In Stage, Stake, and Scaffold Andreas Höfele proposes that “the theatre, the bear-garden, and . . . the spectacle of public execution participated in a powerful semantic exchange that crucially informed Shakespeare’s explorations into the nature and workings of humanness as a psychological, ethical, and political category” (2). Höfele regards the three forms of public spectacle available in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London as being like a triptych (46, 64), with Shakespeare’s plays making up the middle, and largest, panel. This idea opens up detailed close readings of seven of those plays: Macbeth, Richard III, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest.

Höfele underpins his work with the idea of “intermediality”: “If,” he writes, “we regard ‘media’ as a set of conventions contingent on specific technical devices, the prefix ‘inter’ points to a crossing over from one such set to another” (13). Using this idea he argues that, not only is there a “family resemblance” between the three spectacles in terms of the reduction of the human to the status of animal, or — in the case of the baiting arena — the elevation of the suffering of the animals to human-like status, but also that we should regard a playwright like Shakespeare as writing with the resemblance in his mind. Höfele’s historicist intention, therefore, is to restore Shakespeare’s plays to the place in which they were originally conceived: the “semiosphere” (13) that was London, the city that housed the Globe Theatre, The Bear Garden, and Tyburn. Readings that fail to recognize the collusion between the three, Höfele argues, lose something of the playwright’s original meaning. Indeed, he argues, “The more Shakespearean drama became detached from its original semiosphere, the more the human-animal correspondences became, in a way they had not been before, just figurative” (231). The original links between stage, stake, and scaffold are most clearly outlined through Höfele’s tracing of the use of “pinched” as a term for physical violence in The Tempest (used seven times), in the description of the torture of Francis Throckmorton in 1584, and in Robert Laneham’s description of the bear baiting that was staged at Kenilworth as part of the queen’s entertainment there in 1575. For Höfele, “pinched” reveals the ways in which humans and animals are not held distinct in early modern culture, but are actively and productively aligned. In this place, humans are baited while baited bears are humanized.

The closeness, geographical and architectural, of the theater and the baiting arena in early modern London is something that has been explored in numerous previous studies, and Höfele goes over this existing literature to establish his own argument. He also shows some awareness of debates currently taking place in the field of Animal Studies, with nods at some of the key contemporary theoreticians of human-animal relations: Agamben, Derrida, and Haraway. Such work helps him to see the possible meanings of, for example, Gloucester’s desire to “crawl towards death,” in King Lear. Höfele proposes that this reveals Shakespeare’s acknowledgement of the inherently animal being of the human, caught between the aspiration outlined by Pico and the decaying flesh that Hamlet so despised (211). This alignment of the human and the animal that can be traced in Gloucester’s frail and aged humanity Höfele finds in a different way later in the same play, in the captain’s statement — “I cannot draw a cart, / Nor eat dried oats. If it be man’s work, I’ll do’t.” Höfele makes the point that here the difference between man and beast is “radically horizontal. Man is different from beast, but different on a flat scale of species variety.” The failure to establish the “categorical singularity” of the human “sets the scene for the final tableau of the play” (225–26).

Readings of Shakespeare’s play in the light of the bear garden are not new, and it is a shame that Höfele doesn’t draw out further the place of public executions to emphasize the third part of the “triptych” in this study. As it is there is much that is interesting here, but it is often difficult to see how, despite all of Höfele’s theoretical reading, his detailed close readings of the plays go far beyond George Coffin Taylor’s 1945 outline of “the beast in man.”