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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 16 number 1 march 2011

In an anonymous 1598 translation of AristotlesPolitics we read that Nature who hathbestowed the power of Speech vpon man,

maketh nothing in vaine.1 Perhaps more

recognizable in its modern rendition, man is

the only animal whom [nature] has endowed with

the gift of speech,2 this is an idea that has

haunted Western philosophy since the fourth

century BCE. It is a conception of difference

perhaps even the conception of difference that

continues to do two inseparable things: to

construct the human as the only meaning-

making species, and to relegate animals to a

place of silence. This is a silence based on their

perceived inability to speak, and it is also a

silence based on humanitys unwillingness to

speak fully about and for them. Indeed, writing at

the end of the twentieth century Jacques Derrida

noted that the animal as a being with a capacityfor a response and not just a reaction is

something that philosophy perhaps forgets,

perhaps being this calculated forgetting itself.3

It is not just speech that is at stake in

Aristotles statement. There are other issues

that go with his claim about humanitys unique

status that are sometimes forgotten, or rather are

subsumed under a concentration on spoken

language. He continues (again, quoting from the

1598 translation):

Voice which is the signifier of ioy and sadnes,

is bestowed for this cause vpon other creatures,

for euen Nature proceedeth so farre in them,

that shee giueth them a feeling of ioy and

griefe, and a power to declare the same to

others. But Speech is giuen vnto vs to signifie

what is profitable and what vnprofitable, and

consequently what is iust and what vniust.

For this is a proprietie belonging vnto man

aboue all other liuing creatures, that he onely

hath a sense and feeling of good and euill,

and of iust and vniust. The communion of

which things begetteth and establisheth a

house and a Cittie.4

The distinction of voice and speech, then, is to be

read as a manifestation of another, precedingdifference. An animal, for Aristotle, cannot be

just or unjust because such conceptions require

access to a realm of abstraction that is not

available to the animal mind, a mind which is

capable only of reacting to and thus of giving

voice to immediate circumstances. In this

worldview, a plant has a vegetative soul that

allows for growth, nutrition and reproduction;

an animal has a vegetative and a sensitive soul,

which allows for movement and sensory engage-

ment with the physical world; a human has a

erica fudge

THE HUMAN FACE OF

EARLY MODERNENGLAND

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/11/010097^14 2011 Taylor & Francis


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vegetative, a sensitive and a rational soul that is

immortal and gives access to the abstract.5

Because of its limitation to the sensual world,

an animal cannot be said therefore to live socially,

for social living must be underpinned by, for

example, an agreed set of ethical (i.e., abstract)rules. Following this train of thought into the

early modern period my focus in this essay

Sir Francis Bacon wrote in 1625 that whosoever

in the frame of his nature and affections is unfit

for friendship, he taketh it of the beast, and not

from humanity.6 To be alone to live outside

of society is to be not human.

But it was not only that animals were believed

to be outside of the realm of the social in this

period. They were also not constituted asindividuals. Alongside abstract knowledge ani-

mals were believed to lack self-knowledge, some-

thing vital for both individual and social being.

Sir Miles Sandys, writing in 1634, asked a series

of questions with a clear answer:

Doth the horse know that he is a horse, or, that

he is a beast, and thou a man? . . . or doth the

Dogge (which of all beasts is mans chiefe

attendant) know, whether thou art a man,

or a beast? no certainely. . . . onely man knowesthat hee is man.7

Two decades later, the Hertfordshire physician

John Bulwer, whose work is central to this essay,

wrote that men descending into themselves may

know themselves to be men and not beasts, and

learne to order this August Domicil of man

reverently to the health of the Body, and the

honour of the Soule.8 Self-knowledge is avail-

able only to humans, and like abstract knowl-

edge allows for social living. Having access to

the abstract notion the human, and knowing

who one is oneself and whether the other is a

human or a beast, sits at the foundation of a

society. So a dog can only ever be an attendant;

it can be made to serve humanity but can never

be a full member of the human community.

In this essay I look at a number of writings

from the first half of the seventeenth century

and trace out the ways in which this argument

of exclusion circulates. The materials used here

form a particular discourse on animals which

Aristotles ideas. An alternative early modern

point of view will be explored elsewhere. In this

essay, moving out from questions of language

and communication, I explore how these early

seventeenth-century discussions of sociality and

individuality take up the body as well as the

mind. The possession of a face is at the centre

of these debates. Indeed, in this period called

both the Renaissance and the early modern,

where ancient past and contemporary present

are entangled, discussions about faces are always

discussions about being human.

meaningful bodies

It is not only animals that have been relegatedby their lack of speech. In ancient Greece, for

example, human deafness was linked to muteness

which, in turn, was understood to go hand-in-

hand with an inability to reason.9 Once again,

this conception was followed by later writers,

and in his 1648 Philocophus: Or, The Deafe and

Dumbe Mans FriendJohn Bulwer noted:

The condition that they are in who are borne

deafe and dumbe, is indeed very sad and

lamentable: for they are looked upon as

misprisions of nature, and wanting speech,

are reckoned little better then Dumbe

Animals, that want words to expresse their

conceptions; and men that have lost the

Magna Charta of speech and priviledge of

communication, and society with men.

Bulwer thus repeats Aristotles distinction of

human from animal as being about speech and

society (and it becomes clear that animal as a

category here includes the less-than-human

human), and he notes in the following pages the

status of the deaf in Foro Civili as being one

of exclusion. Legally, deaf people are without

rights because without expression: they cannot

be witnesses, cannot draw up wills.10 But Bulwer

is challenging this Aristotelian conception.

He suggests that a deaf person might learn lip

reading, or ocular audition as he terms it, and

so have language and therefore enter the social

world.11 Thus Bulwer argues that communication

might be possible in ways other than speech: that

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the interpretation of lip motion but in the form

of gesture which is, he states, the universall

language of Humane nature.12

The signifying body that comes to the fore

in Philocophus is of constant interest to

Bulwer. Whether he is worrying about facial

musculature in Pathomyotomia (1649 a text

to which I return), or body modification

(tattoos, scarification, the use of make-up) in

Anthropometamorphosis (1650, enlarged 1653),

the eloquence of the human body is central.

