I have names such as Brue Boehrer and Erica Fudge, but need earlier writers on this topic.The information will be helpful with a project I'm currently working on.
Try my "Tails within Tails," on academia.edu (Brian Boyd), which discusses the phenomenon generally, from Genesis to postmodernism, with examples from A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.
I have also written on animal imagery in Hamlet, but the essay is now in print. It will come out in a collection of essays published by Rudiger Ahrens called The Representation of the Other (published by Winter Verlag, Heidelberg, and posssibly coming out this month)...
The question "where to begin?" is best answered by pointing to the works themselves. It's not always possible to see a performance of , for example, plays by Shakespeare,within a reasonable time, but it would be important to read them at least. The two writers you list suggest that your research will have a sociological slant, but it is important to note that the literary text is the place to start. It's a huge topic and you may find that Shakespeare alone gives you an embarrassment of riches.
Try Professor Chloe Porter, University of Sussex. She's an expert. Perhaps the best resource in the world is The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC. Phone is +202-544-4600. Ask the Reading Room Librarian. Hope this helps. Good luck, George Britton
You may want to research Midsummers Night's Dream, particularly what scholars have to say about transformations such as Bottom's metamorphosis into an ass. Speaking of metamorphosis, another angle would be to research how Ovid's work (Metamorphosis) influences and intersects with Shakespearean mythology.
Aesop's fables is one of the oldest examples you can look at to trace this phenomenon...I had written a paper on the same theme, but I used more of the modern texts for my analysis...especially Orwell's Animal Farm and other popular culture references...also i used Jung's theory of archetypes and Barthes semiological analysis as frameworks..
The Book of Psalms in the Old Testament will provide you very good examples on anthropomorphism
The place to begin might be Xenophanes, who said that Ethiopians claim that their gods are flat-nosed and black-skinned, Thracians that they are blue eyed and red haired. If oxen, horses, and lions had hands like men, horses would represent the gods in the likeness of a horse, oxen in that of an ox, and each would make them a body like the one he himself possessed.
Definitely the "undress me" in macbeth will be a perfect place to start.
Sr, Barrientos Amador, I think you mean "unsex me," and if so, I see no relationship to zoomorphism or anthropomorphism. Please clarify. I must be missing your point:
Act I, scene 5. Lady Macbeth:
Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.
There are some other important studies that haven't been mentioned which are excellent resources. Lucinda Cole's article in Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies (2010) on Macbeth; Karen Raber's Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Cole also has a book coming out next year from Michigan, Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600-1730.
Popular culture might be a key in the field of primary works .
As far as Shakespeare is concerned,my first thought was Bottom in Midsummer, but what can we say of such a hybrid creature as Caliban in The Temp.?
The devil as dog inacted by an actor, is an interesting case in The Witch of Edmonton.
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