Milkmaid Bears and Savage Mates

The paper considers the cultural exploitation of bears, especially white ones, from the late sixteenth century to the present, both in drama and literary fiction and in the bear pits, theatres, circuses, zoos, and natural habitats in which real biological bears have found themselves mythologized and marketed. Beginning and ending with Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson’s art project nanoq: flat out and bluesome (2006), the argument explores the use and abuse of fictive and real white bears in the changing contexts of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics and performance history, eighteenth and nineteenth century colonialism, and present day anxieties about habitat degradation and global warming, and also in the light of the perennial and “almost inescapable anthropomorphism” which, as Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson point out, causes us to see the bear as “a potent symbol” rather than a creature with its own life experience and autonomy. In addition to nanoq: flat out and bluesome, which attempts to break its audience out of that mind-set by confronting them with the mortal remains and individual histories of 34 taxidermic bears, the paper discusses George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale (c. 1594), the anonymous 1590s play Mucedorus, Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon, the Fairy Prince (1611), Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760), Robert Bage’s Jacobin novel Hermsprong (1796), James Hogg’s novella The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon (1834), Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights (1995), Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016), and Martin Rowe’s The Polar Bear in the Zoo (2013

Aesthetics · Biology · Genealogy · Period (music · Sociology · White (mutation · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Demography · History · Philosophy

• Folklore in Elizabethan Drama

  John A Crow, John Crow•Folklore•1947

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