Indeed, his first work, published in 1644, is a

study of gestural language. This book is made

up of two texts, Chirologia and Chironomia

(the natural language of the hand and the rule

of the hand respectively13). The first tracesthe signification of individual hand gestures in

classical texts as a way of establishing a lexicon

of natural, universal hand language, while the

second looks at the cultural refinements of this

natural language. For Bulwer, in gestural lan-

guage the individual can truly express themselves

and thus be truly human. Indeed, he states that

he will handle gesture, as the only speech and

general language of human nature.14

Thus, in arguing for a universal language andin tracing classical precedent, Bulwer establishes

what he regards as a trans-cultural and trans-

historical human nature, and a new way of

marking out what makes the human a human.15

Of the handshake, for example, he writes:

Our ancestors also had this expression of

hospitable love in a real respect when they

knew no greater term of reproach than to call

a man unhospitable. This expression of the

hand continues in force and estimation andbears such sway among all nations (especially

those that are northward) that he seems to be

disarmed of all humanity and to want the

affability of expression who doth (when there

is occasion for it) omit this benevolent

insinuation of the hand.16

Here, to be able to engage socially is to have a

hand to gesture with, and the pun in Bulwers

statement that one who fails to offer the hand is

disarmed of all humanity seems to reinforce

this. However, he had noted earlier that an arm

lost, and likewise we are asked to recognize that

it is not an animals different anatomy that

excludes it from the realm of hospitality.17

Rather, there is an incorporeal lack, more

important than any corporeal one, which dis-

counts animals from the social world that thehandshake opens up. The reason for the absence

of animals from this sphere of friendship

is because the handshake is, Bulwer states,

a natural expression [which] seems to result

from the sympathy between the will and the

hands. For, the will [is] affectionately inclined

and moved to stretch forth herself; the hand

is moved by the same spirit.18 This gesture,

as all gestures, is a manifestation of volition, and

so animals can never be understood to speakeven physically because they are creatures lacking

such will, which is a capacity of reasonable beings

only. An animals body movement is mere

corporeal noise while hands, Bulwer argues in

Chironomia, are not only assistant to eloquence

but do incredibly conduce to all the offices of

reason and humanity.19

Bulwer is not alone in his assessment of the

body as a reflection of humanitys reasonable

state. Such a belief gets played out in many worksin this period. Philosophical discussions linking

reason and the flesh are constant and orthodox as

the humoral make-up of the body was one way

of understanding the mind of the individual.

Robert Burton, to cite just one famous example,

begins The Anatomy of Melancholy (1624) with

a lengthy discussion of the human frame, seeing

it as inseparable from his later discussion of

human psychology.20 But this interest in the body

can also be traced in a different way in other areas

of early modern intellectual life. In the court

masques of Jacobean and Caroline England, for

example, the potentially reasonable nature of

the human body is reflected in the centrality of

dancing which was understood to be, as Blair

Hoxby has written, the raison-detre of these

court performances.21 In them, actual spoken

dialogue played a minor role, something that

apparently undermines the prioritizing of speech

in the distinction of human from animal that can

be found, for example, in George Puttenhams

declaration that Poesie was thoriginall cause

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before the people remained in the woods and

mountains, vagarant and dispersed like the wild

beasts.22 From this conventional perspective,

humans gathered to tell tales and so society was

born, whereas animals, beings without speech,

cannot tell tales and so can never be conceived

of as being properly social.

Just as Bulwer argued for the possibility of

ocular audition introducing the deaf to the society

of the hearing, so an alternative way of commu-

nicating another kind of speech was

emphasized in the court masque. Dance itself

was recognized in early modern theorization as

conveying meaning. Jennifer Nevile writes:

Dancing taught the chosen members of societycontrol over their body and over their actions,

both when dancing and in day-to-day interac-

tions with their colleagues and superiors.

It was visible evidence that a person was

capable of controlling their inner emotions

as well. Dancing, therefore, functioned as a

social marker, as one of the ways a certain

group in society defined itself and excluded

others.23

We can go further than this, I think. If dancingmarks out class difference it also marks out

species difference. Nevile writes that

Movements of the body were believed to be

the outward manifestations of movements of the

soul. Consequently, if the movements of the body

were ungraceful, then the movements of the

soul would be presumed to be similarly ugly

and inharmonious.24 Courtly dancing revealed

a rational mind in that it reflected grace and an

ability to act in accordance with socially agreed

rules that is, the steps of the dance. An animal,

lacking such a mind, was therefore incapable of

such dancing, and a performance of a disorderly

dance therefore said much about the species

status of the dancer.25

In the court masques of the seventeenth

century, then, it was not only the tales told but

also the dances danced that constructed human

society, and this is marked in one trope of the

masque in which a shift from the opening chaos

of the antimasque to the order of the courtly

dance at the end was presented as being

to human. James Knowles, tracing the represen-

tation of such less-than-humans (satyrs, animal-

headed men) and apes in Stuart court perfor-

mances, has noted that masque form, with its

movement from antimasque to masque, was an

ideal vehicle for demonstrating the primacy of thecivil, human, and royal over the barbarian,

satirical, and bestial.26 Ben Jonsons Oberon

The Fairy Prince offers an illustration of this.

