1. Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Animals as Agents of Revelation: The Horizontalizing of the Chain of Being in Shakespeare’s Comedies” in New York Literary Forum, vol. 5/6 (1980) 81.
2. All references to John Webster’s The White Devil are from The Drama of the English Renaissance. Vol. II: The Stuart Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976), 431–474.
3. See Hall’s Things of Darkness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), especially pages 211–253.
4. Some early modern documents on the human/animal divide include Edward Topsell’s The History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents (London. 1607); Godfrey Goodman’s The Fall of Man or the Corruption of Nature (London, 1616); Thomas Hodges’s The Creatures goodness, as they Came out of God’s Hands (London, 1675); and Thomas Robinson’s New Observations of the Natural History of this World of Matter and of this World of Life (London, 1696). Treatises on the domestication of animals include A Treatise of Oxen, Sheep, Hogs, and Dogs, With their Natures, Qualities and Uses (London: Obadiah Balgrave, 1683); Thomas Tryon’s The Country-Man’s Companion (London: 1684); and A Choice Collection of Several Strange and Wonderful Dogs (1738).
5. The tensions between the black servant as exotic object and as source of slave labor explode with the seventeenth century. Seventeenth century documents discussing the pros and cons of English entry into the slave trade include Richard Jobson's The Golden Trade (1623)