Abstract
This reading of Mother Hubberds Tale focuses on the Ape and his debt to the performing apes of the playhouse and baiting arena. The chapter outlines the history of the performing ape and its relationship to mimetic theory before considering the relationship between the speaking and embodied animal in the poem. I then analyse the Ape’s behaviour, emphasising the contortions involved in his two-footedness, dancing and gaming, and his adoption of elaborate costume. I end with a discussion of the role of pain in shaping the poem’s exploration of animal personation and how it references anxieties about censorship. Throughout, I argue that Spenser’s interrogation of the rhetorical figure of personation uses the animal to question modes of performativity in relation to social status, satirising the Elizabethan court but also asking wider questions about the links between prosopopoeia, the production of poetry and violence.
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Notes
- 1.
I wish to thank Rachel Stenner and Richard Danson Brown for their invaluable feedback and advice.
- 2.
Elizabeth often gave her courtiers and intimates pet names, for example, Lady Margery Norris was her ‘crow’. See Borman (2017, 357).
- 3.
- 4.
Donna Haraway has called the Western study of primatology ‘simian Orientalism’, drawing attention to how the construction of the ape is always about the human (Haraway 1992, 11).
- 5.
Henry VIII’s fool, Will Somer, had a pet monkey (Borman 2017, 141).
- 6.
All quotation of MHT is from Spenser (1989).
- 7.
Laurie Shannon highlights the difficulty of using ‘footedness’ as a category of identification when describing apes and argues that Shakespeare and his contemporaries repeatedly signal the precariousness of human two-leggedness (2013, 92–3).
- 8.
See Hadfield (2012, 126–7).
- 9.
- 10.
This accords with Brown’s reading of the Fox and Ape as amoral poets when he posits that MHT, like the Complaints as a whole, brings to the fore an uncertain and ambiguous view of poetry and its moral and didactic value (Brown 1999, 184).
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Shinn, A. (2024). Spenser’s ‘Apish Crue’: Aping in Prosopopoia or Mother Hubberds Tale. In: Stenner, R., Shinn, A. (eds) Edmund Spenser and Animal Life . Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42641-4_6
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