This masque was performed at Whitehall Palace

on 1 January 1611. It opens with a scene all

obscure, and nothing perceived but dark rock,

with trees beyond it, and all wildness that could

be presented. In this place a group of satyrs

(played by professional actors) are gathering and

running forth severally . . . making antic actionand gestures.27 They are awaiting the presence

of Oberon (played by Prince Henry) who will,

they hope, transform them: he will gild our

cloven feet, Hang upon our stubbed horns /

Garlands, ribands, and fine posies, stick our

pricking ears / With the pearl that Tethys wears,

Trap our shaggy thighs with bells.28 It is the

animal aspect of the satyrs what reveals them as

less-than-human that will, they hope, be

overlaid by a civility which is symbolized in thejewels and ornamentation that the Fairy Prince

will bring. But when Oberon enters the stage

in a chariot, which to a loud triumphant music,

began to move forward, drawn by two white

bears his follower, the foremost sylvan,

corrects the satyrs telling them that the True

majesty in the room is James I and not his

performing son.29 Silenus, the prefect of the

satyrs, acknowledges this:

He makes it ever day, and ever spring,Where he doth shine, and quickens

everything,

Like a new nature: so that true to call

Him, by his title, is to say, Hes all.30

Where Oberon has the power to superficially gild

the satyrs lack of humanity, James can truly

transform the world.31

At this point in the masque the satyrs disappear

from the action, and the remaining songs and

dances are performed by fays (fairies), and

by Oberon and his knights, who are played by



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of the presence of the rightful monarch has

transformed the action and order is restored by

the commanding gaze of the king. The best view

of Inigo Joness staging was from the throne

and thus, literally and figuratively, in the masque

it is the sovereign alone who has the trueperspective.32 But the order that is present is not

manifested in a shift in the spoken language of

the text (the satyrs speak in rhyme, as do the

fays). Rather, order is represented as visible,

bodily. It is in the dance in the movement from

the satyrs antic dance full of gesture to the

controlled measures, corantos, galliards, etc.

performed by the court at the end that meaning

is conveyed.33 Puttenhams claim that it was

poetry that brought human society into being isonly partly true. For Jonson and other masque

writers, society is established through poetry but

it is also constructed in physical performance:

in adherence to the socially agreed rules of the

dance.

But it is not just in dancing and hand gesture

that the body is used to construct a human.

Bulwer argued that Two amphitheatres there

are in the body, the hand and the head, and

he planned, alongside his Chirologia andChironomia two further receptacles of his

observations of human gestural language:

Cephalelogia (the natural language of the

head) and Cephalenomia (the Rule of the

head: i.e., the qualification of all cephalical

expressions, according to the laws of civil

prudence).34 These texts do not exist, but

Bulwers interest in the human head is a

reflection of wider cultural conventions that are

linked to ideas about dancing and gestural

language. In a number of masques, and in other

writings of the period, the face in particular

emerges as a place where the human can be found

and it is to this that I now turn. I will return to

the writings of John Bulwer to his work on

the musculature of the head, Pathomyotomia

(which may be what became of his proposed head

books) but I begin with another court text: John

MiltonsA Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle.

These are very different kinds of writing, but

both reflect alike on the nature of species

difference and the role of the face in that35

losing face

In 1634, Milton gained the commission to write

A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle. The

masque was commissioned to celebrate the Earl

of Bridgewaters becoming the President ofWales and the Marches. This role saw

Bridgewater as Charles Is representative in

Wales, a place which was considered wild and

uncivilized, and . . . very far from the center of

both power and culture.36 Involving the Earls

three youngest children in key speaking roles, the

masque took up the geographical location of

Ludlow Castle itself and focused on the dangers

of borderlands: between the wood and the court;

the savage and the civil; but also between theanimal and the human. The central character of

the masque, Comus, spends his time lurking in

the dark woods for innocent passers-by whom he

lures to join his immoderate gang by (appro-

priately enough for the son of Bacchus and

Circe) offering a drink: by tempting their fond

intemperate thirst as the Attendant Spirit of the

woods says.37

The dramatic action of A Masque centres on

the Lady who represents chastity, and was playedby the Earls daughter, the fifteen-year-old

Lady Alice Egerton. She becomes separated

from her two brothers in the wood and is

captured by Comus and shackled by him to a

magic throne where she refuses his advances. She

is released only by the supernatural, immortal

powers of Sabrina, the spirit of the river Severn,

which borders Wales and England. The masque

thus tells its moral story about temperance, but it

is also speaking about the dangers and closeness

of savagery, a typical conceit of this genre. But

A Masqueis inevitably more modest than any of

the court masques written for James or Charles,

in keeping with its being presented in a provincial

court rather than the royal one. The modesty,

though, is also appropriate to Miltons focus on

temperance in the text. While we begin with the

antimasque of Comuss rout of monsters . . .

making a riotous and unruly noise and end with

the childrens victorious dance / Oer sensual

folly and intemperance, this is no simple

celebration of chastitys victory over lechery.38

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already present in the figure of the monarch

(as when, in Oberon, the change occurs with the

satyrs discovery that James is and has ever been

present). Miltons masque, rather, is a didactic

work of art. By the end of the performance

Comus and his followers have not been stopped,

they are still lurking in the woods for the next

thirsty traveller. The text is thus a warning to all

viewers and all readers (it was first printed in

1637). Its meanings are aimed at a political level

in that the masque glances at the Earls work in

maintaining order in the borderlands of England

and Wales. But they are also aimed at an abstract

level in that it touches questions of human

moderation.

A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle alsoraises very interestingly the question of being

human. For what happens to the intemperate

passers-by who are tempted by Comuss poisoned

cup is that they are changed; they are metamor-

phosed in a very particular way:

Soon as the Potion works, their human

countnance,

Th express resemblance of the gods, is

changd

Into some brutish form of wolf or bear,Or ounce, or tiger, hog, or bearded goat,

All other parts remaining as they were.39

Later the Attendant Spirit says that Comuss

pleasing poison

The visage quite transforms of him that drinks

And the inglorious likeness of a beast

Fixes instead, unmoulding reasons mintage

Characterd in the face.40

What the potion does, then, is take from the

intemperate drinker the thing that marks them as

human: their face. For Milton, the face represents

the reason and divinity that sits within the human

body. This is a trope he repeated inParadise Lost

some thirty years later when Adam, discovering

Eve has eaten the forbidden fruit, says: How

art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, / Defaced,

deflowered, and now to death devote?41 Like

animals, so Adam believes, Eve is now wholly

mortal, and she has lost her face, and thus

her humanity has been ruined. Likewise, in

is made more like the beasts than the angels by

Comuss drink, something signified in the

gaining of the animal head.

