Abstract
Dolphins and stories about dolphins in early modern England are versions of the Aquaman fantasy, in which human beings imagine an underwater life.1 These apparently smiling mammals, fascinating to humans then as now, present physical evidence that it is possible for warm-blooded air-breathers to live in the ocean. With their bodies submerged inside the most inhospitable part of the natural world, dolphins underwrote in the early modern period a fantasy about human engagement with the terraqueous globe that was being explored by early modern writers and voyagers. Symbolic tensions within early modern representations of dolphins suggest that these marine mammals figured the limits and hopes of human abilities to live in oceanic space. In a contemporary postindustrial culture that often ignores both the sea and our companion species, renewed attention to the symbolic functions of dolphins may help us reevaluate the long history of human relations with our oceanic environment.
We were men before we were fishes.
—Lucian
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Notes
On this fantasy in Shakespeare and Melville, see Steve Mentz, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London: Continuum, 2009), 44–47; 54; and 82.
On the “oceanic turn” in early modern European culture, see Ulrich Kinzel, “Orientation as a Paradigm of Maritime Modernity,” in Fictions of the Sea: Critical Perspectives on the Ocean in British Literature and Culture, ed. Bernhard Klein (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 28–48. See also my 2010 gallery show at the Folger Shakespeare Library, www.folger.edu/lostatsea.
See Claire Jowitt, The Culture of Piracy, 1580–1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2010).
See Anthony Alpers, Dolphins: The Myth and the Mammal (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1960); and
Eunice Barr Stebbins, The Dolphin in the Literature and Art of Greece and Rome (Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1929). Stebbins’s book was a Johns Hopkins dissertation in 1927.
William Shakespeare, Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gosset (London: Thomason, 2004), 2.1.25. All parenthetical citations to drama refer to act, scene, and line number, respectively.
Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 712–13. The epigraphs to the five central sections of this essay come from this passage in Pynchon’s novel.
William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders (London: Thomason, 1995). Citations appear parenthetically in the text.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 2001), 4.12.1.2–4.
See Genesis, 1:6. On conflict between land and sea in multiple religious traditions, see Christopher Connery, “There was No More Sea: The Supercession of the Ocean from the Bible to Hyperspace,” Journal of Historical Geography 32.3 (2006): 494–511.
For a “tehomic” (ocean-centered) reading of Genesis, see Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).
The kinship between whales and dolphins was well-established among early modern naturalists, but whales lie outside the scope of this chapter. See Dan Brayton’s essay in this volume, “Royal Fish,” and his article, “Shakespeare and the Global Ocean,” in Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lynne Bruckner and Dan Brayton (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 173–90.
This quotation comes from a prose version of Oppian in The Dolphin Smile: Twenty-Nine Centuries of Dolphin Lore, ed. Eleanore Devine and Martha Clark (New York and London: Macmillan, 1967), 35.
On the history of this term, and the parallel history of the Prince of Wales (“whales”), see Dan Brayton, “Royal Fish.” In both cases what appears a sophomoric pun emerges out of what Brayton calls “a longstanding cultural association between monarchs and marine mammals.” See also Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 94.
William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. T. W. Craik (London: Thomason, 1995). Citations appear parenthetically in the text.
John C. Lilly, Man and Dolphin (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 11.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000), 81–84. Citations by line number in the text.
On pirates and “unexpected intrusion” in Shakespeare, see Jacques Lezra, Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 270–80.
Giacamo Affinati, The Dumb Devine Speaker (1605), 196. This Catholic text, translated by Antony Munday in 1604–5, may have been designed to provide rhetorical protection to the English Catholic community; see Donna B. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 155–56.
On music in early modern England, see G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearean Tempest (London: Oxford University Press, 1932);
Bruce Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999);
Wes Folkerth, The Sound of Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 2002); and
Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of the Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, ed. Keir Elam (London: Thomason, 2009), 1.2.10 and 13–16.
See, for example, David Brin, Startide Rising (New York: Bantam, 1984); and
China Miéville, The Scar (London: Macmillan, 2002).
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3.
Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 138 and 114.
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© 2012 Jean E. Feerick and Vin Nardizzi
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Mentz, S. (2012). “Half-Fish, Half-Flesh”: Dolphins, the Ocean, and Early Modern Humans. In: Feerick, J.E., Nardizzi, V. (eds) The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015693_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015693_3
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