that those luckless mariners were doused with water just before they came on’ (Charney 1971, 16).

So, taking into account the ‘flexibility available on the open stage’ of the early modern public theatre (Dessen 1980, 11), I will argue in this chapter that wetness was a sensory and visual experience which was part and parcel of the theatrical process and which triggered both creative performances from the players and imaginative answers from the audience. It is a well-known fact that, in the public playhouses, the groundlings who stood in the pit were exposed to the elements.

Torturing Rabbits

In 2009, four young men bought two rabbits in a pet shop in a large Swedish city to torture them, videorecording the process. After taping the legs together, they set one of the rabbits on fire. The rabbit can be seen struggling to break loose for several minutes before dying. The other rabbit is thrown repeatedly into a wall. Laughter can be heard in the background of the video. A man tries to make a dog attack the rabbit, but the dog refuses. Finally, the rabbit is stamped to death. When this case went to trial around a year later, it was extensively covered by the Swedish news media because of the unusual cruelty of the acts. Animal rights activists who attended the trial protested loudly, shouting ‘scum’ at the men before they were led out of the courtroom. A regional animal protection case manager who had seen the video recording observed that the dog seemed to experience strong discomfort from the situation, and the men were conse¬quently also prosecuted for abusing the dog. The police described it as ‘one of the most horrendous animal abuse cases’ that they had ever encountered. Three of the men were sentenced to three, four and six months in jail, and the fourth and youngest one was fined.

Beginning an essay with a torture scene, like Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, highlights an ambivalence of violence – it is at once direct and absolute, but at the same time, there are different kinds of violence following different logics and rationales.

The literary life of Italo Calvino, one of the most beloved and celebrated Italian authors internationally, is populated by animals. There are spiders and crows in the restless atmosphere of war, dogs that accompany eccentric owners who never come down from the trees, flocks of starlings in the city sky, turtles mating in the garden, whistling blackbirds, geckos, chickens, rabbits, pets, pests and feral creatures.

These animals share a characteristic: even when they are ‘wild’ or ‘free’, they always carry traces of a ‘culture’ that is embodied in their nature as semiotic creatures. Moreover, they sometimes conceal a cipher of violence or otherness, which is often a biopolitical cipher. This happens, for example, in works like Marcovaldo (1963), in which animals live a parallel fate of marginalisation and oppression together with marginal humans – the novel's protagonist and his family, in fact. In some of these animals, the biopolitical cipher is coupled with dynamics in which bodily and existential oppression is corroborated by histor¬ical and colonial oppression. This is the case in the story ‘The Albino Gorilla’, included in Mr. Palomar (1983).

Set in a zoo, the story lays bare all the ontological and anthropological con¬tradictions implied by the presence of a rare specimen of primate that, from the other side of his cage, looks at us with a face in which we humans can mirror ourselves. Using biosemiotics, multispecies ethnography and postcolonial stud¬ies as theoretical coordinates, this chapter takes the cue from Calvino's story for a wider reflection on primates, both nonhuman and human.

Introduction

Early in his intellectual career and before becoming an established figure in his own right, Michel Foucault helped prepare a translation of Swiss psychia¬trist Ludwig Binswanger's Traum und Existenz with his colleague Jacqueline Verdeaux. Foucault had just recently come to Paris at this time to teach classes at the Ecole Normale at Louis Althusser's behest, and Verdeaux – a long¬time friend of the Foucault family – was tasked with looking out for Michel. Verdeaux, who had an independent and longstanding interest in psychiatry, began the translation of Binswanger's text on her own. As she pursued the project in more depth, though, Verdeaux realised that rendering its dense phil¬osophical vocabulary into French would require outside assistance. It was in view of such assistance that she turned to Foucault, as she knew he had a serious interest in the theoretical and philosophical figures with which Binswanger's text was in dialogue (thinkers ranging from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers). Foucault was delighted to help and worked regularly with Verdeaux on the translation (although Verdeaux is the only one officially credited as translator). Published in 1954, the translated volume was accompanied by notes and a lengthy Introduction written by Foucault.

While working on the translation, Verdeaux and Foucault took trips together and travelled to visit Binswanger during his vacation in the scenic southern Alps. Verdeaux and Foucault became close friends during these travels (Foucault would refer to Verdeaux as his ‘wife’ when queried); they studied artworks together and visited sites dotted with magnificent landscapes and scenery.

Dino Buzzati is hardly an author who comes to mind when considering the rela¬tion of the animal to biopolitics. More or less consigned to the ranks of minor literature and its authors, most see Buzzati as the palimpsest of another writer, whose works stand both as the highpoint of Middle European modernity and as one of twentieth century's most important writers, whose writings became a touchstone for philosophical thought. One need only think of Deleuze and Guattari's monograph on Kafka, for instance, or Jacques Derrida's musings on Kafka in ‘Before the Law’ in Acts of Literature to measure the distance between Kafka and the lesser Buzzati. Indeed, if Kafka's insights provide the thinker interested in biopolitics and animality with all the material needed to arrive at a critique of the law and the animal, why turn to a lesser version? The project of rehabilitating Buzzati in a context of animal studies and biopolitics might appear to be redundant at best and a waste of time at worst.

There are a number of reasons to take issue with this judgment. First, Buzzati was especially attuned to animal life, both in his writings and personal life. Indeed, animals populate his short stories and novellas in ways different from Kafka. His writings are more animal-specific than Kafka’s, more inclined to the animal than to the human, more directed to highlighting the sacrificial economy that humans institute in order to kill animals without guilt. If we are to take the sacrificial economy as one of the central principles underlying biopower today, we will want to highlight the ease with which the sacrifice of animals (principally of their animality, as I argue below) corresponds to a marked increase in contemporary biopower.

The first printed visual portrait of an Englishman, in a mid-sixteenthcentury travel book cum ethnography by the Catholic priest and doctor Andrew Boorde, depicts him as naked apart from hat and obligatory breech cloth with a roll of cloth over one arm and a pair of scissors in the other hand (see Figure 1).

This depiction is explained in the accompanying comment by an addiction to ‘new fashyons’, which leaves the Englishman without a sartorial (and by metonymy cultural) identity of his own (Boorde 1547, n.p.). Boorde's criticism is mild compared to the fierce condemnation of the ‘monster and […] beaste of manye heads’ ‘the Englyshe manne’ is ‘nowe become’ by Boorde's contemporary, the fervent Protestant Thomas Becon who is concerned less with the newness of the fashions to which the Englishman is addicted than with their strange or foreign character, borrowed as they are, on the one hand, from the Italian, French and Spanish (i.e. papists) and, on the other, from Turks and Saracens (i.e. infidels), that is, from those menacing, but also constitutive others of the English (Becon 1550, sig. Jiiiiv; cf. Becon 1543, sigs Eiiv–Eiiiv). As I show in my book Shakespeare's Englishes, Boorde's figure of an Englishman without a sartorial identity of his own mutates into the figure of an elite male dressed in a motley of foreign fashions, a meme of cultural reformation ideology which is taken up and widely disseminated through the state-sponsored homily on excess of apparel by James Pilkington (Tudeau-Clayton 2020, 93–131). Through performative exclusions of this figure, I argue, an idea of the temperate, plainly dressed male citizen is promoted as the normative centre of the true, or proper, Englishman, disassociated from elite males, othered as effeminate and of strange, that is, foreign, cultural habits.