The loss of face and reason has two related

outcomes. First, we are told that the drinkers,

all their friends, and native home forget / To roll

with pleasure in a sensual sty.42 Their Circean

animalization is represented through human

isolation and the descent into the pleasures

of the material realm. This transformation of

human face into animal head mirrors that seen on

the frontispiece to Thomas Heywoods

Philocothonista, or The Drvnkard, Opened,

Dissected, and Anatomized, a text printed

in 1635, the year after the performance of

A Masque.In this text, Heywood categorizes different

kinds of drunkenness using different kinds of

animals. Thus Ebrietas Ovina (sheep drunken-

ness) is the category of those who when drunk

seeme to be terrified with the feare of Sprites

and Hobgoblines. Those who can stand upon

no ground, but leape and dance, and caper, toy,

laugh, sing, and prattle, troubling the whole

company with their Antick gesticulations, and

tedious verbositie are displaying EbrietasVitulina (calf drunkenness). Last in his list

are the pig-drunks:

These are most ridiculous and nasty, who by

giving themselues over to all beastiall vinosi-

tie, by spending whole dayes, and consuming

night after night in Tavernes, and Tippling-

houses, returne from thence, either led or

carried, who oft times stumbling, lie wallowing

in the kennells, and so appeare no other then

Hoggs and swine, newly come durty anddawbed out of the puddles.43

An earlier version of this listing of animalized

drunkards can be found in Englands Bane: Or,

The Description of Drunkennesse which was

written by Thomas Young and published in

1617. Young became tutor to the young John

Milton the following year.44 The metamorphosis

of Comuss rout in A Masque Presented at

Ludlow Castle is thus a conventional one, and is

one that is associated with drinking. Animals, this

discourse states, live only in the sensual present,



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so losing control of ones reason when one is

drunk is also and logically (not just metaphori-

cally) a loss of humanity and a descent to the

status of a beast.45

But the second set of descriptions that is used

to represent those who succumb to Comus is also

worth noting. What goes alongside the question

of lack of temperance and removal of face is a loss

of something else. Comus refers to his followers

as a herd.46 Throughout the piece which

is 1023 lines long they are described only as a

group: as a rout, a rabble. This is quite

different from a society: a herd is a collection of

by an outside force. A member of the herd

in A Masque is tricked into joining and held in

place by Comuss magic potion. They therefore

have no agency and they cannot alter the nature

of that rabble. In this context, an individual

animal is an impossible singular in a collective

noun the herd. It is as if, in A Masque, Milton

is representing the power of the herdsman over

the herd and, to speak more generally, of humans

over animals, as being analogous to sorcery.

The orient liquor in a crystal glass that Comus

offers to passers-by is potable dominion.47 For

the unknowing drinker, however, it is a truly

Fig.1. Frontispiece fromThomas Heywood, Philocothonista, orThe Drvnkard, Opened,Dissected, and Anatomized(London:Robert Raworth,1635) The British Library Board. (Shelfmark C30d11).Reproduced with permission.

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Comuss dupes drink the proffered refreshment

and lose their reason, lose their faces and lose

their individuality all in one movement, so much

so that they fail to know this. After their

transformation they, so perfect is their misery,

/ Not once perceive their foul disfigurement, /

But boast themselves more comely than

before.48 They have lost the ability to tell

whether or not they are human. Once again

Milton is not unique. Three years before his work

was performed Jonson, in his masque Loves

Triumph through Callipolis, wrote that slaves

to sense were Mere cattle, and not men.49

The animalization, like being human, has an

internal cause. In A Masque one of the Ladys

brothers outlines what happens to those who arenot temperate. He states:

But when lust

By unchaste looks, loose gestures and foul

talk,

But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,

Lets in defilement to the inward parts,

The soul grows clotted by contagion,

Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose

The divine property of her first being.50

The human soul sunk in sensuality is imbodied

and imbruted: it has become flesh and thus, in

this conception, the human has become a mere

animal. This is why gesture to return to

Bulwer is meaningful only when underpinned

by animating reason. Hence, when in Chirologia

he mentions the horse-rhetoric of Smithfield

and the very different fish dialect of

Billingsgate, what he is referring to is the

cunning management of the hand by mer-

chants and traders at London horse and fish

markets and not the body language of animals

because animals, lacking reason, can never be

understood to have such language.51 Thus, as

speech, and therefore human status, is a product

of reason, humans sunk in vice lose their essential

humanity; they become animal-headed (a litera-

lization of their beastly minds). But these humans

also metaphorically lose their faces: they cease to

know their friends and to know themselves and

are, in Jonsons terms, mere cattle; in Miltons a

herd. They are not active parts of a social

grouping and they are no longer individuals, they

are passive, isolated, bodily beings trapped in a

world of physicality.

This is presented on stage not in the speech of

Comuss rout (for they, appropriately, have none,

only riotous and unruly noise), but in theiranimal heads and their Midnight shout, and

revelry, / Tipsy dance and jollity.52 Their sheer

faceless bodiliness here is thus part of that other

complex of ideas through which the human is

being constructed in early modern thought:

dancing. And dancing, as noted, is human.

Jonson, indeed, termed dancing a display of

the wisdom of your feet in his 1618 masque

Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue that includes the

character Comus, the god of cheer, or the bellyand is believed to have influenced Milton.53 The

chaotic motions of the later Comuss followers

exist in opposition to the organized dances

performed by the children at the end of A

Masque. These are dances that take place in the

castle rather than the wood, thus marking also the

spatial shift from animal outside to human inside:

the woods being the place that Puttenhams

storytelling humans left behind. Thus, we have

various oppositions emerging in A MasquePresented at Ludlow Castle that are utterly

orthodox in their rendition of Aristotelian ideas:

between noise and articulate communication;

between orgiastic gyration and orderly move-

ment; between the woods and the castle; and

between animal heads and human faces.

