What Can Beast Fables Do in Literary Animal Studies? Ben Jonson’s Volpone and the Prehumanist Human

Abstract

John Simons, Jacques Derrida, and others argue that beast fables such as those ascribed to Aesop, being based on centuries of convention rather than on an understanding of specific species, have little to tell us about human–animal relations, and for this reason can be evacuated from literary animal studies. This chapter will challenge this perspective by turning to one of the English Renaissance’s most well-known beast fables: Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (1606). It will read it alongside contemporary work by Erasmus, John Donne, Robert Burton, and John Davies, among others, and argue that all these writers make visible a conception of humans that means that the beast fable can be read as having a role to play in understanding not just human perceptions of animals, but also human perceptions of being human. Through a reading of Jonson’s play this chapter aims to make a case for the need to rethink the place and meaning of beast fables both in the past and today. To underline this it turns briefly at the end of the chapter to look beyond the early modern period to posthumanist ideas as a way of thinking through how the historical analysis might also impact upon contemporary literary studies that attend to what Cary Wolfe has called “the question of the animal”.

Throughout this chapter the spelling and literation of original early modern sources have been silently modernised.