Shakespeare's Ocean by Brayton Dan;

Author:Brayton, Dan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2012-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4. Joachim Camerarius, Emblem XII, sig. D1r, fol. 13 (dolphins). (Folger Shakespeare Library)

Another of the emblems of Camerarius, Metuenda Procella (The storm should be feared), depicts two dolphins at play on the open sea while, in the background, a threatening sky—dark clouds and rain—looms over a bold coast (figure 5). The caption reads, Contrahe vela, licet ludant Delphines in alto, / Nam tunc tempestas non procul esse solet (Draw in your sails, let the dolphins play in the deep, / For then a storm is usually not far), ascribing a harbinger status to dolphins (“a storm is usually not far”). This is precisely the sentiment of the fisherman in Pericles who tells his fellow worker, apropos of porpoises (in the same family as dolphins), “Nay, master, said not I as much when I saw the porpoise how he bounced and tumbled? They say they’re half fish, half flesh. A plague on them, they ne’er come but I look to be washed” (5.63–66). The porpoise implicates the fisherman in a marine ontology: at one level, the claim that he “look[s] to be washed” when he sees one indicates the proverbial harbinger of a squall; at another level this formulation suggests the mirroring function of a sea creature, the company of a marine mammal erasing the boundary between terrestrial and aquatic life. The hint of shared identity in this passage is only reinforced by the lines that follow, in which another fisherman develops the proverbial topos of the cannibalism of marine life as an analogy for human behavior.

The emblems of Camerarius reflect the Renaissance discourse of natural history. In the sixteenth century natural historians such as the Swiss Conrad Gesner entertained the idea of a human kinship with marine mammals; Gesner does this in the fourth volume of his exquisitely illustrated compendium of illustrations and prose description of all known animals, the Icones Animalium (1551–58). Gesner discusses and graphically illustrates the fact that all genera of marine mammals, whales (by which he means toothed whales), “Balenae” (baleen whales), dolphins, and the “Phocaena” (seals) breathe air, give birth to live young, and lactate.45 In this he follows Aristotle. As if to confirm that Gesner had glimpsed the possibility of a human kinship with marine animals, he includes in his chapter on dolphins and whales an image of a highly anthropomorphic sea monster purported to have been discovered in the Mediterranean. Continental naturalists such as Camerarius and Gesner entertained the idea of humanity’s kinship with whales and even based a substantial amount of their life’s work on such comparisons.

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