But dancing can be read in another way as

well. In the early modern period it was part of the

education of a gentleman and was placed along-

side horse riding as a truly human accomplish-

ment. Indeed, according to John Holless father

in 1614, to learn one skill alone was to be not a

gentleman but a worker: to dance only belongs

to a ballarin . . . and to ride only to a cavallerizzo.

All must therefore go together.54 But once again

it was not only class status that was at stake;

species status must also be considered. Success in

both dancing and horse riding signalled control:

in dancing it was control over the animal self,

the body; in riding, over the animal other, the

horse.55 An orderly dancer, like a good horseman,

revealed himself to be a controlled and



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controlling human.56 Thus, in Oberon, when

Prince Henry enters the scene in a chariot with

two white bears in harness and then performs

a dance, he is revealing his humanity twice over

and in a most spectacular fashion: he controls the

wildest of animals, he controls himself.

just nodding

But on a more figurative level, riding a horse has

another meaning. If to ride is to control nature,

a control lost at the Fall, riding is therefore a

return, if only temporarily, to a state of pre-

lapsarian perfection. It is a moment of re-facing,

you might say. And this way of thinking about

riding can be found almost forty years afterJonsons masque to provide another way of

linking equestrianism and dancing to possession

of a face. In Pathomyotomia Or a Dissection of

the significative Muscles of the Affections of the

MindeJohn Bulwer states that he is interested in

that which I use to call the Clock-work of the

Head, or the Springs and inward Contrivance

of Instruments of all our outward motions,

which give motion and regulate the Dyall of

the Affections, which Nature hath placed inthe Face of Man.57

The mechanical imagery he uses does not displace

the conception of the reasonable nature of the

human face. In fact, so linked is the face with

reason for him that in his outline of the Scope

of the book, Bulwer states that his aim is to

describe such Actions only, which are generally

and universally used by all men, as apparent

significations of their Mind.58 Animal actions

are never of interest to him because they are

never evidence of a reasonable mind, and because

of this, animals are not considered as beings

possessing faces. They can make meaning can

express the sensual worlds they are engaged

with but not like humans: It is well known

that most of Creatures [sic] that have no

Countenance to expresse the variation of their

Sensitive Appetites and Imagination, do express

their Senses by certaine motions or wagging of

their Eares.59 This lack of expressive counte-

nance is superficially due to the physical fact of

an animals musculature: it is this, he states, that

prevents them from laughing.60 But there is

another and much more powerful reason for an

animals lack of face, which is, as it was in

discussions of hands in Chirologia, about what

lies beneath the skin. Bulwer makes the claimthat animals have no Countenance on the

level of the soul as well as the body. Indeed, the

two the soul and the body are inseparable as

it is the former that underpins his anatomical

explanation as to how facial movements take

place, an explanation which defines what he

means by a face.

Tracing what might be termed the bodily chain

of command from the brain to the nerves to the

muscles, Bulwer argues that all the parts ofthe body are under the rule of the soul: for the

instruments move, because they are moved by

it.61 The body is thus a microcosm of the royal

court in which command comes from its king.

In animals, the soul that moves is merely

sensitive and mortal, whereas in humans, the

soul is reasonable and immortal. Thus, in a

circular argument, humans have faces because

faces are sites of reasonable expression and only

humans have reason, while animals, lackingreason therefore lack faces. An animals idiom

(if such a word can be used) is always bestial.

But this bestial idiom is available to humans too

those animal-headed drunks in Heywoods text

testify to the possibility (although they could not,

of course, testify in court).

This human beastliness is, then, of the soul as

well as of the body, and a link between physique

and mind in which animals lurked in the human

flesh can be found not only in imaginative

representation but in the science of physiognomy

as well, a science which discovereth, as Bacon

put it, the disposition of the mind by the

lineaments of the body.62 In A Pleasant

History: Declaring the whole Art of

Phisiognomy (1613), for example, Thomas Hill

states that he is considering in particular the

brutish sort: which for the lacke of grace, and

being not regenerated by Gods holy Spirit, . . . in

such manner, are moued to follow their sensuall

will and appetites.63 The grace that is lacking

that he refers to is Gods grace the grace of the

fudge


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soul but it is equally a grace manifest in the

body. Instead of dancing, these unregenerated

brutes simply move and follow their senses.

Hill goes on:

the Creatures which are regenerated throughthe holy Ghost, doe not onely endeuour to

mortifie their fleshly appetites, but seeke to

put away and correct, all other inormities

and vices resting in them: although there still

continueth a frailtie to sinne, and offences

daily committed.

Control is what humans, those regenerated

beings, must try to achieve. They will, however,

always fail, because they are human, but they

must continue to try, because they are human.Their inherent and inevitable frailty is visible

in the body and Hill writes, for example, that

The person hauing a bigge forhead, is slow

and dull Witted, compared vnto the Oxe, in that

the Oxe is a slow beast, which hath a bigge

forehead.64 What the science of physiognomy

declares, then, is the fallen and dangerously

fleshy nature of the human. Just as a dance can

become an orgy and a rider can lose control

of a horse, so a soul can be imbodied, andimbruted and a human face can become an

animal head.

