The End of the Antique Measures

The final chapter argues that the foregoing case studies demonstrate how the liminality of the ape/human frontier pertains particularly usefully to the political. It makes connections across chapters to show that humans can be seen essentially as civilised monkeys, and that the metaphorical monkey interrogates the nature of cives and polis especially in the systems of organisation which prop up institutions. The nature of theatre—with its close relationship both to leisure activity and ritual, and with its own conventions which rely upon double-sight and metatheatre—is an especially fertile locus for interrogating what it means to be human, and how breaking the consensus of civilised society can put one’s humanity in question. The coincidence of Battell’s great ape discoveries, the new attitude to scientific investigation and the seventeenth-century stage’s increasing use of metatheatrical and intertheatrical devices created the conditions for the stage ape to be particularly expressive in a period of significant political and social unrest.