Vir-tue: Being a Man

This chapter explores how humans playing the ‘overgrown ape’ can be traced in plays for other companies—Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Massinger’s The Bondman (pr. 1624), in particular—where the focus on apes is more challenging to ‘top’ humans. It investigates some of the ways in which parody operated on the early modern stage to reinforce and threaten a (top) human’s sense of self. It looks at male sexual incontinence, bullies, slaves and fettered apes and shows how playwrights used the relational position that the monkey or ape inhabited in opposition to man to interrogate what it meant to be human.