This link between horse riding, possessing a

face and being human is represented in two

related ways inPathomyotomia.Firstly, Bulwers

conceit for expressing the difference between

voluntary (human) and spontaneous (animal)

movement is philosophically cliched but also

utterly appropriate.65 In humans:

The Braine commandeth as soone as it hath

judged whether the thing is to be avoided

or persecuted, the Nerves commonly called

Illatoresor the Posts, for the intelligence they

give, bring the commandement, and Facultie;

theMuscleillustrated with the Animal Spirits

obeyes, and moves the part according to the

command of the will: and as a Riderby the

moving of his Raines, guides his Horse: so

the force of the Soule residing in the Braine,

moves the Muscles by the Nerves, as with

Raines; for the will is like the Rider, the

Nerves to Raines, and the Muscles to the66

Thus facial expression and its readable language

are, like riding, an externalization of the humans

internal, rational capacity. When this capacity is

gone, so too is human status. This can be seen

in the animal-headedness of Comuss followers

who have given-in to their sensual appetites,

but Bulwer offers another vision of this using a

different equine analogy, this time of a rather

more shocking species: If any man would make

triall to find after what manner this significant

motion of the Head is done, having got a fresh

humane carkasse, the other parts besides the

ligaments of the vertebres being taken away, he

should manoeuvre the head forwards and back-

wards and watch the muscles move. These

muscles which pull the head this way and thatare, he says, represented in the raines of a

Horse. As if to make the point more fully,

Bulwer advises his reader:

nothing can better shew you how to conceive

of the office and function of these Muscles,

than if you should put a garter athwart about

the hinder part of the Head, bringing it from

above the ears on each side-down to the breast,

for if you afterwards draw both the ends of

the garter together, the Headwil give a justNod of assent: but if you pull the ends by

turns one after another, you will cause

Collaterall Nods, such as wee use when the

partyes to whom we make the signe are on

the one side of us.67

The human carcass is bridled and thus made

horse. This is philosophically correct: a human

carcass is devoid of a soul as its immortal essence

has flown and it thus lacks the reason that marks

it as human. This means that, like those animals

referred to as a herd, rout, or rabble, a human

carcass has no agency, will, or reason. Its actions

are dictated by an external power: an anatomist

playing at being a rider rather than a herdsman,

this time. But Bulwer does something else here as

well. The head, he writes, gives a just Nod.

It appears at first glance that even this de-souled

body is capable of a reasoned reply. But this is

soon corrected: the existence of Collaterall

Nods reminds us that just here means simple

rather than morally correct. In this discourse a



11/15

animal-headed human, can never give a nod that

is just because what can actually be seen when the

muscles move, when reins are put on, is simply

animal agitation.68

But perhaps the fact that the human bridle

Bulwer advocates here is working in reverse,

leaving the rider pulling from the front rather

than behind, is what allows for the glimpse of a

possibility that a carcass is capable of moral

judgement. Where riders can see and read only

the body of the horses they are riding, sitting as

they are on the animals back, this harnessed

human-horse is always facing the anatomist who

is holding the garter. Perhaps the equine imagery

and the link between horse riding and human

control that recurs in this early modernAristotelian discourse that I have been tracing

has another meaning, and a much more literal

one than I have yet considered. Perhaps we

should read this discourse as always having been

written from on top of the animal, and wonder

what might have been written if another position

had been taken: by an animals side, for example,

or standing face-to-face with one.

The former is a position neither

Milton nor Bulwer consider, thelatter an impossible one, as for

them a face is only ever human.

notes

1 Aristotle, Aristotles Politiques, or Discovrses of

Government (London: Adam Islip,1598) 13.

2 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett

(Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) II: 446,

1253a9.

3 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore

I Am (More to Follow) in The Animal That

Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans.

David Wills (New York: Fordham UP, 2008) 11.

4 Aristotle,Aristotles Politiques 13.

5 For a more detailed account of these ideas in

this period see Katherine Park, The Organic

Soul 464 ^ 84 and Eckhardt Kessler, The

Intellective Soul 485^534 in The Cambridge

History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds. Charles

B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge:

6 Francis Bacon, Of Friendship [1625] inEssays,

ed. Michael J. Hawkins (London: Everyman, 1973)

80. On the impossibility of human/animal friend-

ship in early modern ideas see Erica Fudge,

The Dog is Himself: Humans, Animals, and

Self-Control inThe Two Gentlemen of Verona inHow To Do Things With Shakespeare, ed. Laurie

Maguire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) 185^209.

7 Sir Miles Sandys, Prudence, The first of the

Foure Cardinall Virtues (London: W. Sheares, 1634)

42^ 43.

8 John Bulwer, A View of the People of the Whole

World: Or, A short survey of their Policies, Dispositions,

Naturall Deportments, Complexions, Ancient and

Moderne Customes, Manners, Habits, and Fashions

[aka Anthropometamorphosis] (London: ThomasGibbs, 1658),A Hint of theUseof thisTREATISE

n. pag.

9 Martha L. Edwards,Deaf and Dumb in Ancient

Greece inThe Disability Studies Reader, ed.Lennard

J. Davis (London and New York: Routledge

1997) 35.

10 John Bulwer, Philocophus: Or, The Deafe and

Dumbe Mans Friend (London: Humphrey Moseley,

1648) 102, 103^ 04. In this period, as earlier, deaf-

ness and dumbness were perceived to be abso-lutely linked. Rene Descartes assumed this in

Discourse on the Method when he wrote of men

born deaf and dumb who invented their own sign

language. Descartes, Discourse on the Method[1637]

inThe Philosophical Writings of Rene Descartes, eds.

John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald

Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) I: 140.

The founder of precedent law in England, Edward

Coke, links the status of a person non compos

mentiswith a person incapable of language. Coke,

Beverleys Case in The Reports of Sir Edward Coke

(London: W. Lee, 1658) Part IV: 334^39. Emily

Cockayne records the first deaf person drawing

up their will as Framlingham Gaudy in Norfolk

in 1672. Cockayne, Experiences of the Deaf in

Early Modern England,The Historical Journal 46.3

(2003) 507.

11 Bulwer, Philocophussig. A4v.

12 Ibid. sig. A3v. Other early modern thinkers

interested in this are discussed in Dilwyn Knox,

Ideas on Gesture and Universal Languages

c.1550 ^1650 in New Perspectives on Renaissance

Thought: Essays on the History of Science, Education

fudge


12/15

eds. John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London:

Duckworth,1990) 101^36.

13 John Bulwer, Chirologia: or the Natvrall Language

of the Hand [1644], ed. James W. Cleary

(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP,1974) 6.

14 Ibid. 5^ 6. The punning use of handle is an

echo of Titus pun handle not the theme, to talk

of hands in Shakespeares Titus Andronicus(c.1592).

On the meaning of hands in early modern culture

and a discussion of Titus Andronicus see Michael

Neill, Amphitheaters in the Body: Playing with

Hands on the Shakespearian Stage,Shakespeare

Survey48 (1995): 23^50.

15 In this way he is going beyond classical writers

for whom, as Gregory S. Aldrete has argued,

Gestures were an indispensable part of

oratory and served many purposes. Hand

and body motions could mirror the verbal

component of an oration, impart emotional

shadings to thewords, serve as an alternative

language for communication, and enhance

the innate rhythmic nature of many orations.

Gesture truly offered a way for Roman

orators to achieve eloquence not only with

their words but also with their entire

bodies. (Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamationsin Ancient Rome (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

UP,1999) 42^ 43)

16 Bulwer, Chirologia91.

17 Ibid. 22.

18 Ibid. 88.

19 John Bulwer, Chironomia or The Art of Manual

Rhetoric[1644] inChirologia 155.

20 A discussion of hands and agency in earlymodern thought that reflects on these ideas is

Katherine Rowe, Gods handy worke in The

Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early

Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman and Carla

Mazzio (New York and London: Routledge, 1997)

285^309.

21 Blair Hoxby, The Wisdom of their

Feet: Meaningful Dance in Milton and the

Stuart Masque, English Literary Renaissance 37.1

(2007) 74.

22 George Puttenham,The Arte of English Poesie

[1589], eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice

23 Jennifer Nevile,The Early Dance Manuals and

the Structure of Ballet: A Basis for Italian, French

and English Ballet in The Cambridge Companion to

Dance, ed. Marion Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge

UP, 2007) 13.

24 Jennifer Nevile, The Eloquent Body: Dance

and Humanist Culture in Fifteenth-Century Italy

(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP,

2004) 2.

25 In the philosophyof the fifteenth-century neo-

Platonist Marsilio Ficino, dancing also had a role to

play in constructing order. Thomas M. Greene

writes: Ficinos magic was based on the doctrine

that certain figures (figurae) enjoyed a sympathy

with a given heavenly body, and could be used

to attract its influence down to this world. Thesefigurae included dance, music and facial expression.

Ficinos ideas were present, Greene argues, in

sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English court

dances. Greene, Labyrinth Dances in the French

and English Renaissance, Renaissance Quarterly

54.4 (2001) 1445.

26 James Knowles, Can ye not tell a man from

a marmoset?: Apes and Others on the Early

Modern Stage in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals,

Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. Erica

Fudge (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P,2004) 146.

27 Ben Jonson, OberonThe Fairy Prince[1611] inBen

Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel

(New Haven and London:Yale UP, 1969) s.d. (stage

direction) 1^2, 27^28. Sir Miles Sandys wrote of

satyrs that they might have the visage of men,

but they want a reasonable soule, which is the

sole difference betweene man and beast. Sandys,

Prudence 42^ 43. Like the deaf as they are desig-

nated in the law, these apparent humans are not

human at all.

28 Jonson, Oberonlines 73, 80 ^ 81, 83^ 84, 86.

29 Ibid. s.d. 216 ^17; line 248. On the white bears

and their history see Barbara Ravelhofer,Beasts

of Recreation: Henslowes White Bears,English

Literary Renaissance32.2 (2002): 287^323.

30 Ibid. s.d. 30; lines 271^74.

31 A similar representation of James can be found

in Jonsons earlier Masque of Blacknesse (1605)

in which the Britannia is Ruled by a sun that to

this height doth grace it, / Whose beams shine



13/15

Ethiop, and revive a corse (Complete Masques lines

223^25).

32 See Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,1965) 37.

33 Jonson, Oberons.d. 206, 336.

34 Bulwer, Chirologia6.

35 The politics of these authors are also very

different, and such differences might be traced

in the texts themselves. Milton, in Paradise Lost

in particular, recognizes that clarity ^ natural

meaning ^ is gone forever and that human lan-

guage is inherently fallen. InA Masque, too, words

and gestures lie: Comuss disguise and false words

signal this. Milton is also working within a political

ideologyin which fixed hierarchy is not necessarilytobe upheld: in whichmetamorphosis of the social

order is a positive possibility. Bulwer, on the other

hand, distrusts slippery written and spoken

language, and praises the language of the body as

a natural language that has, somehow or other,

managed to escape the curse at the confusion

of Babel (he does not explain how). See Bulwer,

Chirologia 19. Indeed, Jeffrey Wollock argues that

Bulwer no doubt believed that [the deafs] more

natural way of seeing the world made them

inclined to support the King and the Laudianchurch, as opposed to what he considered the

artificial religious and political interpretations

that the Puritans superimposed on reality

(Wollock, John Bulwers (1606 ^1656) Place in the

History of the Deaf, Historiographia Linguistica

23.1/2 (1996) 9).

36 Stephen Orgel, The Case for Comus,

Representations81 (2003) 32.

37 John Milton, A Masque Presentedat Ludlow Castle

[1634] in John Milton: Selected Shorter Poemsand Prose, ed. Tony Davies (London: Routledge,

1988) 67.

38 Ibid. s.d. 92, 974 ^75.

39 Ibid. 68 ^72. Bruce Boehrer helpfully translates

express here as meaningapressed out, externa-

lized resemblance in an essay that emphasizes

the Plutarchan influence on Milton. Boehrer,

Milton and the Reasoning of Animals: Variations

on a Theme by Plutarch, Milton Studies 39.2

(2000) 54.

40 Milton,A Masque526^30.

41 John Milton, Paradise Lost[1674 ed.], ed. Alastair

Fowler (London: Longman, 1968) Book IX: lines

900 ^ 01.

42 Milton,A Masque76 ^77.

43 Thomas Heywood, Philocothonista, or TheDrvnkard, Opened, Dissected, and Anatomized

(London: Robert Raworth, 1635) 4, 4 ^5, 6. The

tedious verbositie of the calf-drunk marks their

expression as voice rather than speech.

Drunkenness is legally understood in this period

to give the drunk a temporary status as

non compos mentis. See Coke, Beverleys Case

335^36.

44 See Adam Smyth, It Were Far Better be a

Toad, o r a Serpent, then a Drunkard: Writing

about Drunkenness inA Pleasing Sinne: Drink andConviviality in Seventeenth-Century England, ed.

Adam Smyth (Cambridge: Brewer, 2004) 199.

45 Further discussion of human drunkenness and

other dangers to species status are in Erica Fudge,

Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality and Humanityin

Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,

2006).

46 Milton,A Masque 152.

47 Ibid. 65.48 Ibid. 73^75.What Comuss herd experiences is

hardly happiness at all. Doth the tickling of the

body cause a happy life? Seneca asked in Epistle

XCII. The answer is clear: Let that creature

which is borne to eate, onely depart from that

most beautifull number of liuing creatures, and

next vnto the gods, and let him be numbred with

brute beasts. Bodily pleasure is the pleasure of

an animal. Seneca, The Workes of Lvcivs Annvs

Seneca, Both Morall and Naturall, trans. Tho. Lodge

(London: William Stansby,1614) 385.

49 Ben Jonson, Loves Triumph through Callipolis

[1631] in Complete Masques 89 ^90. Knowles has

also noted the link between Miltons masque and

Aurelian Townshends earlier Tempe Restored(1632)

in which there are also animal-headed men.

He argues that the less-than-humans of Tempe

Restored must choose their direction of transla-

tion, whereas in Miltons masque, the beast-

masquers are animals without reason and

unable to recognize their own bestiality, perhaps

itself part of a critique of the courtly beast-mas-

quers who falsely consider themselves rational

fudge


14/15

50 Milton,A Masque463^ 69.

51 Bulwer,Chirologia85.

52 Milton,A Masques.d. 92,102^ 03.

53 Ben Jonson, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue [1618]

inComplete Masques239. The text continues: For

dancing is an exercise / Not only shows the

movers wit, / But maketh the beholder wise, / As

he hath power to rise to it (240 ^ 43), and s.d. 5.

On Jonsons influence on Milton see Orgel,

Jonsonian Masque151.

54 John Holles, Instructions for travel that my

father gave me the 22 July 1614, cited by Barbara

Ravelhofer, Virgin Wax and Hairy Men-

Monsters: Unstable Movement Codes in the

Stuart Masque in The Politics of the Stuart Masque,ed. David Bevington and Peter Holbrook

(Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1998) 255.

55 The other skill listed with dancing and riding

that a gentleman was expected to learn was fen-

cing, which, again, involves bodily control. See

Holles,Instructions 255; Hoxby,Wisdom 76.

56 Another kind of control of nature ^ gardening

^ was also an exercise in dominion and has been

linked by Nevile to dancing. See Jennifer Nevile,

Dance and the Garden: Moving and StaticChoreography in Renaissance Europe,

Renaissance Quarterly52.3 (1999): 805^36. On gar-

dens and human control see Andrew

Cunningham, The Culture of Gardens in

Cultures of Natural History, eds. N. Jardine,

J.A. Secord and E.C. Spary (Cambridge:

Cambridge UP,1996) 41^47.

57 John Bulwer, Pathomyotomia Ora Dissection ofthe

significative Muscles of the Affections of the Minde

(London: Humphrey Moseley, 1649) sig. A2v.

On this work see Thomas R. Geen and Louis G.Tassinary, The Mechanization of Emotional

Expression in John BulwersPathomyotomia(1649),

American Journalof Psychology 115.2 (2002): 275 ^99.

58 Bulwer, Pathomyotomia 190.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid.104 ^ 05.

61 Ibid.12.

62 Sir Francis Bacon,The Advancement of Learning

[1605], ed. Arthur Johnston (Oxford: Oxford UP,

1974) 103. This phrase is quoted directly by

63 Thomas Hill, A Pleasant History: Declaring the

whole Art of Phisiognomy,Orderly vtteringallthe speciall

parts of Man, from the Head to the Foot(London: W.

Iaggard, 1613) sig. A3r.

64 Ibid. sigs. A3v, 31v.

65 Bulwers unwillingness to allow humans to

display anything but voluntary expression is a pro-

blematic one, and at one point he makes the link

between facial expression and an unwanted erec-

tion. Bulwer asserts that there are two kinds of

reason ^ vigilantiumanddormientium, So thatin

every motion the will comandeth either manifestly

or obscurely (Pathomyotomia110, 30). On the link

between erection and expression see Stephen

Greenblatt, Mutilation and Meaning, in Body

in Parts234^35. Loss of control over the body as

evidenced in sexuality ^ this time wet dreams ^ in

A Masque Presentedat Ludlow Castle ^ is the subject

of Deborah Shugers Gums of Glutinous Heat

and the Stream of Consciousness: The Theology

of Miltons Masque, Representations 60 (1997):1^21.

66 Bulwer, Pathomyotomia 14.

67 Ibid. 49, 50.

68 The terminology used in early modern texts

itself is interesting, as Brian Cummings notes, with

the word animal itself in early modern dis-

cussion divid[ing] in connotation: the animal

on the one hand is a creature inhabited by

anima, by a soul or living principle; on the

other, the animal is a physical compound

of organic, corruptible and mortal flesh.

(Cummings, Animal Passions and Human

Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in

Early Modern Europe and the New World

inAt the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies

and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern

Period, eds. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert and

Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1999) 33)

Erica Fudge

School of Humanities

University of Strathclyde

7.28 Livingstone Tower

26 Richmond Street

Glasgow G1 1XHUK



15/15

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